The Girl, the Homes, the Stories

Prologue: All of MY sellers are fabulous and I love them all. ❤️

Here are two stories about two sellers that were not my clients:

Seller one was so irate at buyers for daring to ask for a few things on the home inspection that before the final walkthrough he took the time to go through the entire house and remove every single light bulb just out of spite. That takes quite a lot of time and effort just to ruin someone’s day.

This next one is only a story I heard. Call it a real estate urban myth if you will. However, it came from a reliable source. Buyer and agent go to the final walkthrough of the home that’s closing the next day, and they find all of the kitchen appliances GONE. So buyer’s agent calls seller’s agent and asks why the hell the seller took everything. Sellers agent says they have NO idea what buyer’s agent is talking about…. seller didn’t take anything at all, and all appliances were definitely included in the sale. Fast forward to standing outside and a neighbor comes out. Says he was wondering what was going on because the PREVIOUS owner from YEARS AGO was there with his truck (with his business name on it and everything….. not even trying to hide) and loaded up all the appliances.

Police were called. Previous seller claims wife told him that since the house was selling again that he should go get all of THEIR appliances out. So he did. Did the wife set him up to be arrested? Who knows.

EPILOGUE: When you buy a house, change the locks. You never know who has keys.

There’s little I look forward to more than boozy lunches with good friends in the biz. Going and having some good food and wine with people you really love in the middle of the day is one of the best recharges for mind and soul I have ever found.

This is the first year in a LOT of years where I didn’t have a child still at home to take care of. My kids are 21, 14, 12 and 7 so the last one is finally at school all day. I’m whooping it up! Work work work….play play play….work work work….play play play. Only way for me to stay sane in this ultra-stressful business. Gotta find that outlet and have people to vent to who KNOW and UNDERSTAND.

I love my boozy lunch gals.

Sometimes a house is vacant. Sometimes I need a confirmed appointment. No matter if it’s confirmed on 100 year old parchment paper written with calligraphy in unicorn blood, I knock. Almost always. Below are some reasons why I knock and just some other oddities.

I’ve encountered:

A large naked man sleeping on the couch right smack in front of us when we opened the door.

A large group of sleepy and very high twenty-somethings all sitting around in the dark at 2 in the afternoon passing around the 3 foot bong. I asked them if they knew we were coming. They did.

A dog who wanted to kill me for sure.

A lady out COLD on her bed. We had an appointment and she apparently forgot.

A man who peered out his tiny window in the door and demanded two forms of picture ID from both me and my clients. We skipped that one.

A room set up with nothing but a black cot, a table with a bible on it. It was like a dungeon room for someone bad (?). Im glad it was empty. I’ll never forget it.

A basement filled with clown paraphernalia and art. Filled. With. Clowns.

One of the first houses I ever toured, walked down basement steps, turned on the light and BOOM a 7 foot tall cardboard cutout of some boxer standing in fight pose. Right there in the front of your face. I swear the owners did it intentionally and probably had video running to catch all the Realtors screaming. I keep waiting to see my scream on a viral YouTube video.

Those are just the highlights. This job definitely never gets boring.

One of the questions I get asked repeatedly is if I’ve ever been in a “haunted house”. The short answer is yes, but it’s more complicated than that. I believe that spirits can reside in a house but that doesn’t make it “haunted”. Your grandma or mom or great uncle who loved you to pieces might stop by a lot and watch over you. That’s the good kind of “haunting”. Unfortunately I have experienced the other kind on three separate occasions over the 10+ years I’ve been doing this job. I don’t know why I feel it, but I do and in the story I’m about to tell my clients also felt the same exact thing without any of us saying a word. It was an extreme case of what felt like bad bad bad something pushing us out out out of the house.

First of all, this house had a “morning room”, which lets just face it, made it creepy from the jump. But when I walked in it was like someone had sucked all the joy out of me. A dark pressure on my shoulders. A feeling of dread and seriously bad anxiety. I was standing there in the morning room feeling all kinds of awful when my clients walked in. Didn’t want to sound like a lunatic so I said nothing. We walked around the first floor and even though the house was super pretty and actually quite magnificent we found ourselves all standing in the kitchen looking at the door to the basement and NO ONE would open it. Not one of us would touch the doorknob to even open the door but it was inexplicable. We decided to move on but we’re collectively pretty damn freaked. One of the points of realization came when stepped into the addition “wing” on the West side of the house. As soon as I crossed the threshold into it it was like someone flipped a figurative light on. The heaviness disappeared. There was a back staircase from the addition that led to the original second floor story. Walked up the steps, stepped into the hallway and BOOM. Dread, awfulness, heaviness, sadness, anger, ANXIETY. It was so overwhelming. Walked around upstairs, down these weird short hallways and came to the door of one of the bedrooms and holy crapola you couldn’t have paid any of us to step into that room. It was like neon flashing lights screaming GET OUT. So we sure as hell did. Left quickly right then.

Standing outside in the driveway looking up at the house. We find ourselves all looking at one window. I looked at my clients and they looked at me and we both basically at the same time said “I feel like someone is going appear at the window”. We both left in our separate cars. It took me until I got to a red light about 3 blocks away before I felt the heaviness and dread leave me. To this day I won’t drive on that street because I’m scared that spirit will remember me and follow me. Seriously.

So was I crazy? Wanted to find out. I went home and googled the address. The man who had spent his entire life there had died in the upstairs bedroom. He was somewhat well known for some business he owned so there was an article about him when he passed. A young boy had an accident in the 1930’s in the basement playing with ropes. He strangled and died and the mother apparently went crazy. So yeah, the two areas we couldn’t bring ourselves to enter were where both of them died.

So are there such things as haunted houses? After that experience you can’t convince me otherwise.