Lovely Home, Shame about the Homicidal Former Tenant
“When Niki and John saw the flat here, they fell in love with it. After weeks and weeks of dragging themselves around London, they agreed the place was their dream home… But what they didn’t know is that two decades ago a crazed serial killer lived upstairs. Dennis Nilsen — one of Britain’s most notorious and prolific murderers — blocked the house’s drains when he tried to flush the dismembered corpses of his victims down the toilet… ‘We thought it was excellent value for money. They were asking £320,000 — at least £50,000 less than it should have been. We immediately asked the agent: ‘What’s wrong with it? Why’s it so cheap?’ He said he had to tell us that Dennis Nilsen had lived in the top floor flat. As soon as the words came out, it really freaked me out. I just wanted to get out of there — I would never live there.’ Back at her Tufnell Park home, Niki did some research about the old tenant. ‘I found out he was a necrophile homosexual alcoholic mass murderer,’ she said.” —Guardian (UK)
It’s no secret that undesirables — even average sex offenders, not to mention necrophile freaks like Dennis Nilsen — can ruin the property values in a neighborhood. What’s more, people tend to believe that houses retain vibes of some sort, and this naturally makes them reticent to live somewhere that such awful things happened. That’s why real estate developers eventually tore down the house in which the Manson family killed Sharon Tate. They hoped to recover the real value of the underlying property by obliterating the material traces of the past.
That being said, though, you can’t help but wonder if this superstition about houses being “haunted” by past events won’t turn on its head. A few decades ago, it was inconceivable that people would collect John Wayne Gacy paintings or Charles Manson memorabilia. Now you can readily buy mementos of murder on ebay. Won’t this extend to houses, sooner or later? Probably it would be a great investment to buy Dennis Nilsen’s flat right now, while people are still spooked by it. A few years down the road you could probably sell it to next-generation goth kids precisely because it was where a “necrophile homosexual alcoholic mass murderer” had chopped up his boyfriends.
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