Sunday, September 22, 2019

The "legally" Haunted House is for sale again Upstate New York

A “legally” haunted New York house is on the market again.

Former owner Helen Ackley — who lived in the Queen Anne Victorian at 1 LaVeta Place in Nyack, from the 1960s to the late 1980s — publicly asserted the presence of various poltergeists who hailed from the Revolutionary War era and regularly shook beds, slammed doors and traipsed the halls with their phantom footsteps.

Her home, which dates back to the 1890s and fronts the Hudson River just 25 miles northwest of Manhattan, is about to list for $1.9 million with Nancy Blaker Weber of Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty.

It has a spooky history, sure, but also a litigious and star-studded one.

It started when Ackley put the allegedly possessed property on the market in 1989. When she began the process of selling the 15-room, single-family dwelling to Wall Street bond trader Jeffrey Stambovsky, she failed to disclose the spectral situation within.

In a lawsuit that would make headlines around the globe and set a precedent for future real estate transactions, Stambovsky sued Ackley over the deliberate omission and fought to obtain his deposit while backpedaling out of the purchase.

Then, in 1991, New York’s Supreme Court ruled that the home was officially haunted and, in favor of Stambovsky, decreed that Ackley had the responsibility to disclose the property’s apparent apparitions to future buyers.

Saturday, September 21, 2019

Man photographs a ghost at a famous Texas Theatre (video)

AUSTIN, Texas — It's not even fall yet in Central Texas, but this spooky story is already haunting the KVUE newsroom.

Pianist Chad Lawson was performing at The Paramount Theatre in Downtown Austin Sunday when he decided to stop and snap a couple pictures from the stage after soundcheck.

But it wasn't until he got back to his hotel that he made a chilling discovery – the figure of what appears to be a woman floating in the stairway of an otherwise empty theater.

"These photos were taken as we had finished our soundcheck last night at Paramount," said Lawson. "As we were exiting the stage, I stopped to take a picture of the hall as I do with every show. Nothing out of the norm. Three quick shots (as if you were counting out loud 1-2-3), put the phone in my pocket and then headed back to the hotel."

But, in one of those three quick photos, a strange figure can be seen in the stairway.

"Once at the room, I began going through picture filters and to share one of them on social," said Lawson. "That’s when I noticed the figure in the mezzanine. I must confess it did freak me out a bit, especially as the figure is not present in the first photo."

At that point, he decided to do a little research on ghost stories at the theater. A quick Google search returned some eerie stories, including an old KVUE article about spooky sightings at The Paramount.

It specifically mentions sightings of a woman in a white dress who was seen roaming the aisles on the mezzanine.

That's when he decided to reach out to the Paramount itself, asking if a staff member might have possibly been on the floor around the time he captured the images.