Sixty-five percent of Americans say they’d at least consider buying a home they knew was haunted, and 39% say they’d buy one outright with no hesitation, according to a Rocket Mortgage survey of 1,037 adults conducted in October 2025. That number sounds like a punchline until you look at what actually happens to a property’s price and time on market once a stigma attaches to it — because peer-reviewed real estate research backs up what survey respondents intuited: a haunted or otherwise “stigmatized” house really does sell for less, and it usually takes longer to sell than a comparable home next door.
The Survey Number That Surprised Realtors
Rocket Mortgage’s data splits almost evenly between enthusiasm and caution. Of the 65% open to a haunted purchase, 39% said they’d buy one without a second thought, while another 26% said they’d at least consider it. The remaining 35% ruled it out entirely. Belief may be doing some of the work here: 61% of respondents said they believe ghosts are real, versus 21% who don’t and 18% who are undecided — and 36% said they currently live in, or have previously lived in, a home they considered haunted.
What Buyers Say They’d Need Off the Price
Openness to a haunted house comes with strings attached. Among survey respondents willing to buy one, 37% said they’d need a discount of 40% to 59% off the asking price, 29% said 20% to 39% off would do it, and only 15% said they’d buy with a discount under 19%. Separately, 82% of respondents said they were concerned about how a haunted reputation would affect resale value down the line — meaning even people willing to move in themselves are thinking about the next buyer’s hesitation, not just their own.
The Academic Case for the Discount
That instinct holds up under research. A study on stigmatized properties published in the Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, based on a survey of 410 respondents across three U.S. universities, found that homes with a reputation for being haunted saw an average price reduction of 16.55%, while homes where a murder or suicide occurred saw devaluations closer to 24%. Homes near a mortuary averaged a 17.3% reduction. Interestingly, the same study found real disagreement among respondents — about a third thought a haunted reputation carried no value impact at all, while more than 6% thought it could cut a home’s worth by half or more.
Other academic work points the same direction from different angles. Research published in the Southern Economic Journal found that the stigma from the Columbine High School shooting reduced nearby property values by 5.7% a full year after the event, showing that this kind of discount isn’t a short-lived panic — it can persist. A separate study in the Environmental Economics and Policy Studies journal found that a homicide inside an apartment building lowered rents for nearby units by roughly 10% immediately afterward.
Disclosure Laws Turn Folklore Into Paperwork
Whether a seller even has to mention a haunted reputation, a death, or a “psychologically impacted” history varies enormously by state — some require disclosure of a death on the property within a set number of years, others require nothing at all unless a buyer asks directly, according to the National Association of Realtors’ overview of stigmatized-property law. That patchwork means the same “haunted” house could come with a legal disclosure obligation in one state and none in the neighboring one, which helps explain why so much of this discount shows up informally, through buyer hesitation and slower sales, rather than through any uniform rule.
Two Numbers, One Pattern
Put the survey and the research side by side and a consistent story emerges: people are more open to the idea of a haunted house than pop culture might suggest, but almost nobody wants to pay full price for one, and the market agrees with them. The gap between a homeowner’s asking price and what a stigmatized property can actually fetch isn’t superstition showing up in a spreadsheet — it’s buyers pricing in something real estate agents have always known and academics are now quantifying: reputation is a line item, whether or not anyone believes in ghosts.
