Haunted House Legislation

I received my monthly Psychologist's magazine which contained a large article describing “those sick people who go on ghost walks”. Psychology has as many views on the paranormal as there are psychologists, and many see the paranormal as psychology’s biggest area of failure.

Britain has had so many new laws brought in over the past few years that they often take a while to filter through. One of the most intriguing is the Property Disclosure Act. This means if your house is haunted you have to tell the buyer. In the past, establishing just what constitutes a haunting has been open to various interpretations, and a particular problem area is council housing,where different boroughs in the past have had very different policies.

As overseas buyers come to London to invest in property, they often bring with them Feng Shui practitioners. One recent Japanese businessman pulled out of a deal when he found that the building was built on the site of a house where a family had died in W.W.II. In one case highlighted by Rosie Millard in the British Sunday Times newspaper of Jan 7th 2007, a Victorian school in Clerkenwell was built on the location of a 19th century house of detention which housed 10,000 prisoners a year including children. Although demolished in 1890, the cells all remained below the playground and occult phenomena was reported.

A classic case is the house where mass murderer Donald Neilson killed a series of men he brought home, and afterwards the new house owner claimed the estate agent did not inform him of the house history, or the type of morbid sightseer he would get. The new legislation means he would have to be told.

With China now a big exporter of goods to Britain, London is on the list for Chinese people to own a second home, and knowledge of past history is vital for their culture, where they revere their family ancestors.Failure to disclose could mean being sued, and heavy damages payable.

Most prisons are haunted and the new inmate in cell number D336, child killer Roy Whiting, claims mass murder Dr Harold Shipman who hung himself there, makes his life absolutely miserable.

These new legal rules, brought in by Matrix chambers, Cherie Blair’s law firm, mean his human rights may be abused if he is not moved as he asks.

The English civil war battle site at Naseby, in particular, is a place where shouting voices are still heard, with the clash of metal upon metal.The blood spilt on the land makes it an eerie place, and from what I have seen, I know I would certainly not buy one of the houses being built there. One proposal is for estate agents to have access to an exorcist in order to give certification of spiritual hygiene, within the health and safety legislature.

Nevertheless, the prospective buyers will have to be told of the site history, and I have a feeling we may see many more court cases in the future.

Where that leaves the extremist denial school of psychology,who deny life after death I can’t quite see. I may offer to take them on one of my ghost walks!

T Stokes

Return from Haunted House Legislation to Moonslipper Home Page