If the walls in these houses could talk, home buyers would immediately run! These realtors reveal the strange and twisted history behind a home they have sold. Content has been edited for clarity.
Horrifying History Lesson
“I am a realtor, and an attorney I knew called me and told me she had a client in Canada. The client’s uncle passed away and left her everything. Since she lived out of the country and just wanted money out of the belongings, she wanted a realtor who would also do an estate sale.
I agreed to sell her home and set up an estate sale. I worked the process out with the niece through the attorney, and we agreed everything could be sold except for one item.
The niece explained, ‘There is a lock box hidden in the house. When you find it, please do not open it. Just mail it to my address.’
I never found the lockbox, and trust me, I searched everywhere for it. She even claimed she knew exactly where the box was located, but it wasn’t there.
Anyway, the main floor inside the home was nineteen-sixties chic. Everything seemed normal, except the basement was set up as a doctor’s office. There were a lab, an examination room, an exam table, and instruments.
I asked the attorney, ‘What was up with the guy who lived here, anyway?’
He told me an amazing story I would never forget.
The man who lived in the home was ninety-six years old when he passed away. At this time, he was still practicing medicine. He made house calls, and he still drove himself.
The man was German and he was born in Germany. Allegedly, he was a brilliant scientist and was recruited by German soldiers in World War II. When he was faced with some ‘horrible tasks’, he fled Germany. He never told anyone exactly what he was asked to do or what he actually did, but he only claimed he couldn’t do what was asked of him.
Since he made a scene while leaving, the soldiers arrived at his home before he did. He was asked to return to work, and he refused. He was beaten, and he still refused. The soldiers carted him off and put the man in a prison camp where he was beaten daily and told to return to his job. He finally came up with a plan to escape and agreed to go back to his job.
Since he agreed to go back to work, he was told he had three weeks to go home and recuperate. Guards heavily surrounded the inside and outside of his home, and they ensured he wouldn’t escape in the meantime. The man, his wife, and his children set fire to the home as a distraction. He escaped the home first, followed by his wife and children. A guard jumped out and hit his wife, and he was shot in the back and arm. He ran off and hid with friends and hoped to find a way back to his family.
Over the next week, he smuggled himself back to his neighborhood and hid out at a house with his friends. Sirens went off, and he ran to the windows. A flatbed truck was driving up and down the street, and his wife and children were in the back.
A loudspeaker on the truck announced, ‘We have your wife and children. Turn yourself in so you can be reunited with your family.’
His friends kept him hidden and told him not to trust whoever had his family because they would likely kill him. This happen for a couple of days, and on the last day, they said he had to surrender or else they would kill his family. The man tried to get up, but his friends tackled him and held him to the ground. Seconds later, shots rang out. He looked out of the window, and his entire family was dead in front of his burned-down home.
He stayed hidden for a few more weeks and then decided to flee the country. He met up with a couple of other refugees and they made their way out of Germany, on foot, at night. For months, they walked and hid until they got to Spain or Portugal.
He and the other refugees somehow booked passage on a ship to the United States and were smuggled overseas. They were apprehended in the United States and he spent a year in a detention camp being debriefed.
After the war, he went on to be a successful doctor here in the United States. When he ‘officially’ retired, he opened a small office in his house and made house calls for a select number of long-time patients, one of whom was the attorney’s grandmother.
While he had a girlfriend for over thirty years, he never remarried, and he outlived her. They never lived together because he had night terrors and was extremely violent in his sleep. She couldn’t even stay in another room because he’d be screaming all night long.
He was a fascinating guy but it’s such a sad story.”
True Crime Tales
“My wife and I are both realtors, in San Fernando Valley to be exact. We were in business with a colleague who was significantly older than us and had been working in the industry for a long time.
One day, we arrived at a new listing and my colleague said, ‘Oh, I know this house.’
Her tone was extremely off-putting, and naturally, my wife and I became concerned.
My wife and I questioned, ‘What do you mean you know this house?’
She replied, ‘I’ll tell you when we leave.’
The home was lovely and was settled in the multi-million dollar area of Sherman Oaks. It clearly had a few different owners throughout the years and needed cosmetic repairs. Despite this, anyone would have been lucky to own this property. The asking price of the home was over one million dollars.
When we left, I pushed my colleague for answers about the home.
She said, ‘A family lived in the house in the eighties. There was a home invasion, and the family was brutally tortured and murdered. It was a huge story at the time, but there wasn’t internet at the time so word didn’t spread about it.’
My wife and I were shocked. We were both true crime fans and wanted to see if we could dig up any other information about the house. After a bit of time scouring the internet and newspaper archives, we couldn’t find anything. It really bothered me. As a realtor, I wanted to be able to provide the proper history and information to a client interested in the house.
Here’s the messed-up part. California real estate law states you only have to disclose a death on a home property if it occurred within the last three years. However, if the death was violent, you have an obligation to tell the client no matter when the instance occurred. But if you don’t have the information, then you are perfectly well within the law if you don’t disclose information.
I’ve come across a lot of homes where there has been a death on the property, but if it’s a normal death, it’s usually not a big deal to a client. All I could think of was the realtors prior to me selling the house, and how they might not have known the history of the house.
