3 BR, 2 Baths, 3 Murders: Stigmatized Properties Make a Tough Sell
Days after closing on his dream home – a brick colonial near the Washington, D.C., school he was toiling to save – principal Brian Betts learned of his property’s ghastly past.
Inside the house, 11 months earlier, an intruder had shot and killed a 9-year-old girl and her father. Horrified, Betts demanded the transaction be rescinded. When that effort failed, he invited two ministers to pray over his new place. Then Betts tried to paint over the grim history, refinishing the woodwork and refurbishing the kitchen.
Seven years later, in April 2010, a robber shot and killed Betts in his bedroom.
“In Maryland, there’s no obligation on Realtors to disclose that a murder took place at a home, much less two murders – and subsequently three,” said Rene Sandler, an attorney for Betts' family. “Brian was just getting to know his neighbors when one told him he was surprised someone bought the house given what had happened. Brian was absolutely shocked. His Realtor never said anything.”
Last February, the same house sold again, this time at almost $200,000 below asking price.
Welcome to a macabre corner of American real estate, a legally gray, emotionally black sector governed by a mishmash of varying state laws that dictate whether agents must divulge that bad things went down in what the National Association of Realtors calls “stigmatized properties.”
Only two states, Alaska and South Dakota, mandate that sellers’ agents reveal whether a homicide or suicide occurred at a listed home within the previous 12 months, according to NAR spokesman Walter Molony. In Connecticut, Delaware, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Oklahoma, if a prospective buyer asks about past bloodshed, real estate agents must truthfully answer the question.
“In most states, a seller isn't required to voluntarily disclose nonstructural issues such as homicides on the property,” said Holden Lewis, a real estate expert at Bankrate.com, a consumer finance service. For example, he noted that Minnesota law says "the seller doesn't have to disclose that the property was the location of a suicide, death or ‘perceived paranormal activity.’ ”
In Maryland, where Betts was shot to death, agents must inform buyers only about “material facts they know or should know,” said Chuck Kasky, vice president of legal affairs for the Maryland Association of Realtors. When it comes to Maryland properties, he added, a murder is “not a material fact.”
The reason some agents are reluctant to mention such former horrors? Money, of course. Many buyers would be uneasy if not queasy about living in a space where a life – or several lives – ended in a disturbing way, even if the tragedy happened years before.
Such “psychologically impacted homes” languish longer on the market than comparable properties and sell for about 3 percent less, according to a study authored in 2000 by two professors at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Their peer-reviewed paper, based on an examination of 102 “stigmatized” homes in Ohio, was published in the Journal of Real Estate Practice and Education.
Those 102 homes took, on average, 45 percent longer to sell than comparable properties without grisly pedigrees, said one of the authors, James Larsen, a finance professor.
But a homicide home’s value dip can be even steeper if it’s located in a rural area where violent crime is less common and neighborly gossip echoes for generations, contends Bennie Waller, a professor of finance and real estate at Longwood University in the central Virginia town of Farmville, population 8,200.
“There’s a country song (by Miranda Lambert) that says, ‘Everybody dies famous in a small town.’ In a town this size, it’s an informal communications network, and things get around pretty quickly – even without cable,” said Waller, who has studied the real estate impacts on two local homes where killers took lives.
In 2009, four people – two parents, their daughter and the daughter’s friend – were bludgeoned to death in a home not far from Longwood’s campus. The 20-year-old murderer, an aspiring rapper who later pleaded guilty, knew the daughter. Before the crimes, the home was tax assessed at $240,000. Later, it was auctioned to an investor for $104,000 but it remains on the market, unoccupied, due to the emotional scars left by the homicides, Waller said.
At another house next to the school – “a fantastic property” with a swimming pool, Waller said, Robert Bruce shot and killed his wife in 1991. Locals still refer to the residence as “the Bruce house.” That place is tax assessed at $200,000 but was similarly sold at auction for about $90,000. It, too, remains empty.
“My wife and I actually looked at (buying) it,” Waller said. They jointly decided not to make an offer.
“I’m a finance-real estate guy so I looked at it from an investment perspective. My wife is my wife,” Waller said.
If it were to come down in price, Waller said he would reconsider buying it.
"I don’t care what people say," he said. "But it would probably be an investment rather than a property we would live in. Because college kids don’t give a damn (about its gory past). I could put six kids in there, (rent it) and make money.”
While those two infamous Farmville homes remain available, Brian Betts’ family had preferred that his two-story, three-bedroom house in Silver Spring, Md., simply vanish after his death.
