‘Murder,’ she wrote, but it’s not required

Halloween’s over, and, amazingly, the decorations have already been picked up at my house.

That’s the work of my wife. If I were in charge of putting them away, they’d likely become a permanent feature of the premises, much like a pile of newspapers is a permanent feature of my car’s backseat.

Anyway, while we’re on the subject of Halloween, here’s a ghost story my mom used to tell her three kids.

My grandmother — Mom’s (not dad’s) mom — supposedly saw the ghost of my grandfather at the foot of her bed one night. Grandma recounted the event to a priest, who told her it just meant that Grandpa was doing OK in the afterlife and he wanted to let Grandma know that.

Apparently, even after death, Grandpa still recognized the importance of communication to a healthy marriage.

I’m pretty sure Mom believed that story. (She’s a Louisiana girl, you see, and they’re all superstitious down there.)

But if Grandma were alive today — she died in a Louisiana nursing home last year at 73 — and owned a home in North Carolina and Grandpa’s ghost still popped in every once in a while, state law says Grandma wouldn’t have to disclose that to a buyer.

In fact, a seller could live in a house where the furniture rearranges itself at 3:47 a.m. every day and the ghost of a dead soldier cleans a musket on the front lawn at sunrise on Sundays and not have to say boo to a buyer.

That’s because supernatural occurrences on a property are not considered to be a “material fact” that must be disclosed by an agent to a homebuyer in N.C., Tom Miller, general counsel for the North Carolina Real Estate Commission, tells me.

N.C. agents also aren’t obligated to tell a buyer about the wife who murdered her husband in the kitchen or that Granny died in her upstairs bedroom a week before the house went on the market. In other words, if a buyer asks whether there was a death on the property, the agent can keep as silent as a grave, Miller says.

An agent also doesn’t have to tell a buyer whether the previous occupant had a “serious illness.”

But “it’s against the law to lie,” Miller says.

Plus, lying could anger the spirits.

N.C.’s law is similar to other states’ when it comes to disclosing whether someone perished on a property. In Massachusetts, for example, agents are also under no obligation to tell a buyer about a death or if the current owner sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night and sees a little ghost girl weeping in the corner of the master bedroom.

In California, though, where the FX haunted house show “American Horror Story” takes place, the law is a little different; there, an agent can get in trouble if they don’t divulge that a death occurred within the past three years on a property.

Here in N.C., if there’s graveyard on the property, and the agent is aware of it, that has to be disclosed to the buyer, Miller says. (Personally, I think it would be fun to just let them discover that while digging a new rose bed, but that’s just me.)

N.C. agents also aren’t responsible for knowing about unmarked graves, Miller says. If there are tombstones in the backyard or other evidence that “through a reasonable examination” an agent would ascertain the existence of graves, the agent would have to share that with the buyer, Miller says.

But let’s say the graves were once marked with wooden crosses that rotted away.  N.C. law does not hold the agent responsible for not knowing there are bodies buried in the backyard.

Just because N.C. agents don’t have to open up about deaths, dying-related damages might be “material” and might have to be disclosed, Miller said. Indeed, Uncle Larry’s corpse could wreak havok on the floorboards after lying there for several weeks.

Miller said North Carolina’s disclosure laws for deaths on properties stemmed from lawsuits that arose across the country in the late 1980s. The suits might have come from concerns about ghosts, deaths or HIV — Miller wasn’t really sure — but he said the cases resulted in N.C. OK’ing, in 1989, a statute, G.S. 39-50.

If I’m ever in the market to buy another house in N.C., and later find out it’s haunted, I probably wouldn’t get much help from Miller and his group.

“It would be difficult for us to expend a lot of resources on that,” he said.

Roberts can be reached at [email protected].