I’m not a big believer in the paranormal and am not scared of ghosts, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be the new owner of the house. Imagine spending one million dollars on your dream home and not knowing something horrific happened there.”
A Realtor’s Worst Nightmare
“I am a realtor, and I have been witness to some of these stories and heard of some from other colleagues.
The first story happened when a couple bought a house in the nineteen-eighties. They called me a couple of years prior, and they were looking to sell their home. As we were talking, the wife started to confide in her many difficult pregnancies and how she had lost them all previously. I felt bad for her, but I wondered what this had to do with selling her home.
The husband piped up and said, ‘After the last pregnancy, I didn’t know what to do. I came home and the first thing I thought to do was remodel the kitchen. I had to break something!’
He went on about his impromptu kitchen demolition, and I could tell he was devastated they had lost another pregnancy. He said he ripped out a corner wall in the kitchen to find a ball of cloth hidden behind the drywall. As he pulled apart the layers of cloth, he found the skeletal remains of a baby. The remains were wrapped inside a teddy bear. He said he had called the police, but they never got a follow-up about the situation.
Another strange story from my own experience was from a house I was asked to sell. The home was a fixer-upper, but it was on a relatively nice plot of land. From the first minute I met the sellers, I could tell they had some sort of strange relationship going on. The woman was in her twenties, the man was in his fifties, and they were married. She was dressed very scandalously, even while just meeting with me. The couple was not well-off by any means, so it wasn’t as if the woman was with him for the money.
I decided to Google their names and see if I could find any information about the weird couple. I found out the couple had been busted for running a puppy mill out of their garage in the past. After I found this information, I just ignored them. I couldn’t even talk to them, didn’t want to associate with them, and I wasn’t going to be the person to sell their home.
The final story is from my colleague. They went to close on a home, and the seller was running extremely late. An hour went by, and the seller was still a no-show. My colleague called him, but they weren’t getting an answer. The seller’s nephew had let her in the home once before, so she decided to call him to figure out what was happening. The nephew drove over to the seller’s home and found the man dead on the floor. He was wearing his coat and had one shoe on. He died putting on his shoes so he could go to the closing. The buyers still purchased the home, but it took a few extra weeks to close.”
“He Refused To Sleep In The Room From That Night Onward”
“My extended family previously lived in an extremely old house just north of London. Supposedly, it was Queen Victora’s stop when she was traveling in the area. When I was younger, I confessed to my uncle how I didn’t believe in ghosts or spirits. I would be the first person to call it a load of garbage. However, his story has turned me into a believer.
One night when my uncle was sleeping, he was awoken by a man staring at him at the end of his bed. The man was dressed in an old army uniform and looked transparent. My uncle froze for a few seconds, panicked, and flipped on the bedside lamp. As soon as the light came on, the man vanished.
He refused to sleep in the room from that night onward.
My uncle later found out the man he saw was the previous owner of the house. The owner was a soldier who had just returned from war to find his wife having an affair. The man was furious at his wife, and he vowed to get revenge on his lover at all costs.
One morning, the man took his toddler twin sons outside to the garden. He murdered them and proceeded to turn the weapon on himself.
Since my family initially purchased the property, my uncle had twin sons, my mom had twin sons, and my uncle’s brother also had twin sons. Spooky.
Even more strange, my nieces and nephews have heard children laughing in the garden while they were playing outside. We knew they weren’t lying because they didn’t know the history of the home yet.”
Unhabitable Hospital
“I am not a realtor, although I have taken the realty course twice. I have been in the residential property management industry for fourteen years, and I have managed and leased thousands of apartments and homes. One building I previously leased was extremely old and was on the National Register of Historic Places. The building was formerly an insane asylum, and prior to the asylum, a hospital. Thankfully, I never had a terrible experience in the building, only one unsettling experience. However, the tenants who have stayed in the building throughout the years have had bad experiences.
Since the building itself was on the registry, certain design aspects throughout the apartment could not change. The overall architecture has remained the same, and so have the flooring and walls. The worst part of the building was the basement. Because the building was previously an asylum and hospital, there was a morgue in the basement. Even fifty years later, you could still smell formaldehyde downstairs. There are a handful of apartments in the basement, and one of the apartments, in particular, has two giant walk-in closets. The closets were previously old body lockers, and the original latches are still intact on the walls.
I cannot understand how anyone could live in the apartments because I cannot even walk into the building by myself.”
Television Terror
“I was practically a realtor with how much time I spent doing leg work to buy my house.
The creepiest house I have experienced was the ‘backward TV house’ as we called it.
It was easily two hundred thousand dollars less than any neighboring house in the area. It had some fixer-upper problems, but otherwise, it was a good house. It had a beautiful atrium, huge windows in the master bedroom facing the mountains, and a pool overlooking the valley.
We walked into the house and tried to turn on the lights. None of them worked, but it was okay. There were plenty of windows upstairs which gave the living room and kitchen light. We walked into the kitchen, and pictures of the family and children were spread out all over the dining room table. There was still food on the table. The dishes weren’t done. All of their medicine was still in the drawers.
