Haunted addresses on record in Pennsylvania
What Pennsylvania requires
Pennsylvania has no dedicated stigmatized-property statute, but the state's Supreme Court has settled the question anyway: a death on a property — even a murder-suicide — is a 'pure psychological stigma,' not a material defect, so sellers and agents don't have to volunteer it. If you ask directly, though, they're expected to answer honestly rather than lie.
Pennsylvania's general disclosure statute is the Real Estate Seller Disclosure Law (RESDL), 68 Pa.C.S. §§ 7301 et seq., which requires sellers to disclose known material defects about a property. It doesn't mention deaths, hauntings, or stigma at all — that gap was filled by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in Milliken v. Jacono, 628 Pa. 62, 103 A.3d 806 (Pa. 2014). The buyer there sued after learning, post-purchase, that a murder-suicide had occurred in the home; the Court held that a purely psychological stigma isn't a 'material defect' under the RESDL because it doesn't affect the physical condition or value-in-repair sense the law is aimed at, so there was no duty to disclose it and no fraud in staying silent.
There is no death-disclosure time window in Pennsylvania — nothing like California's three-year rule. Because the Milliken court treated psychological stigma as categorically outside the disclosure law, there's no threshold of recency, severity, or notoriety written into a statute that would trigger a duty to disclose; some commentary on the case has floated the idea that an extremely notorious event might someday be argued as an exception, but that isn't an established rule, just informed speculation.
The 'ask rule' does appear to hold in Pennsylvania, per legal and industry commentary (including the Pennsylvania Association of Realtors): while sellers and licensees have no duty to bring up a death or a haunted reputation unprompted, if a buyer asks directly, they're expected to answer truthfully rather than deny or misrepresent it. That expectation rests on general misrepresentation and licensee-conduct principles rather than a specific statutory clause, so treat it as a strong professional norm rather than a hard-coded statutory right.
The notable case is Milliken v. Jacono itself: a Bucks County home where a man shot his wife and himself, sold years later at auction without disclosure to a buyer who said she only learned of it after moving in. The Supreme Court's unanimous ruling — that the Sisyphean task of deciding which tragedies must be disclosed and which don't is exactly the kind of line-drawing disclosure law shouldn't be asked to do — is the case every Pennsylvania stigmatized-property discussion cites, functioning as the closest thing the state has to a stigmatized-property rule.
General information, not legal advice. Laws change and turn on details — for a real decision, talk to a licensed professional in Pennsylvania.
The Pennsylvania record is waiting
No entries filed from Pennsylvania yet. If something happened at an address you know, write it down — you may be the reason the next resident feels less alone at 3 AM.