I believe there have been a few legal cases where either, someone was sold a house but not told it was hauned or, someone bought a haunted house and was disappointed to find no haunting.
So how, legally, do you prove a house is haunted or not?
The ghosthunters have been giving us proof of that for years!
A court would only take an interest in this if it were material to a contract between the seller and purchaser of a house.
In your first case the purchaser would have to prove that having a ghost made the contract invalid. I would think that the way to prove that would be to establish that the house was reputed to be haunted prior to the purchase and that this was something that the seller knew and that he should have passed this information on to the purchaser.
In the second case the onus might be on the seller to prove that the house had a prior reputation of being haunted. I can't see how a purchaser could prove a ghost wasn't there. It might be on it's holidays.
Dare say one of the legal eagles round here could sum this up better and in more legal language.
So you think it is down to rumour or reputation. This means you could change the value of a house simply by spreading rumours! That's even worse than sending in a psychic for their opinion!
But you can change the value of a house simply by spreading rumours! It doesn't have to have anything to do with ghosts and, when changing it down, is called blight.Originally Posted by Harryprice
Genuine blight can be caused by something like Crossrail. There are lines on maps and a proposed extension. Anyone who lives near the proposed extension is currently blighted, their houses are worth less.
But you can achieve the same thing with wild speculation and rumour. Margaret Hodge MP did this prior to the construction of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. She repeatedly claimed that the whole of her constituency was blighted and that nobody wanted a house in her constituency, and so it became true. People in identical houses in neighbouring constituencies, who were just as far away from the CTRL line, were untroubled by the blight, but her constituents found the value of their houses plummet.
Victorian Estate Agents used to add "attributed to Sir Christopher Wren" to the description of old large houses to increase the value. There are loads of similar tricks.
So I don't think that ghost rumours are really a seperate thing from all the other tricks and stories that can up or down the value of a property. Or, indeed, the value of shares in a company...
Yes. It's called advertising.
What I was saying, though, was that a court wouldn't look at whether a house actually was haunted but it would look at the reputation of the house to see if it had been misrepresented and whether that misrepresentation was a material fact that should have been disclosed at the time the contract was made.
And what proves a reputation? A newspaper article, the opinion of a neighbour? A reputation is as flimsy as a ghost!
Last edited by Harryprice; 18th November 2009 at 11:32 AM.
I believe that paranormal investigators armed with EMF meters provide incontrovertible evidence.
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Possibly but I would imagine it would have to be pretty substantive to stand up in a court. That said there is an entire branch of Law which relies on the notion that a reputation is a quantifiable thing.
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