Americans Would Rather Live With Ghosts Than Face Today’s Housing Market

When mortgage rates and home prices drive potential buyers to the breaking point, haunted houses start looking surprisingly appealing.

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Housing prices keep climbing. Mortgage rates remain stubbornly high. The American dream of homeownership feels further away than ever. So when someone suggests buying a house with a reputation for paranormal activity, more Americans than you might expect are saying yes. The reasons why tell us as much about the state of the housing market as they do about our relationship with the supernatural.

More Than Half of Americans Are Willing

Over half of Americans would consider buying a house with a haunted reputation, according to a 2025 survey by Real Estate Witch. The number stands at 52% of respondents, with the majority saying they would only do so if they got a discount on the purchase price. Specifically, 73% of those willing buyers said a lower price would seal the deal. These aren’t thrill-seekers looking for a paranormal experience. These are practical people doing the math on their budgets and deciding that unexplained footsteps might be worth tolerating if it means getting into a house they can afford.

A separate Rocket Mortgage survey found even higher willingness, with 65% of Americans considering buying a haunted house. In this survey, 39% said they would outright say yes, while another 26% remained open to the idea. The difference between surveys might come down to how the questions were phrased, but both show Americans are comfortable with the prospect of spectral roommates. More comfortable, in fact, than many would have predicted even a few years ago.

The shift in attitudes has been dramatic and recent. In 2025, homeowners are twice as likely to knowingly purchase a haunted house compared to 2024. That represents a fundamental change in how people are approaching one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives. Among those who say they’ve already lived in a haunted house, 25% knowingly chose to live there in 2025, more than double the 11% who said the same in 2024. Something has changed in the calculation people are making about what risks they’re willing to take.

The motivation becomes clear when you look at what’s actually keeping potential homeowners up at night. Americans say the scariest aspects of homeownership come in the form of unexpected costs at 53%, bad neighbors at 52%, and high interest rates at 47%. Against that backdrop, a few unexplained footsteps in the hallway or the occasional door closing on its own look manageable. You can’t negotiate with mold or termites. You can’t talk your bank into lowering your interest rate. But a ghost? Maybe you can learn to live with that.

The Dollar Value of Paranormal Activity

Buyers have specific numbers in mind when they start weighing the value of sharing their home with the undead.

More than a third of potential buyers, 39%, say they would need at least 40% off the asking price before considering a haunted property. Another 29% would be okay with 20% to 39% off, while only 15% would settle for a discount of 20% or less. These aren’t arbitrary numbers. They reflect what people think it would take to compensate for the challenges of living in a stigmatized property, from the personal discomfort to the knowledge that they’ll face those same challenges when they eventually try to sell.

The real estate professionals who specialize in these properties have seen the pattern play out enough times to know what the market will bear. Expert appraiser Randall Bell, who specializes in stigmatized properties, reports that such homes can sell for 10% to 25% less than comparable non-stigmatized properties. Bell has spent years studying this niche market, and he’s learned something about how it works. Bell notes that discounts for purportedly haunted homes are very real, though he emphasizes that perception drives everything in the stigmatized property market. Whether ghosts actually exist doesn’t matter as much as whether people believe they do. The market reacts to belief, not to any objective measure of paranormal activity.

The disconnect between what buyers think they should pay and what sellers think they should get creates tension. Two-thirds of Americans, 68%, say they would offer below asking price for a haunted house. Yet only 32% of current haunted homeowners expect to sell below market value. Either buyers will be disappointed when sellers won’t come down as much as expected, or sellers are in for a rude awakening when they discover their property’s reputation has a real price tag attached.

The optimism on the seller’s side borders on unrealistic in some cases. In fact, 41% of haunted house owners expect to sell above market value, more than 2.5 times the 16% of buyers who say they would make such an offer. This disconnect creates an interesting negotiation dynamic. Sellers seem to be banking on finding that one person who doesn’t just tolerate the haunting but actually wants it, someone who sees the paranormal reputation as adding character and interest to the property rather than diminishing its value.

