'We have a ghost in the house' - Weird tenant complaints

14 February 2017 - 15:17 By TMG Digital
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When it comes to complaints tenants make to their landlords‚ "We have a ghost in the house‚" ranks as one of the stranger gripes.

TPN‚ which vets the credit records of tenants who stay in rental properties‚ says this is one of the more unusual complaints they have heard from a client.

Michelle Dickens‚ managing director of TPN said that "as a property specialist credit bureau‚ TPN’s landlords and occasionally their tenants report every imagined possibility to us. From the mysterious to the utterly bizarre‚ we have heard it all".

A landlord of a northern Johannesburg home‚ who asked not to be named‚ told TMG Digital that her husband was called by their tenants recently and asked if someone had died in her house. The tenants said they "sensed a presence in the house and asked anyone had passed away in the house by any chance as they were definitely not alone in the house."

Her husband listened to them she said, "He is quite receptive to this which I am not."

The woman had woken up and seen an elderly woman in her bedroom but initially thought it was her mother-in-law who may have become disoriented in the night and wandered into the wrong bedroom. But then she awoke a few nights later and found her husband hitting the headboard‚ convinced he could see an old woman.

But the landlord was sceptical about reports of a ghosts. "We lived in that house years ago‚" she said. Nothing had happened and they had not had similar complaints from other tenants in 22 years of owning the property.

The landlord said she is convinced it is carbon-monoxide from cooking in the gas stove and has asked them to ventilate the house after cooking. "My immediate thought is they want out of the contract."

This is not the case. They have also had filter on stove changed.

To date there have been no more complaints. "Perhaps they are embarrassed‚ or perhaps they are not breathing in so much carbon monoxide‚" said the landlord.

But‚ asks TPN in their press release: "If hallucinations due to gas poisoning were the cause of the abnormal night-time activity‚ how is it possible that members of the family saw exactly the same old lady in their hallucinations?"

- TMG Digital

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