When an Ogden couple gets a divorce, they generally must decide what to do with their home. If they rented a house or apartment, then the issue should be fairly simple to resolve. But for those who purchased a home during the marriage, the house is part of the marital property. In that situation, who gets to keep the house? Or should it be sold?
In many cases, the couple is able to reach a settlement on asset division outside of court. But sometimes the couple is unable to agree on valuable assets like a house and the case must go to court. That is what happened in an unusual case from another country where a woman claimed to the family law court judge that her house was haunted in an apparent attempt to lower the value of the house.
The court had hired an appraiser to assess the value of the house. The wife disputed the value, claiming among other things that a ghost lived in her bedroom. She said that people in the neighborhood knew about the ghost and that her nephew had once “felt something” during a visit several years ago.
On the witness stand, the appraiser denied the haunting. Appearing “rather amused,” in the judge’s words, the appraiser said “unless the ghost was held captive in the room to which we could not gain access, it must have been at lunch.”
The court agreed that the wife’s story was not believable and declined to reduce its valuation of the house. The judge ruled that the woman could keep the house if she paid her husband a portion of its value.
Source: Huffington Post, “Divorce Stories: Australian Woman Cites Ghost In Order To Keep House In Divorce Settlement,” Feb. 13, 2013