The sellers who’ve been through the process before know the reality is harder than the hope. Among Americans who have lived in haunted houses, 63% admit these homes are harder to sell. Yet these same homeowners remain optimistic about pricing, possibly betting they’ll find someone who views a haunting as a feature rather than a flaw. It’s a gamble that sometimes pays off, particularly when the haunting comes with enough notoriety to attract buyers who see commercial potential or just want to own a piece of local legend.

A Patchwork of Disclosure Laws

Most states offer sellers considerable protection when it comes to disclosing a property’s spooky reputation. The laws vary wildly depending on where you live, and navigating them requires understanding a patchwork of regulations that often leave buyers with less information than they’d like.

A Zillow state-by-state analysis found only four states deal with paranormal activity in their real estate disclosure laws: New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. Four states out of fifty have bothered to address the question of whether sellers need to mention if their house might be haunted. The other 46 states have apparently decided this isn’t something that requires legal clarity, leaving buyers and sellers to figure it out on their own.

In New York, courts can rescind a home sale if the seller creates and perpetuates a reputation that the house is haunted and then takes unfair advantage of a buyer’s ignorance of the home’s ghostly reputation. This stems from a 1991 case that people commonly refer to as the Ghostbusters ruling, and the story behind it explains a lot about how haunted house law evolved.

A man purchased a large Victorian house in Nyack, New York, before learning about local stories of Revolution-era ghosts inhabiting the place. He demanded to be released from the contract, as the realtor had not disclosed the house’s reputation. The buyer noted he did not believe in ghosts himself but was concerned about the effect on property value.

In 1991, in a joke-laced ruling that quoted Ghostbusters, the appellate court agreed with the purchaser, noting that as the house had been “possessed by poltergeists,” it could not be said to be unoccupied. The court said that if you’re going to market your house as haunted to the public, if you’re going to invite ghost hunters in and write articles about your spectral roommates, then you can’t suddenly pretend none of that happened when someone wants to buy the place. You’ve created a reputation, and that reputation travels with the property whether you want it to or not.

The other states that address hauntings take different approaches. In New Jersey, a seller must truthfully tell a buyer if their property comes with phantom roommates, but only if asked. As long as nobody asks the direct question, sellers can stay quiet. It puts the burden on buyers to know what questions to ask, which assumes they have enough knowledge about the property’s history to know there’s something worth asking about. Massachusetts and Minnesota deliberately mention paranormal or supernatural activity as a “psychologically affected” attribute that does not need to be disclosed. They specifically carved out an exception so sellers wouldn’t have to mention ghosts. The law in these states explicitly says that the presence of spirits, or the belief in them, isn’t something sellers have to bring up.

When it comes to deaths on the property, the rules are slightly more concrete in some places, though still far from universal. Three states require disclosure of deaths: California, Alaska, and South Dakota require sellers to disclose whether an untimely or natural death occurred at the home within the last three years. The three-year window suggests these states believe the stigma fades with time, that a death becomes less relevant to buyers the further back it recedes into history. Fifteen states require disclosure when a buyer asks, but there is no legal penalty if the seller is unaware or has not researched the property to find the answers. Sellers can claim ignorance without facing any consequences, even if a simple Google search would have turned up the information.

Despite the legal protections for sellers, 67% of Americans think the government should require sellers to disclose a haunted house. There’s a gap between what the public thinks should happen and what the law actually requires. People believe transparency should be mandatory, that buyers deserve to know what they’re getting into. Among those who have lived in haunted houses, 68% would not willingly disclose if their house was haunted when selling. Even people who’ve experienced the challenges firsthand would rather keep quiet and hope the next owner doesn’t find out until after the papers are signed.

The Reality of Living With Ghosts

The numbers on who’s experiencing this are higher than you might think, which suggests that either a lot of houses are haunted or a lot of people are experiencing things they can’t easily explain.

