Halloween’s Ghostly Spirit Chills Chicago Housing Market

As the wind howls and shadows creep, a different kind of haunting has gripped the housing market this Halloween season. ‘Stigmatized properties’ once shunned for their ghostly tales are now attracting curious buyers.

(Above) A group of monuments in Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery, located just northwest of Midlothian and Oak Forest in the southwest Chicago suburbs (Wikimedia Commons/Matt Hucke Group).

Imagine what is transpiring on this eerie, windy, and dark Halloween eve, when Chicagoans are more aware of ghostly visions, goblins, and noises in the night.

This writer asks: Is there really a “Heaven” populated with long-gone spirits residing in some distant galaxy?

First, let’s imagine where the spirits go when they depart from earth and move toward the light. Hopefully, the eternal travel directors will guide each of us to an individual haven in Heaven, where friends and family dwell on a fluffy white cloud.

Or perhaps each spirit passing through the pearly gates would be sent to a different galaxy. Wall Street tycoons would ascend to a cloud equipped with a stock ticker and CNBC, while 16-inch softball devotees would play under starlight on their own “Field of Dreams.”

Of course, the evil ones among us – you know who you are – would be given a pitchfork send-off to a flaming, lava-filled “Hell” under a boiling hot sun.

Selling haunted listings can be challenging

In Chicago’s crazy North Side housing market, buying or selling a home in 2024 can be a pretty scary event, especially if the property seemingly has a haunted or paranormal past.

Real estate brokers generally refer to such parcels as stigmatized properties. They include sites of murders, notorious representations, or environmental contamination. And, of course, homes that allegedly are inhabited by spirits or ghosts.

However, not all properties classified as stigmatized are undesirable. Those inhabited by spirits or ghosts may actually attract some buyers rather than dissuade clients.

According to Dale Kaczmarek, president of the Ghost Research Society in southwest suburban Oak Lawn, there are thousands of haunted homes in the Chicago area.

Kaczmarek (right), who has been involved in researching supernatural phenomena since 1975, says most ghostly encounters are benign and most spirits are playful and mischievous – not evil.

One of Kaczmarek’s best ghost stories is about Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery in south suburban Midlothian. Visitors report seeing the apparition of a phantom Victorian farmhouse in the woods near the cemetery.

And, witnesses report, as night falls, “orbs of blue lights” can be seen twinkling and floating near the house. However, if you walk to the lights, they vanish.

(Left) Monuments of the Hageman family, among the earliest German settlers in Bremen Township, at Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery. (Click on image to view larger version.)

“Some people say an orb – or ball of light – is the spiritual energy ghosts gather before manifestation or poltergeist activity,” noted ghosthunter Celeste Busk, a retired Chicago Sun-Times reporter who has written many haunted house stories. “To be a true orb of light, it has to move with purpose.”

“Orbs are thought to be a spirit and/or white balls of energy the spirit is using to manifest itself – or use for poltergeist mischief,” explained Busk (right). In the 1980s, Busk witnessed the appearance of an orb of light in a garage being investigated by ghosthunters because the former homeowner hung himself there.

“It was dark and quiet at midnight when an orb of light appeared and zig-zagged with intelligence all the way to the garage floor, where it disappeared,” Busk recalled. “I was awestruck and couldn’t move.”

Did you know nearly half of all Americans believe in ghosts and poltergeist activity? Just in time for Halloween, this writer offers The Home Front readers the following classic ghostly apparitions:

Babysitter ghost. A young mother tells the tale of Tom, the friendly ghost, who enjoyed haunting her baby son’s room in her two-flat on the North Side in the late 1980s.

“Our vintage oak rocking chair would mysteriously rock by itself. Sometimes, a hand-crank ‘Swing-O-Matic’ baby swing would start slowly moving by itself, and the non-motorized mobile over the crib would spin,” she recalled. “And lights would come on by themselves, and stereo music would play.”

Once, at 3 a.m., the baby was found laughing while sitting on the floor near his crib.

“I sat down on the bed and had a heart-to-ghost chat with Tom, explaining that he was a spirit and had to move on,” she said. “After a long talk, the ghost finally ended his haunting.”

Grandma’s perfume. Just before midnight on Christmas Eve in 2020, a senior citizen homeowner was relaxing by his fireplace, reading a book.

Suddenly, he noticed the heavy aroma of perfume wafting from a nearby corner curio cabinet in the living room, where his wife displayed photos of her late grandmother and grandfather.

The aroma flowed into the library, and lingered. Then, the fragrance concentrated in the bedroom that once was occupied by Grandma Ruth, the builder who erected the home in 1965. Gradually, the aroma faded.

“We recently had completed renovation work on our 55-year-old house, which we purchased from the family estate,” said the wife. “It seemed like grandma came back on a midnight spirit’s tour to review our upgrades. Her fragrance was Tabu. She loved to read. The new library seemed to be a magnet for her, and her 1950s Little Book Club leather bookmark was on the shelf.”

On Christmas Day that year, the wife witnessed poltergeist activity. The terrace swing moved, but there was no wind. Later, the aroma of grandpa’s cigar smoke drifted across the deck. Four of their grandchildren simultaneously experienced the visitation.

Flickering lamp. On an autumn evening, a couple started happily chatting over a glass of wine about all the hard work that they had completed on the home over the past decade.

“If my father were alive, he wouldn’t believe how much we improved the house,” said the wife.

Simultaneously, the bulb in a vintage table lamp that once belonged to her father began flickering on and off in a sign of approval. No electrical problems were found, but the owners decided to replace the lamp’s electrical outlet to make sure there wasn’t a short.

On April 17, 2024, the same lamp started flickering brightly again. The date was the tenth anniversary of her father’s passing.

“Dad was sending us an electrical spiritual reminder through his lamp,” concluded the wife.

Haunted “blue room.” In late October 1985, a young couple purchased a vintage English Tudor home in the Sauganash neighborhood on Chicago’s Northwest Side. They were only the second owners of the house, which dated to the 1920s.

After doing a total renovation of the house, the new owners decided to leave one of the bedrooms intact because they liked its deep blue color. So, the walls were freshly painted the same shade of blue. A matching blue bedspread and curtains were added.

Soon afterward, however, thumping began inside the blue walls of the second-floor bedroom. Just noisy heat ducts or plumbing, the owners rationalized. But the noise continued even when the furnace wasn’t on.

A year later, a female house guest stayed in the blue room. Within minutes of retiring for the evening, the guest raced down the stairs in hysterics.

“There’s something in that room,” she said. “I heard heavy breathing and groaning, and it’s freezing cold in there.”

After researching the house’s past, the new owners found that the only prior resident had built the home in the early 1920s and lived there happily for more than 60 years. His family said their father had passed away of lung and heart difficulties in the blue bedroom only months before the couple had purchased the house.

Legislation needed, say Realtors, to free them from disclosing stigmas

Because of the credibility questions supernatural phenomena raise, the National Association of Realtors encourages states to adopt legislation based on model language provided to each state Realtor association.

The language asks Realtors to declare that “all psychological impacts or stigmas associated with real property are not material facts and need not be disclosed to a potential purchaser or lessee.”

Although it may take supernaturally creative marketing campaigns to sell an allegedly haunted house, buyers are out there.

Boo!

Don DeBat is co-author of Escaping Condo Jail, the ultimate survival guide for condominium living. Visit escapingcondojail.com. For more housing news, visit www.dondebat.biz. Don also is writing Chicago’s Game, a book on 16-inch softball.