HAUNTED HOUSES are not for the faint of heart. Deceased former tenants—normally those who have suffered violent, untimely deaths—are said to remain in residence. Living occupants complain of creaking doors and floorboards, shifting furniture, knocking, footsteps and voices. Ghostly apparitions can terrorise children; pets flee eerie spectres.
Sceptics might write such phenomena off as paranoia, but haunted houses do spook the property market. That ghosts depress prices, especially in some Asian cities such as Hong Kong, has long been recognised. But a recentby Utpal Bhattacharya and Kasper Meisner Nielsen of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Daisy Huang of Nanjing Audit University, attempts to calculate the size of the ectoplasmic discount.
So ghosts and ghouls are a factor for discerning Hong Kong house-hunters to weigh. But the process by which a property becomes haunted matters, too. Suicides lower the value of affected properties by between 16% and 28%, depending on the method used; deadly accidents depress prices by 20%. Murders, meanwhile, have the most chilling effect on values, sending prices tumbling by a whopping 36%.
'ghost benefit analysis' 😂😂