“The family’s wishes were to essentially have it bulldozed for who ever was going to acquire that property to just start anew,” said Sandler, the family’s attorney. However, the principal's estate still owed money to the bank for the home's mortgage.
Despite good schools nearby and its locale in an upscale neighborhood popular with federal workers, “it sat on the market for a very, very long time,” Sandler said. “And (in time) the house went to foreclosure.”
Fannie Mae acquired the property, and in May 2011, it was listed for $515,000. It sold in February for $330,000, according to Zillow.com. The family believes that buyer knew about the property’s history.
“Two things really bothered Brian about the purchase. He was an educator, an educator who truly made a difference in kids’ lives – I mean something for the movies,” Sandler said. “Knowing that a child was murdered in that house, much less a child and her dad, really impacted him.
“But then you have the piece where it was just intentionally not disclosed,” she added. “This was a Realtor that Brian was on friendly terms with, not somebody he just picked at random. So that level of deception, if you will, was very unsettling.” - realtormag
Haunted Places: The National Directory: Ghostly Abodes, Sacred Sites, UFO Landings and Other Supernatural Locations
This House: The True Story of a Girl and a Ghost
Haunted by Non-Disclosure, A Horrifying Experience: what every home buyer should know!
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One-Handed Spectre
When I was 12 years old, my sister and her husband and their two-year-old (my niece) moved into a house on the next block. The family who vacated the house had moved because their teenage daughter had a friend who was missing, and the strain was too much for the girl. I was spending the night on a weekend, and I was downstairs with my sister and niece doing laundry. As we went up the stairs to the main floor, I turned to help my niece up the stairs. She had been playing around the basement and talking to herself (or so I thought!). As I turned to grasp her hand, she said, "C'mon lady, c'mon." I was amazed to see a girl of about 16 or 17 standing at the base of the stairs dressed in a white dress with her arms outstretched. She was missing her right hand.
On numerous occasions, I was to see this ghost. It was nothing to wake up and find her sitting on the bed or looking into your face. I would follow her down the hall into the living room or into my niece's room. Several months passed, and the missing girl was found. She had been mutilated and cut into many pieces by a machete. Her right hand was missing when they found her. It seems that she was supposed to go to her girlfriend's house after work on the night she disappeared. She never got there. She was abducted and murdered. Her best friend kept seeing her in the house, and her family thought she was nuts. Hence the reason they moved and my sister rented the house. I have heard that the girl still haunts the house, and it never stays occupied long. My sister lived there longer than anyone else, she is psychic, and she said that she never felt threatened by the girl. To this day, it still gives me the cold chills and nightmares. - T.
Ghost Stories: The Complete Series - As seen on FOX Family Network
The Haunters & The Haunted: Ghost Stories and Tales of the Supernatural
The Empty House: and Other Ghost Stories
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Hypnosis is no laughing matter
Hypnosis is the eccentric uncle of cognitive science. It was once part of the mainstream – studied by scientists and clinicians alike in its 1960s heyday – but it slowly fell into disrepute as it was picked up and popularised by tacky stage hypnotists and quack practitioners in the following decades.
In recent years, hypnosis has seen something of a rebirth, and neuroscience studies using the technique are now regularly published in some of the most respected scientific journals. Curiously, though, it hasn't shaken off the stigma entirely. While writing this article I contacted several researchers who have published neuroscience studies using hypnosis, and not one replied. The reticence is understandable. Like the study of consciousness 20 years ago, hypnosis is still considered by some to be a "career-limiting move". Consequently, scientists make sure they stick to the most conservative and orthodox form of research – academic journals, occasional conference presentations, and definitely nothing that hints of hype, or indeed, public exposure.
The lack of wider discussion is a pity, as hypnosis – or rather suggestibility – is a remarkable aspect of human psychology. The ability to be hypnotised seems to be a distinct trait that is distributed among the population, like height or shoe size, in a "bell curve" or normal distribution: a minority of people cannot engage with any suggestions, a minority can engage with almost all, and most people can achieve a few.
The key word here is "engage", as, contrary to popular belief, hypnosis cannot be used to make people do something against their will, even though the effects seem to happen involuntarily. If this seems paradoxical, a good analogy is watching a movie: you don't decide to react emotionally to the on-screen story, but you can choose to turn away or disengage at any time. In other words, the effects of the film, just like hypnosis, require your active participation.
The most difficult suggestions to achieve are those which affect the fundamentals of the mind, such as memory and perception, meaning that while highly hypnotisable people can experience temporary hallucinations and amnesia after suitable suggestions, low-hypnotisable people may only be able to experience temporary changes in their volition or movements – such as an arm feeling heavier than usual, perhaps.
