Originally published on Slaw.
In a rather strange case, the plaintiff alleged
that the defendants sold the plaintiff a commercial property that
was haunted. The plaintiff alleged that this constituted a latent
defect in the property which the defendants knew about and
concealed from the plaintiff.
The plaintiff's lawsuit was based solely on a newspaper
article in which a director of one of the defendants was quoted as
saying that the property in question was haunted.
Oddly, the plaintiff's representative testified that he had
never seen a ghost, did not believe there was a ghost and that all
conversations about the property being haunted were a joke and were
not serious.
The Superior
Court dismissed the lawsuit on the defendants' motion for
summary judgment. The court noted that there was no apparent case
law that would obligate a vendor of a commercial building to
disclose to the purchaser that someone had died in the building.
The court also wondered how a
