Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Tenants have been evicted by their landlords for many reasons, but I’m guessing “Your dead relative is lowering my property values” doesn’t crop up very often.  The “Detroit Free Press,” December 29, 1929:

Berlin, Dec. 28.(U. P.)--There is a landlord in Berlin who absolutely refuses to let tenants bring ghosts with them into his apartments. He has gone to court to ask for permission to eject a family that, he alleges, has been harboring an all too active spirit in their rooms.

According to popular report, not only undenied by the family but actually confirmed by the family pastor, the ghost is that of an uncle of 11-year-old Lucy Regulski, the only person now alive to whom the apparition has appeared.

Other members of the family, however, have heard the noises made by the unearthly fellow during his nocturnal calls upon his niece, and years ago, it is said, Lucy's grandmother was once favored with a visit from her then recently deceased son. 

Family ghosts may be all right in their way, the owner of the building suggests in his petition to the court, but families possessing them should at least have the common courtesy to report the fact before signing leases on new apartments. Sometimes they can be very disturbing, as  apparently they have been in the case of Uncle Regulski.

The landlord argues that the Regulskis must have known of the existence of this ghost before they moved in because it had once called upon the grandmother. It is his contention that its occasional presence in Lucy's bedroom, but more especially the effect that its presence there has had on neighborhood opinion, will result in decreasing, to his financial loss, the desirability of his apartments as living quarters and thus also eventually lower the market value of the building.

Just to play it safe, in the event that there really are no such things as ghosts, he included in his petition another plea in which he asserts that the entire affair is probably a hoax upon the part of the Regulski family, that the ghost has been invented by them for unexplained but nevertheless sinister reasons. In either case, he feels he is being damaged and he wants to dump the Regulskis, ghost and all, out into the street. 

Meanwhile spiritualists and other persons learned in the ways of manes and wraiths have been cooperating with the Regulskis in trying to lay low the secret of this restless uncle.

The judge in the case eventually ruled that as the Regulskis obviously genuinely believed their apartment was haunted, it proved that the family was not intentionally trying to annoy their neighbors or their landlord.  Therefore, they had the legal right to occupy any ghost-infested dwelling they chose.

Which really seems only fair to Uncle Regulski.