It was as if they were abducted overnight by some government agency.
We walked downstairs and it was extremely dark, as there were only a few windows. There were a ton of televisions in the basement, but they were all turned backward and facing the wall. They weren’t flat screen, light-weight, televisions either. They were the giant old-school type of television.
There were notes all over the house about how much the family loved and missed each other. It was top top-notch creepy stuff. We have no idea what happened there, but we can only assume they had to flee the country or it was ghosts.”
Storage Room Stranger
“When I was doing rounds looking to purchase my first house, I made an appointment to look at a nice little cottage. The house was totally within my budget, and it seemed to fit all the criteria I wanted in a home. I wasn’t familiar with the area the home was in, so I arrived at the property about forty-five minutes early. Instead of just waiting around for the agent to show up, I decided to take a tour around the neighborhood and found another seller who was having an open house. This house was very much not in my budget, but I decided to take a look anyway just for laughs.
The house was extremely fancy inside. It had white marble floors, a gym, and a hair salon! I continued walking around the house looking at the amenities and found the laundry room on the opposite side of the house. Off the laundry room, there was another door, and it was way smaller than the average size doorway.
I thought, ‘Oh, cool! A secret passageway.’
I opened the tiny door and found a passageway running longways down the back of the house. One side was dirt, and the other side was a rock pathway. I followed the dimly-lit passageway and found a small room the current owners were using for storage. I looked around the room and suddenly spotted a large man in the corner. There, standing amongst boxes of god knows what was a lifesize replica of Freddy Kruger!
I ran out of the house as quickly as I could. Four years later, the house is still on the market. Oh, and I didn’t put an offer in on the home I initially looked at either.”
“You Don’t Want To Know Anything Else About The House”
“A while back, my aunt and uncle purchased a house. They were well off and had plenty of money, so the house was huge. The entire top floor of the home had gorgeous, intricate, murals on every wall. The remainder of the home had wrought iron bars over the walls, and the doors at the top of the staircase were made of iron mesh and had deadbolt locks.
My aunt asked her neighbor, ‘Why is the house so weird? There is a huge prison-like area in the home, do you know what it was used for?’
The neighbor replied, ‘The last family who lived in the house had children. You don’t want to know anything else about the house.’
All of my aunt’s neighbors completely refused to discuss the house with her any further, so she decided to quit asking them what happened. What my aunt didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
She renovated the strange area of the house pretty quickly.
My aunt mentioned everyone in her neighborhood seemed extremely happy her family moved into the home. Whatever happened in the house, it shook the neighborhood pretty hard and they were relieved to have a normal family move in.”
Filthy Flooring Fable
“The lady next door to me died, and she wasn’t found until weeks after her death. Let’s just say at this point, her body was more liquid than solid. Her immediate family could not afford to keep the house, so the home went to the Department of Housing and Urban Development to auction. The department paid for some of the cleanings, but they didn’t replace the carpet. The carpet only got steam cleaned.
The house finally sold, and I got a chance to talk to the buyer flipping it.
Before I could mention the woman’s death, he asked, ‘Did the house have a water leak or something under the foundation? My team and I ripped up the carpet to put new flooring down, and something weird got all over our clothes.’
I told him, ‘A woman in this house died not too long ago. Her body was laying on the carpet, and the carpet hasn’t been replaced. Only steam cleaned.’
His face turned as green as a pea and puked on the side of the fence. I still feel bad to this day.”
The Little Black Dot
“A while back, I went to visit my sister in California. It had been a long trip, and once I arrived I wanted to take a shower. Well, I took a long enough shower so the mirror was steamy when I got out. Upon closer inspection, I noticed one tiny black dot in the middle of the mirror wasn’t steamy.
My immediate thought process was, ‘Oh, how weird. I guess if you draw on a mirror with a black marker, it won’t steam around it.’
I investigated the dot even closer, and I finally realized it was a camera lens.
I was freaking out! Was there somebody watching me? I got dressed and ran up to my sister’s room to tell her what I found. We went out to her backyard and poked around in a utility closet which lined up with her bathroom. Sure enough, the drywall had been cut away and re-patched at some point. We cut the drywall back open, only to find there wasn’t a camera inside anymore. It’s really freaky to think whoever lived in the home previously was getting actually spied on. I still wonder if they ever even realized there was a camera in the mirror.”
Macabre Mansion
“I photograph homes for a living. People die in homes, it’s normal. I’ve photographed a few homes where the reason for the sale was a recent death in the home. It was a little weird initially, but I had gotten used to it over the years.
The strangest house I photographed was mostly very creepy and suspicious. I photographed a billionaire’s compound, and the owner had an absurd fascination with animal flesh. There were over fifty animal heads mounted on the walls, from water buffalo to elephants. There were at least ten large taxidermied cats scattered around the home. There were intricate chandeliers made from the feathers of rare birds. Stools made from elephant legs and feet were next to each sofa. Paintings and abstract photos of animal muscles were hung throughout the home. I looked for the owner’s ‘kill room’, but I never found it. In general, I find billionaires don’t behave like normal people, but this one was particularly odd.”
