As Halloween approaches, there are a lot of ways you can get in the holiday season. You can carve a pumpkin, for example, or make a scarecrow — or find out whether someone was ever murdered in your house.
DiedInHouse.com is a website that does exactly what you’d think: it tells you whether someone ever died in your house. The site was founded in 2013 by software engineer Roy Condrey after some tenants in a house he owned asked if he knew the house was “haunted,” according to Forbes.
DiedInHouse.com works by searching data from death certificates, news reports, and 130 million police records to determine first whether someone died in your house, and then more specifically whether there have been any underground meth labs on the property, arson, or murders.
These spooky findings can have real implications for your house value. A death or incident of violent crime in your house can cause its value to sink up to 30%, according to Forbes.
This could present a serious problem, unless you live in an insane housing market like San Francisco, where a house in which a mummified woman had been discovered fetched $1.56 million — $500,000 over asking.
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We tried out three searches on the service, which starts at $11.99 (3 searches cost $19.99). None of our houses came back with dead people in its past, but Forbes had checked it against known dens of death and it passed the test. They found that it correctly identified a (former) meth lab and the Amityville Horror House.
Condrey told Forbes that the site has sold over 40,000 reports to date to a mixture of ghost hunters and concerned citizens.
If you are worried about prior deaths in a house you are looking to buy, you should check your state laws regarding disclosures, which vary widely.
Check out the website for yourself.
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