It seems, however, that there is very little that can be done to make you more or less hypnotisable – the hypnotisability trait is the primary factor in how successfully you can experience the effects. We know that there is a genetic component to this trait and that several studies have indicated that highly hypnotisable people show structural and functional differences in the brain when compared to low-hypnotisables, but the question of why we have a varying ability to have our reality changed by suggestions remains a mystery.
Due to their ability to have their mental processes temporarily altered in ways previously not thought possible, highly hypnotisable people have become key in scientific studies. Amir Raz and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal reported that it was possible to "switch off" automatic word reading and abolish the Stroop effect – a psychological phenomenon that demonstrates a conflict between meanings, such as where we are much slower to identify the ink colour of a word when the word itself describes a different hue. Furthermore, when this experiment was run in a brain scanner, participants showed much lower activation in both the anterior cingulate cortex, an area known to be particularly involved in resolving conflict between competing demands, and the visual cortex, which is crucial for recognising words. Although this may seem like a technicality, to the scientific world it was a strikingly persuasive demonstration that hypnosis could apparently disassemble an automatic and well-established psychological effect in a manner consistent with the brain processes that support it.
Neuroimaging has also proved key in answering the question of whether hypnotised people are pretending to experience the effects. When people are asked to fake hypnosis, to the point where observers cannot tell the difference between them and the genuinely hypnotised people, the two groups are clearly distinguishable by their brain activity.
Taking the science one step further, researchers from the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science in Sydney have published a series of studies in which they have used hypnosis to temporarily simulate genuine conditions where patients may hold false beliefs or lose awareness of a problem after brain injury. One such condition, called somatoparaphrenia, can occur after right-sided brain injury and can result in the patient denying ownership of a limb. Literally, the patient believes that their arm is not theirs, has been replaced, or belongs to someone else – something which both challenges our intuitive ideas about how we perceive our body and can pose a practical problem for post-injury rehabilitation. In highly hypnotisable volunteers, the Macquarie team momentarily instilled a similar feeling of limb alienation to examine whether healthy people could rationalise such a counterintuitive idea, finding that participants remained consistent in their explanations even when challenged with visual evidence.
A special issue of the respected journal Cortex will shortly be dedicated to the neuropsychology of hypnosis, additionally pointing to the growing momentum of the scientific revival. The wider public, however, still base their knowledge on the watches and weight-loss stereotype, meaning it is likely to be a while before neuroscientists feel comfortable about breaking their self-imposed silence. - guardian
Past Life Regression: A Guide for Practitioners
Regression to Times and Places (Meditation Regression)
Hypnosis for Chronic Pain Management: Therapist Guide (Treatments That Work)
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What's behind the Rorschach inkblot test?
Few devices from the world of psychology have entered popular culture quite so much as Hermann Rorschach's famous inkblot test. But the test still divides psychologists, writes Dr Mike Drayton.
I first came across the Rorschach inkblot test when I was training to be a clinical psychologist. I was shown a series of cards containing inkblots and asked to say what they looked like to me (Tester: "What does this look like?" Me: "A bat.") I remember thinking that it felt more like a tarot reading than a proper psychometric test.
However, when the test was scored and interpreted, it produced a scarily accurate profile of my personality. It knew things about me that even my mother didn't know. I've been a fan, if a rather sceptical one, ever since.
So, what is the Rorschach inkblot test? It's simply a set of cards containing pictures of inkblots that have been folded over on themselves to create a mirror image.
The Rorschach is what psychologists call a projective test. The basic idea of this is that when a person is shown an ambiguous, meaningless image (ie an inkblot) the mind will work hard at imposing meaning on the image. That meaning is generated by the mind.
By asking the person to tell you what they see in the inkblot, they are actually telling you about themselves, and how they project meaning on to the real world.
But the inventor of the test, Hermann Rorschach, never intended it to be a test of personality. Continue reading at What's behind the Rorschach inkblot test?
Essentials of Rorschach Assessment (Essentials of Psychological Assessment)
Psychodiagnostics A Diagnostic Test Based On Perception
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Detecting Ghosts Through Media – Film, Voice Recording, Motion Sensors, and Temperature Gauges
Electronic Voice Phenomena and Ghost Boxes
Secret History of Poltergeists - available at Amazon.com The Secret History of Poltergeists and Haunted Houses: From Pagan Folklore to Modern Manifestations
Home sweet home, haunted?
Two convicted of trespassing at historic building to ‘see ghosts’
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On Tulpas, Guardian Angels, and Figments of the Imagination
Two Celebrated Authors' Precognitive Dreams!
Ghostly Image from Maine Military Fort
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