The Nyack Haunted House

There is a house in Nyack, New York that a court ruled is haunted. Not in a figure of speech. In writing, in a 1991 opinion, a New York appellate court found that the Queen Anne Victorian at 1 LaVeta Place, on a bluff above the Hudson, was haunted as a matter of law.

The house belonged to Helen Ackley, and for years she had told anyone who'd listen about the three friendly spirits living with her family. She named two of them, an 18th-century couple she called Sir George and Lady Margaret, and described a third, a Revolutionary-era Navy lieutenant. She said the beds shook in the mornings to wake her children for school, and that the shaking stopped during spring break when one daughter wanted to sleep in. There were phantom footsteps, knockings, doors that opened and slammed on their own. She reported small gifts that appeared and vanished, baby rings and coins and silver sugar tongs. She wrote it all up for Reader's Digest in 1977. By 1989 the house was a stop on a five-home Nyack walking tour, billed in the local paper as "a riverfront Victorian (with ghost)."

Then she sold it for $650,000 to Jeffrey Stambovsky, a buyer down from New York City who knew none of this. He put $32,500 down. Then, in his words to the court, "to his horror," he learned what the whole town already knew.

He sued to get out of the deal, and the court took the problem seriously. A haunting, the opinion reasoned, is "not a condition which can and should be ascertained upon reasonable inspection." No home inspector finds a ghost. A buyer from out of town has no way to know what every local has heard for years, so a haunted reputation became something the seller was bound to disclose.

So Stambovsky lost on the fraud claim, with Justice Israel Rubin writing that the plaintiff "hasn't a ghost of a chance." But the court let him cancel the sale anyway. Because Ackley had spent years publicly promoting her ghosts, the opinion held, she was "estopped to deny their existence and, as a matter of law, the house is haunted."

Lawyers call it the Ghostbusters ruling. Rubin worked the movie's theme song into the text, quoted Hamlet's Ghost, and the case is taught in law schools across the country to this day.

The matter settled. Ackley refunded half the deposit and sold the house to someone else. She moved to Florida that same year, and by her own account she took the ghosts with her. The house has changed hands several times since, for around $1.8 million each time. As far as anyone has documented, no one who lived there after her has reported the spirits at all.