And you think you’ve been having a tough time selling your home …

By Geoff Williams

Farkas says that he has been able to communicate with ghosts since his 20s, but he recently started to make a full-time living out of it. It isn’t always a matter of getting rid of a specter, but negative energy, for instance, the type emitted in the house due to ongoing bad feelings of a divorce. But he does claim to be able to talk to the beings most of us will only admit to seeing on TV and in the movies.

Ghosts, says Farkas, are really just like us, except for the problem about not living. He recalls one of the first ghosts he spoke to, where he asked the poltergeist if he knew he was dead. The answer: “Well, that would explain a lot.”

“Ghosts — they don’t have a clue,” Farkas says. “Many have stayed behind because they believe they have unfinished business. Or sometimes there are unresolved feelings, and they just wind up staying. But most of the ghosts don’t know they’re dead, or once they do know they’re dead, they may not have the energy to try and leave.”

Most ghosts, like most people, are friendly and just want some attention, he says. Some aren’t so nice. He refers to those as demons but clarifies, “To me, it’s a technical term like a bacteria or virus. They’re parasitic and opportunistic where they feed on negative energy and create more and more chaos.”One can chuckle, of course, but according to Farkas, any snickering stops after he has “cleared” a house of the dead. Frequently, after he has come and gone, people have sold their house in a matter of days. While Farkas may be one of the few ghostbusters making a living at what he does, there seems to be a demand for his profession.

“I’ve definitely had to bring in the hired help,” says Nicholas, who figures that on a dozen occasions at least, in the last 25 years, he has hired priests and “spiritual persons” to bless the house and, of course, home stagers to “brighten it up and make it cheerful.”

Step 4: Rest in Peace After Last-Resort Tactics

If you’re quite desperate, you might even want to consider changing your house’s address if it’s been severely stigmatized by a murder, says Michael Soon Lee, a real estate broker and consultant for 30 years in Dublin, Calif. He says that was done at the house where child beauty queen Jon Benet Ramsey was killed.

And if there are some serious concerns among a jittery public that something wicked might be living in your den, lying low and waiting to attack a hapless new homeowner?

“You may have to bring the price down, way down,” says Nicholas, who suggests going as low as 20 percent to 25 percent off the selling price. “You may have to make it attractive for an investor, not for someone who will live there, but someone who will want to scrape the house and build anew.”