Nearly one in five Americans, 19%, believe they have lived in a real haunted house, with 75% of those homeowners not knowing the home was haunted before they moved in. That’s a significant portion of the population who moved into what they thought was a normal house and then started experiencing things that made them reconsider. This includes 23% who believe their current home is haunted and 13% who lived in one in the past. The people still living in haunted houses represent an interesting group because they’ve experienced the phenomena and decided it’s manageable enough that they haven’t moved out.

The reports cover a range of phenomena, from the subtle to the unmistakable. The survey found that 54.4% of respondents felt a strong presence that made them believe their home was haunted. However, most reports centered around incomprehensible sights and sounds: 49.6% heard mysterious noises, 42.7% saw apparitions, 41.6% heard unaccountable footsteps, 38.3% witnessed objects move, and 31.8% caught doors inexplicably opening and closing. These aren’t people reporting dramatic, horror-movie-style hauntings with blood dripping from the walls. They’re describing experiences that are unsettling but not necessarily threatening, things that make you question what you’re seeing and hearing but don’t necessarily make you fear for your safety.

When people encountered supernatural situations, the most common signs were a strong presence at 64% and mysterious noises at 61%. Others experienced unaccountable footsteps at 49%, apparitions at 37%, and objects moving on their own at 24%. The consistency across different surveys suggests these experiences follow certain patterns. People living in supposedly haunted houses tend to report similar types of phenomena, which either means hauntings manifest in predictable ways or that people interpret ambiguous experiences through a common cultural lens of what a haunting should look like.

The gap between discomfort and action is revealing. A majority of Americans, 57%, say they would feel uncomfortable living in a haunted house. Yet three-fourths, 74%, would not move immediately if they discovered their house was haunted. There’s a big difference between discomfort and actually packing up and leaving. Moving is expensive. Finding a new place in this market is hard. So people are willing to tolerate quite a bit of discomfort if the alternative means dealing with the hassle and cost of relocating. Two-thirds, 68%, still would not move even if they saw a ghost. Even a direct visual encounter with the paranormal isn’t enough to make most people abandon their home and investment.

When asked what they would do if they found out their house was haunted, only 18% said they would move out and sell it, while 41% replied they would make friends with the ghosts. If you’re stuck living with something, you might as well try to make the best of it. If they discovered their new home was haunted right after moving in, 37% would try a ghost eviction using salt, sage, or exorcism. Before they give up on the house entirely, more than a third would try to solve the problem using methods borrowed from various spiritual and religious traditions.

The Tangible Trumps the Supernatural

When you line up all the possible homeownership concerns, ghosts rank pretty low. The survey data makes it clear what’s actually keeping people awake at night, and it’s not the sound of phantom footsteps in the hallway.

Americans are more concerned about everyday home problems than spirits. Nearly all respondents, 94%, fear home repair issues more than ghosts, including mold at 70%, termites at 65%, and asbestos at 63%. Those problems cost real money to fix. They can make you sick. They can destroy the structural integrity of your home. A ghost might give you a scare, but it won’t give you respiratory problems or eat through your foundation or require you to spend thousands of dollars on remediation.

When it comes to complete dealbreakers, more than half of Americans, 52%, would refuse to buy a home near a nuclear waste facility. In comparison, just 22% say they would completely rule out a home simply because it was rumored to be haunted. Nuclear waste is measurable, documentable, and definitely dangerous. It poses real health risks that no one disputes. Ghosts remain theoretical, and even for people who believe in them, the threat they pose is ambiguous. They might scare you. They probably won’t hurt you. Nuclear waste will definitely hurt you if you’re exposed to enough of it.

About half of Americans would rather live with spirits than a hoarder at 50% or someone with bad body odor at 49%. Ghosts don’t leave their stuff everywhere or create unpleasant smells. They don’t use up all the hot water or eat your food from the fridge. As roommates go, the incorporeal kind have certain advantages over the flesh-and-blood variety.

