Psychological impact

Just in time for Halloween, a haunted house

A reader tells me that this Stamford house, 315 Hycliff Terrace, which is on the market for $899,990, reduced from $945,000 after just a week on the market, was recently the site of an ugly attempted murder/suicide. The husband managed to kill his wife but botched his own suicide, and after the police rejected his story about home invaders, was eventually released on bail. He returned home, and finished the job.

The house itself doesn’t seem to amount to much: Zillow labels it as “new construction”, although it was built in 1928 and last remodeled in 1980, but that’s Zillow (and real estate agents) for you, and, for Stamford, seems overpriced, but I do wonder how the market will react. People die in houses all the time, even by suicide, and generally those deaths don’t affect value, but murders cast a certain pall over a property: according to Trulia, a homicide on the premises can drop a home’s value 10% - -25%, and, in my experience, sometimes more. The Dairy Road home where the owner was dragged into the basement and slaughtered, for instance, was torn down and even had its address changed from No. 8 Dairy to No. 10, and still took years to sell, though much of that time on the market can probably be attributed to its being both designed an built by Mark Mariani and grossly overpriced.

I’m curious to see how this one fares.

As if lingering corpses weren’t enough, fogged double-panes indicate failed seals, requiring replacement..