How to Sell a Haunted House

by Grady Hendrix

Whenever Louise got anxious, her dad always said, You know, Louise, statistically, and there’s a lot of variance in these numbers, but in general, from a strictly scientific point of view, everything turns out okay an improbable number of times. Not this time, she thought. This time, nothing’s ever going to be okay again.

She cried because at last it hit her that time only moves in one direction, no matter how hard we wish it wasn’t so.

In 1732, Gentleman’s Magazine noted a large number of ghost hoaxes designed to “sink the Rents of a House which an Ousted Tenant has a mind to retake” and the actress and writer Eliza Haywood wrote in 1740 that “Houses have been reported to be haunted out of Malice to those who owned them.”

Marasco realized that the real question for most people confronted with a haunted house is not “Does this mean the soul survives bodily death?” but “Can I get my deposit back?”