In 1991, a man in New York sued the previous owners of his house for not having disclosed that the house was haunted, and the court ruled in his favor. The judge didn’t comment on whether the ghosts might be real, but noted that the house had been written up as haunted in a national publication, which meant that any future owner might have to deal with ghost hunters and tour groups. “As a matter of law,” the court wrote, “the house is haunted.”
Establishing hauntings as a pre-existing conditions made a lot of news. But it had already happened in Chicago in 1912, when the city had lowered the assessment on a house due to reported hauntings. The case was written up in a handful of “real ghost stories” books in the early and mid 20th century – with the name, address, and numbers invariably wrong.
In 1973, the Daily News summarized it thus:
“In 1912, J. Denterlancer of 3375 S. Oakley complained that his property’s assessment value was highter than his home’s actual value. He said he couldn’t rent his rooms because of the ghost. Two fearless detectives spent the night in that house. Nothing is said of the events during that one-night stand, but in the morning J. Denterlancer was notified that his assessment would be lowered.”
This was more or less how the story had appeared over the previous decades – it got the name wrong (almost no two articles give the same name), and the address was off by one digit (It’s still standing near 33rd and Oakley, but because it’s a private residence I’m not posting the exact correct address here – the current owner assures me he’s had not trouble with ghosts). This was based on a syndicated article from 1912, which not only got the name and address wrong, but also claimed the assessment on the house was lowered from $12000 to $8000.
In reality, the owner of the house in question was one John Ludwig Unterlander (pictured above), a spiritualist who used “good spirits” to heal clients. He was also involved with “magnetic healing” and using herbs instead of medicines, occasionally raising the ire of the board of health.
He had been buying up real estate around 33rd and Oakley, in the McKinley Park neighborhood, for years by August, 1912, when he tried to lower the assessment value. The most detailed, and likely most accurate, article about his case appeared in the Aug 22, 1912 Tribune.
“Just because I’m a spiritualist, tenants won’t stay in my house,” he told a reporter. “They think I fill the place with ghosts. Tenants move in and hear the neighbors talk of a boy who murdered his sister there two years before. Then at night they would imagine they heard the screams of the murdered girl, the boy opening the windows and running away, and then the doors slamming, followed by silence. The truth was that all of their so-called spirits were in pails and bottles.”
He related that two years before, the son of a man named John Honath had accidentally shot his sister in the house, and neighbors – “ignorant ones who believed in ghosts” – started rumors that he’d brought the girls’ ghost back. (If there was a John Honath, and there had been a shooting in the house in 1910, it didn’t make the news or the vital records).
Unterlander went on to explain that one tenant, Thomas McMain, had moved in with his wife, and left after two days because his wife was hearing the dead girl’s cries. Another tenant had nailed the window shut when he found it open in the morning.
“It’s all bosh,” said Unterlander. “Any sensible man knows that ghosts don’t haunt this earth. They are too dignified. Anyway, if they did, considering that my business is to expel ghosts from people and places, don’t you think I would get them out of here?”
But the Tribune was already late to the party – the day before, the syndicated article on the case had appeared in a number of papers, stating that that Unterlander (or Denterlancer of Deuterlander or any number of variations) had convinced the Board of Review to lower the tax assessment on the house from $12,000 to $8000 on the grounds that it was haunted.
The Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean had also run an article on the case on August 21st. Though they didn’t get Unterlander’s name right (they called him Deuterlander), they did give a more reasonable figure – in their story, the Board had lowered the assessment value from $1615 to $1500. The Tribune didn’t give the exact numbers in their article, but agreed the next day that the assessment had been lowered by $115. It’s a good illustration of the reason I always try to get local papers on a historical story – the retellings in far-flung papers are generally a lot less reliable than papers that had a reporter on the ground.
It’s far less than the $4000 that was widely reported, but still remarkable – an “officially” haunted house. This was not even a haunting that had been reported in local or national publications at the time – just the subject of rumors based on a killing that, itself, cannot be verified and couldn’t have been widely reported. But it’s a precursor to later cases where rumors of hauntings alone could be considered a pre-existing condition (and a good explanation of why I sometimes don’t include exact addresses in these stories).
Unterlander continued to make the news now and then – in 1916, he was using the very house in question for holding seances and magnetic healing sessions.
That year, a woman two doors down named Catherine Cudmore who had been in his “circles” was taken to a psychiatric hospital, screaming “You got my sister and now you’ve got me!” Mrs. Cudmore’s sister had died a few months before, and Mrs. Cudmore was sure it was because of Unterlander. Her own last words in the psychiatric hospital were accussing Unterlander of murder. Her husband told the deputy coroner that Unterlander had driven his wife and sister-in-law to death. “Her sister died and she was in continual fear that this man’s influence would kill her, too. That is what drove her insane.”
Found in his “Spiritual laboratory” for comment, Unterlander said that Mrs. Cudmore hadn’t attended a seance in two years. “She was so crazy I wouldn’t let her come anymore. Why, she wrote on the slate that the spirit told her the Earth was bigger than the sun. Ridiculous!” He had treated Mrs. Cudmore’s sister with “the laying on of hands” before advising her to see a regular physician. Though he professed knowledge of seances, palmistry, and astrology, he said that most such things were fake. “The trumpet sounds are fakes. How can spriits talk when they have no vocal organs? You can hear voices, however, with the voice.”
A coroner’s jury recommended that the State Board of Health investigate Unterlander a week later, but nothing seems to have come of it, and the idea that he’d killed someone with psychic powers faded away. He died in 1928.