A Louisiana house is being given away for free to anyone who wants it and can pay to have it moved — but locals are calling it “too haunted” to live in.
Back in March, local Realtor and developer Sylvia McLain wrote a Facebook post saying a four-bedroom, two-story house in the city of Lafayette would be given away free to anyone who could cover moving costs. Her company, McLain Development, bought the lot on Verot School Road a few months ago to develop the neighborhood. Now, they want to free up the space while preserving the history of the home, which was built sometime around the late 1920s or early 1930s.
“We have concentrated our efforts and development cost in saving as many of the trees as possible and simply do not have a place in the neighborhood for the home,” McLean wrote in the original Facebook post, which went viral several times after it was published.
To do that, McLean has offered the home for free to anyone who can pay for the cost of moving it to a different location — a process that requires a permit and can range in price from $15,000 up to $200,000, according to Realtor.com. The price goes up if a house is larger, older or moved to a place whose lot isn’t prepared for a house.
“We would love to see someone take it to be moved and restored,” McLean writes.
But moving costs aren’t the main reason why some locals are rejecting McLean’s offer. Not long after the post went viral in May, Lafayette locals started commenting and saying it was “haunted.” One woman, Dawn Vallot DeClouet, said her great-grandmother Adele used to live in the house and still roams its halls occasionally as a ghost.
“She lived to be almost 90 and she was always digging in the pots, like when you have something on the stove and someone goes and looks in the pot and stirs it around,” DeClouet told British newspaper The Mirror. “She was well-known for that, and so when we lived there, we used to hear her all the time jangling the pots when we had something on the stove.”
In the comments, some locals discussed moving costs while others commented on whether its history with Adele would be a problem for the residents. As of Monday, the post was still being flooded with potential interest and those who say they would never live there.
“Bet it’s haunted as hell,” local resident Crystal Guidry Floyd wrote.