A third of potential buyers say a property that feels “isolated and creepy” is a dealbreaker. Death on the property, either natural or violent, gives some pause, but more than half would not rule it out if the price was right. The atmosphere of a place matters to people. They want to feel safe and comfortable. But even those concerns have a price point where they become negotiable.

Researching a Property’s Past

Before signing on a potentially haunted property, prospective buyers have options for research beyond just asking their real estate agent and hoping for an honest answer. The internet has made it easier than ever to dig into a property’s history, and several services have sprung up to meet the demand for information.

DiedInHouse.com offers property history reports that search public and private records to uncover deaths that occurred at a property, including date and cause, registered sex offender information, meth activity, fire incidents, and names of previous residents. The service provides a comprehensive look at a property’s past, pulling together information that would otherwise require searching through multiple databases and public records offices. It’s become one of the resources for buyers who want to know what happened at an address before they commit to buying it.

It was created by Roy Condrey after a tenant complained that a property Condrey had rented him was haunted. Condrey did an online search to determine if anybody had ever died at the address but found there was no “one-stop shopping” service for this information. So he built one. It’s a solution born from personal experience with the gap between what buyers want to know and what information is easily accessible.

The basic search service costs $14.99 for three reports or offers unlimited monthly searches for $19.99. Premium searches for U.S. addresses cost $14.99 per report. The pricing structure makes it affordable for individual buyers to run checks on properties they’re seriously considering, and the subscription model works for real estate professionals who need to run multiple searches regularly. A limitation of the service is that most information dates after the mid-1980s due to a lack of older digitized death records. Anything that happened before records went digital is harder to track down. The further back in history you go, the less likely you are to find comprehensive information, which means older homes might have gaps in their documented history that no database can fill.

The disclosure requirements themselves vary dramatically by state, creating a confusing landscape for buyers trying to understand their rights. Disclosure laws for stigmatized properties vary by state: three states require disclosure of deaths within one to three years of the sale, 15 states require disclosure only if the buyer asks and the seller knows but no penalties exist for failing to disclose, and 32 states have no disclosure laws related to deaths on properties. In most of the country, sellers can stay completely silent about a property’s history. They have no legal obligation to volunteer information, and in many cases, they face no consequences for hiding it even when asked directly. Buyers are left to do their own detective work if they want to know what happened in the house before they lived there.

When Notoriety Increases Value

Sometimes a notorious past doesn’t hurt value. For certain properties, the dark history becomes the main selling point, attracting buyers who see commercial potential or just want to own a piece of macabre Americana.

A home’s notoriety can sometimes be one of its biggest selling points. The Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts, a bed-and-breakfast and the site of the 1892 ax murders of Borden’s father and stepmother, sold in 2025 for $1.875 million after it was listed for $2 million. That’s not the price of a stigmatized property struggling to find a buyer. That’s a premium price for a property that’s turned its dark history into a profitable business model. The Rhode Island home that inspired the 2013 film The Conjuring recently went on the market for $1.2 million and is currently under contract for an undisclosed amount. When a haunting is famous enough, when it’s been immortalized in books and movies, the property’s value can actually increase rather than decrease.

Casey Gaddy, senior real estate agent at Keller Williams Realty in Philadelphia, makes a good point about perception and reality when it comes to haunted houses. A haunted reputation does not necessarily make it a bad home. Neighbors might say it’s haunted, but in reality it’s a house with good bones that’s been neglected and needs the right buyer to bring it back to life. Sometimes the haunting is just local legend built up around a property that’s been sitting empty too long. The stories grow and multiply in the absence of anyone living there to contradict them, and by the time a new owner comes along, the house has a reputation that has nothing to do with its actual condition or history.

