Would you buy a murder house?

I’ve been writing about murder houses for a few years now and I’ve turned up everything from a North Vancouver shop keeper butchered by the Black Hand, to a poet beaten to death in her East Vancouver home, to the quiet Colwood home where a Victoria man murdered his wife and then found her head in the ditch in front of the couple’s home in a misguided attempt to collect the insurance money.

Some people embrace murders and their ghosts—most just hang up on me.

Some years ago when I was writing about a Shaughnessy murder for At Home with History: the secrets of Greater Vancouver’s heritage homes I bumped into house genealogist James Johnstone at Vancouver Archives. It turned out that we were both researching the same house—the current owner had commissioned James to research the house as a present for his wife and he was less than thrilled to discover the 1976 murder.

When the Bests’ bought their James Bay home the house vibes made them so uneasy that they did a cleansing before moving in. Years later a young woman knocked on the door and told them about her grandmother who was murdered there in 1956. She’d grown up believing that her grandparents were killed in a car crash and had just learned that her grandfather had died in a mental hospital for the criminally insane more than 40 years after bludgeoning her grandmother to death in their kitchen.

Grant Stuart Gardiner is a North Van realtor who specializes in selling heritage houses. He says in British Columbia, a realtor is only obliged to disclose a murder if asked.

“I’ve never had somebody ask me if there has been a murder in a house, although I have had somebody ask me if there has been a death,” he says. “If there has been one you are duty bound to disclose it, but there’s no duty to research it and try and figure it out.”

Grant doesn’t know about any murders in the houses that he’s sold, but he has had a death. He was showing a Grand Boulevard house one day when a woman came to look but refused to go up the stairs. “She said there’s some weird spirits or something spooky about this house.”

Much later a neighbour told him that a man had hung himself in the attic back in the ’50s. “If it’s not disclosed when you buy it the neighbours sure as hell tell you when you move in,” he says.

You wouldn’t buy a house without having a building inspector check the foundation, so why wouldn’t you spend some time researching your potential home’s genealogy?

Tips on how not to buy a murder house: 

1. Ask your realtor
2. Ask the neighbours
3. Google the address. The problem here is with murders that happened pre-internet and those savvy owners who have kept the house, but changed the street number.
4. Same idea, but this time do a free online search through your library on local papers
5. Both the Vancouver and the Victoria public libraries have murder files packed full of old newspaper clippings.
6. Check the index of my true crime/history books—I may have already written about it.

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