With the housing market in serious trouble, selling any house should prove difficult. But what if your house was haunted on top of it all by a hostile ghost? Regardless of whether or not a haunted house is truly haunted, if it has such a reputation it can be considered a “stigmatized” property and therefore be worth far less. It is with this in mind that I’d like to explore a potential for a relationship between exorcists and real estate agents.
The program could work in essentially two stages. The first stage would have to be the actual cleansing of the house. This would work essentially how people cleanse houses from various cultures, and would depend on the type of entity, and to what it seemed to respond. This would be fairly traditional in how it handled paranormal cases, attempting to cleanse the property so the residents of the house and those wishing to buy it didn’t feel any fear or evil presence emanating from it.
The second stage would be nothing like the first, being a purely psychological exercise to make the house seem more pleasant. Just as people around a given town would share terrifying stories of the haunting of a house, a new story would have to be told. The second stage would rely on storytelling the truth in the cases of true hauntings, and in the case of simple urban legends, the group would have to tell an alternate legend. Essentially, the entire second half of the industry would involve primarily the public relations aspect of exorcism. Since a demonic presence is something everyone would naturally feel inclined to talk about, it would be far more difficult to break up an urban legend surrounding the place.
And since many experts in the paranormal suggest the telling of stories and the presence of a haunting may be causally related, this second aspect would make the agency far more effective at keeping paranormal influences out of the house. The difficult part is no one will feel inclined to share good stories about the house’s being clean now.
This is why the agency implementing the exorcisms would have to be as much a part of the mythos as the ghosts themselves. Those operating within it would have to have a touch of the genuinely dramatic, and they would have to be cloaked in secrecy as though they had truly come from another world. In large cities, the agency operating would have to carry with it such a mystique that the media would cover its movements on slow news days. It would primarily have to advertise through viral marketing campaigns and word of mouth. This mysterious aura would be the important X factor required to ensure every house the agency interacted with it would be unable to extricate itself from their association. This combined with the genuine exorcism would have the potential to be far more effective at both keeping entities from returning, and driving up the value of a stigmatized haunted home.