While every law library has a spooky back corridor or creepy attic, the law books and databases may also be haunted!
Well, at least “haunting” and “haunted” are words found in indexes and keywords …
Flipping through the American Jurisprudence Trial (AmJur Trial), available as a set of books or as a Westlaw database, I was SHOCKED! Or at least mildly bemused to find the ponderously titled “Litigation Against Seller of Real Estate and Its Agent for Failure to Disclose to Buyer Facts of Past Violent Crimes or Hauntings Within Property Subject to Sale,” 142 AmJur Trials 193 (2015).
AmJur Trial articles are typical based on real trials and try to prepare a “cookbook” for litigating a trial case from complaint to discovery to trial, with sample language from complaints, interrogatories, depositions, direct and cross examinations, and jury instructions.
Much of the documents in the article on disclosing violent crimes or hauntings come from a 2009 Pennsylvania case before the Court of Common Pleas for Delaware County. In this case, a gruesome murder-suicide took place in a home. Someone who knew of the murder bought the house cheap and prepared to resell it. An out-of-state buyer became interested but neither the seller or agent informed them of the murder—even when the buyer, a single mom whose husband had recently died, asked point blank why the seller had picked up the house so cheaply.
The Halloween after the family moved in the children were told by friends about the murder. The son, Ryan, then noticed paranormal happenings. Twice he saw a ghostly figure with green eyes. Another time he heard breathing beside him and later the sound of a bullet entering the chamber of a gun. His mother also sensed spectral forces in the home.
Wanting to leave, they filed a claim to rescind the sale of the home and for damages against seller and the agent. The complaint can be found on Westlaw: Milliken v. Jacono, No. 2008-15684 (January 16, 2009), 2009 WL 8518238 (Pa.Com.Pl.) (Trial Pleading).
Further Research found a similar piece in American Law Reports (ALR), also available in print or on Westlaw, “Duty of Seller of Real Estate and Its Agent to Disclose to Buyer Facts of Past Violent Crimes or Haunting Within Property Subject to Sale,” 18 A.L.R.7th Art 2 (2016).
ALR articles are great a collecting all existing state law on a topic and analyzing differences and trends regarding the acceptance of novel legal theories across the fifty-states, D.C. and Puerto Rico.
Here, the editors collected much of the case law on litigation regarding the sale of homes previously the locale of grisly murders, mass deaths, housing developments built on ancient graveyards, and houses locally rumored to be the site of paranormal activities.
Of course, “real” haunted houses—the ones that people decorate to amuse people around Halloween—also have their own legal issues. Dark, crowded, full of fake blood and guts, and with displays often hastily erected in a few weeks, haunted houses are guaranteed to make tort lawyers nervous.
If they are smart, the owners call local lawyers. And those lawyers write about their experience in the local bar publication. Searching HeinOnline Bar Journals, two excellent pieces come up, cataloging a litany of horrors including a patron running into a cinderblock wall running from a monster, another slipping in mud running from Jason, and a man who injured his leg in a “coffin shute slide.” Kathryn A. Ritcheske, House of Horrors: Delight in Fright at Your Own Risk, 77 Tex. B.J. 776 (2014) and Daniel B. Moar, Case Law from the Crypt: The Law of Halloween, 83 N.Y. St. B.A. J. 10 (2011).
So, if your law books get spooky, who you gonna call?
The law library, of course. Who else?
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