Scary Zillow listings have a YouTube series of their own heading into Halloween. Four episodes in, it has covered a former funeral home, a roundup of homes under $50,000 and a listing photo starring a zombie the agent disclosed as AI-generated.
Zillow’s creepiest inventory gets a Halloween marathon
If your feed has been serving up funeral homes and haunted Colonials this month, a YouTube channel could be partly to blame. “Zillow’s Scariest Homes For Sale Right Now” series has spent October working through the site’s spookiest listings.
Part 1 toured a former funeral home with a fireplace in every room. Part 2 moved into a seminary dormitory the Civil War emptied out. Part 3 went bargain hunting, with every pick priced under $50,000. Part 4 found a listing photo starring an AI-generated zombie.
For buyers who want their ghosts with a pedigree, Middleton, Massachusetts, has the Philip Knight House. The circa 1753 Colonial is listed at $749,000. It comes with 1.29 acres, a three-car garage and more than 270 years of former owners, including a family of soapmakers and the Blue Door Bed & Breakfast. The listing sticks to the paperwork.
The family handles the spooky part. Melissa Kaiser, the granddaughter of owner Ethel Marino, told WBZ NewsRadio she has heard stories of noises, voices and apparitions. She also described pots and pans crashing down when a fire broke out on the stove, which woke her grandmother from a nap in time to put it out. A paranormal program once ran tours of the place.
The namesake’s own story is darker. Philip Knight’s testimony during the Salem witch trials helped send John Willard, a constable who refused to keep arresting accused witches, to the gallows.
Put the two together, and you get a picture of how a listing travels in October. The agent publishes the photos and the facts, and the internet supplies the narration.
What this means for real estate professionals
Your listing photos are open to anyone with a ring light and a Halloween content calendar. If one lands in a roundup, share it. The comments give you a place to answer questions and steer serious buyers toward current details. If a home comes with a local legend, take a page from the Knight House: Keep the remarks to what the deed and the history books can back up, and let the owners tell the ghost stories.
What should be on your radar
Spooky season runs on search. Google’s annual Frightgeist is back, and searches for “cauldron crock pot” have hit an all-time high. Horror movie characters, country legends and stress balls are among the top trending costumes. The online chatter is climbing, too. Brandwatch counted about 4.83 million public mentions of Halloween between Sept. 21 and Oct. 20, up about 16 percent from the same stretch last year. Nearly half of U.S. consumers planned to start Halloween shopping in September or earlier, so next year’s seasonal content can go up before October.
AI agents can log in without the password. 1Password launched 1Password for Agents on Oct. 22. The tool lets an AI agent sign in to a user’s accounts after the user approves each login, and the agent never sees the credentials. It works with agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and others. Agents who hand an AI assistant access to their CRM, MLS or transaction software can use it to keep their passwords out of the assistant’s hands.
Meta faces a $25 billion penalty in New Mexico. A judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found the company misled Facebook users in the state about who could access their data, Reuters reported. The case traces back to the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal. Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney criticized the ruling and said the company will appeal.
Protip
Put Canva’s new image model on flyer duty. Canva released Canva Craft, its first in-house image generation model, and every user can find it in the Dream Lab tab. Canva trained the model on human-designed templates, including posters, social posts and menus. The company says it produces legible text and lets you edit one part of an image without changing the rest. Generated images can also convert into layered designs, so an AI-made open house graphic edits like any other template.
Each week on Trending, Inman’s Jessi Healey dives into what’s buzzing in social media and why it matters for real estate professionals. From viral trends to platform changes, she’ll break it all down so you know what’s worth your time — and what’s not.
