Could ghosts be a hindrance – or a help – to a sale?

Kirsty Mcluckie ponders on marketing a haunted house

It is Hallowe’en on Tuesday, and while there might not be a direct correlation between property prices and the witching hour, it is certainly the season when property journalists muse on whether owning a haunted house affects its price or saleability.

Apparently it is not as simple as saying: “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts” as the tagline from the film Ghostbusters would have it.

There are plenty of examples of properties being sold because it was believed that the occupants weren’t all of this world.

Businessman Anwar Rashid moved into Clifton Hall in Nottinghamshire in early 2007. He said the 52- room mansion, which dates back to the Norman Conquest, is haunted. “The ghosts didn’t want us there, and we couldn’t fight them because we couldn’t see them,” he said.

Over time, his family experienced everything from tapping on the wall and unexplained voices, to screaming in the passageways. Investigators of the paranormal were called in, but failed to solve the problem.

In the end, the Rashids put the house on the market again in October 2008, at £ 2.75 million nearly £ 1m less than they paid for it.

The actor Nicolas Cage bought reputedly the most haunted house in New Orleans for $ 3.5 million in 2007.

“At any given moment,” said Cage at the time, “I have five or six ghosts surrounding the house, all looking up at this haunted temple, and I’m in there. We’ll come over and have dinner there but nobody sleeps there.”

The property was sold shortly afterwards.

There was also a case in 1991 in the United States where a seller was ruled liable to the buyer for failing to mention that the property she was selling was haunted, which could have affected the value.

It seems far- fetched that you could fall foul of the Property Misdirections Act for failing to mention spooky goings on in your home, but then I think Scottish people might have a different take on the subject.

I was brought up in a supposedly haunted house.

I didn’t witness anything, not being of an overly- sensitive nature, but we were told by two separate guests, years apart and unknown to each other although sleeping in a particular bedroom, that they had been woken by a benign lady holding out two knives to them in bed.

Neither were particularly perturbed by the visitation, and certainly we would have put it down to dreams, perhaps fuelled by an abundance of cheese and wine after dinner, were the stories not so similar.

We didn’t pass on the information when we sold the house, but I have met the new owner since who was delighted with the story as it added to the romance of the house.

Certainly interviewing sellers of historic homes and castles in Scotland over the years has often meant listening to the proud tales of grey ladies walking the corridors or skirls of ghostly pipers heard on the battlements foretelling doom for the family.

Often these stories are presented in the brochure as an added selling feature for no extra charge.

Perhaps the advice when selling your home should be that any other worldly goings on, particularly those which could be linked, however tenuously, to a famous chapter in Scottish history, should be used at the forefront of your marketing.