Sometimes a haunted home is just an abandoned home or a fixer-upper that needs some attention. Fixer-upper homes are up to 78% cheaper in several metros, including places in the South like Jackson, Mississippi. If you can look past the reputation and see the potential, if you’re willing to put in the work to renovate and restore, there’s money to be saved. The haunted label might actually be working in your favor, keeping other buyers away and reducing competition.

Americans view haunted house owners positively, with about one in three saying they are spiritually sensitive at 39%, open-minded at 36%, and interesting at 33%. Additionally, 92% of respondents think people who claim to live in a haunted house are not liars. There’s a cultural shift happening where living in a haunted house doesn’t carry the stigma it once did. People who talk about their paranormal experiences aren’t automatically dismissed as crazy or attention-seeking. Instead, they’re seen as interesting, as having experiences worth hearing about, as being open to possibilities that others might dismiss too quickly.

Belief Doesn’t Always Predict Behavior

Belief in ghosts doesn’t correlate with willingness to buy a haunted house in the way you might expect. The relationship between what people believe and what they’re willing to do is more complicated than simple logic would suggest.

Ghost skeptics may say they do not believe in the existence of the supernatural, but 47.6% still reported they would be unwilling to buy a house that is haunted. Belief and willingness to buy don’t always line up. Even people who intellectually dismiss the possibility of ghosts feel some emotional resistance to buying a house with that reputation. Maybe it’s the social stigma. Maybe it’s concern about resale value. Maybe it’s just a lingering unease they can’t quite rationalize away.

Americans who previously have shared their living quarters with ghosts appear most inclined to jump into spectral co-ownership: 55.1% reported they would willingly purchase a haunted house. Experience makes people less fearful. Once you’ve lived with paranormal activity and discovered it’s not as terrifying as movies make it out to be, once you’ve learned that you can coexist with whatever might be there, the prospect of buying another haunted house becomes less daunting. You know what to expect. You know you can handle it.

Based on survey results, 55.8% of Americans believe in ghosts, 27.7% do not believe in them, and 16.5% are undecided as to whether ghosts exist. More than half the country believes in some form of paranormal activity, which means haunted houses aren’t a fringe concern. They’re something that resonates with a significant portion of potential buyers. Even though they have not had personal paranormal experiences, 30% still believe in hauntings. Belief doesn’t always require personal experience. Sometimes it comes from cultural narratives, from stories told by people they trust, from a sense that there’s more to the world than what we can easily measure and explain.

The housing market continues to challenge American buyers in concrete ways that have nothing to do with the supernatural. Zillow reported that the national average rent averages $1,979, while the average home in California is valued at $763,288. Against these numbers, the willingness to consider haunted properties starts to make real economic sense. When homes are that expensive, when rent takes up that much of your monthly income, you start reconsidering what counts as a dealbreaker. A paranormal reputation that might knock 10% or 20% off the price starts looking like an opportunity.

Julie Zulanas, licensed real estate agent in El Dorado Hills, California, notes that if someone has no fear, they could end up with a fabulous bargain. For buyers who can look past the stigma, who aren’t bothered by the idea of sharing their space with something they can’t see, there’s real money to be saved. Mark J. Schmidt, broker associate at RE/MAX Country in Milltown, New Jersey, makes a practical observation: you can prove a home has radon, and you can prove a home has mold, but there is not a widely accepted test to prove a home has a ghost. That’s the fundamental difference between a haunted house and other stigmatized properties. The thing that’s supposedly wrong with it can’t be measured. It can’t be fixed. It either matters to you or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, you might have just found yourself a deal.

The surveys show Americans weighing tangible financial pressures against intangible supernatural concerns. In 2025, for many buyers, the ghosts of the housing market prove more frightening than any reported hauntings. When you’re facing down high interest rates, limited inventory, and prices that keep climbing regardless of economic conditions, a house with a paranormal reputation looks like an opportunity rather than a problem. The ghosts you might encounter in a haunted house are, at worst, an inconvenience. The financial pressure of trying to buy in this market is guaranteed to keep you up at night.

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NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.