I know, I know. It is supposed to be Thanksgiving and not Halloween. But this story came around today. It is about a woman named Helen Ackley and her family. Purportedly, they lived with ghosts for years in their home in upstate New York. The place was an old Victorian house built in the late 1800s.
I must tell you this topic interests me for a couple of reasons. But I’ll continue with the story. In the Ackley household, one ghost would shake the children’s beds to wake them up in the morning. Spirits would materialize in midair. The sightings occurred frequently.
So here is the deal. The Ackley family was pretty vocal about their experiences. Their story appeared in newspapers. These ghostly accounts were also published in Reader’s Digest. The house was included in the town’s haunted house tour in Nyack.
It was common knowledge that the Ackley house was haunted to the gills. Common for everyone except a guy named Jeffrey Stambovsky.
Stambovsky was moving to Nyack from NYC. He bought the Ackley mansion in 1989 for a cool $650,000. But he had no idea about the ghosts. His new neighbors told Stambosky all about the hauntings. And once he heard the stories, he took the Ackleys to court. He petitioned to cancel the contract and get his money back. Strambovsky lost the first trial. The judge cited the old standby: “let the buyer beware.”
All was not lost for him. An appeals court in New York reversed the decision. The judge ordered the Ackleys to give Stambovsky back his money.
I have a couple of personal stories that line up with this. Growing up in Dayton, we often wondered if our house was haunted. Mom and Dad’s recliners would rock back and forth, but no one was sitting there. Lights would turn off and on. Strange noises. And so on.
Twenty-plus years later, I found myself in Charleston, South Carolina, looking to buy a new home there. Our realtor would ask the “host realtor” at each house we visited if the home was haunted or not. A common practice in Charleston. As it turned out, both of our homes had unnatural occurrences. And so it went.
All coincidental? Hogwash? The skeptics will be skeppy. But I know what I saw and heard, and it is hard to know what else may have caused those things.
But when selling a home, disclosing a house’s haunted nature is not in the law books anywhere in the United States.
As we all know, when a house goes up for sale, most states require the seller to fill out a disclosure form about the place. You know. Things like any known structural issues or other problematic “material facts.”
But no state requires sellers to disclose paranormal activities about the property.
Some homes are also “stigmatized,” meaning there is some odd fact that might bother a new purchaser. Things like a murder having occurred in the home or perhaps the presence of a meth lab. Maybe there is an old graveyard out back. But sellers don’t have to say a word about those either.
With all of that in mind, home hunters? According to recent surveys, 18 percent of Americans say they’ve seen, heard, or been in the presence of a ghost. About 35 percent of Americans believe that haunted houses are real.
And. About 80 percent of Americans believe in a god that cannot be seen or heard.
See, hear, and believe what you will. Or don’t.
We don’t know what we don’t know. And then we do.
Oh, and, Happy Thanksgiving.
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“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.”
― C.G. Jung
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“In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri
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“While it’s cool to think ghosts exist, I don’t want to see one.”
— Dean Ambrose
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