AIBU to think there is something seriously dodgy about the house?

[WatchedTooMuchBrookside]

Name changed as this is soooooooo outing...

I’m a first time buyer and viewed a property today on a development that is less than 20 years old. There have been several houses recently sold on the development and a few more still for sale, it’s a nice area popular with naice families and retired folks.

The house I viewed today has been on the market for a long time and is vacant and appears to have been vacant for quite some time. It is on the market with three estate agent and has three boards outside it. It is realistically priced and needs nothing at all major doing to it (except a significant area of carpet replaced which I’ll explain later). It’s probably even up for less than market value since all the bedrooms have high spec good quality fitted furniture and nice made to measure curtains and blinds unlike other houses in the development that are up for £10k more.

On looking at the history of the house, it was bought over a year ago and put back on the market for less than it was bought for under 5 months later. The Estate Agent said that it’s in the hands of a company and also, curiously a small but still significantish amount of the deposit is already paid if we wished to buy?!

Upon viewing today there was a huge mound of mail behind the door, indicating there have been no viewings in a couple of months. An almost identical house two doors away is STC since last Thursday as is one round the corner. The house was immaculate apart from spiders/daddylong legs and the odd cobweb. It had definitely had a very deep clean at some point. It looked like it had been decorated at the time it was last bought back in 2017 but not in the way you would if you were turning around for a quick sale.... ie not typically neutral shades like magnolia etc but two rooms had new glitter feature walls and the lounge had quite ornate, pretty new wall paper on and the kitchen had quite distinctive but lovely new tiles. It really seemed like someone had made a personal choice based on what they wanted, if that makes sense rather than thinking about the rental markers or keeping things neutral for a quick sale. We’ve viewed other homes in the development and this one was much more nicely decorated, even than those that have recently sold there for more than the asking price of this one.

So here is where it starts to get creepy...

Throughout the majority of the house the carpet was cream and was one of the only things that needed replaced as it was quite old. In the lounge there was a thick, darker coloured carpet that was brand new and, from the pile, it was clear no-one has lived in there and there has been no furniture on it since the carpet was installed. The stairs of the house are in the lounge and have the same new carpet. Everywhere else, it’s still the old cream stuff.

The person I was viewing with opened the cupboard under the stairs and my first thought was, “how odd! A random red carpet under the stairs, why didn’t they just continue the new lounge carpet in there?” and then the person I with went pale and said to the EA “Excuse me, that’s not blood is it?!” At that point I looked right into the cupboard and saw that, in fact, the old cream carpet was in there and there was a HUGE round blood like stain, maybe 45cm diameter, in the cupboard under the stairs, right up to where it joins with the newly replaced carpet in the lounge. The EA sort of laughed it off and said “noooo I’m sure it’s not blood!” but we later looked in the cupboard again before leaving and studied it carefully and it definitely wasn’t anything like red wine or paint or anything obvious, it really did look like a pool of blood.

The garden was really big and over grown and we decided to walk to the bottom of it as there was a gate at the end and we weren’t sure where it led. When we got to the fence at the bottom of the garden there were about five peeping tom holes cut into it!!! They were round, about the size of a 10p piece and at various different “eye level” heights.

I know it’s going to sound weird but before I saw these two things (the possible blood and peepholes) I felt as though the house “felt sad”. I know that sounds really woo but that’s the only way I could describe it. I suppose a lot of long term vacant houses feel a bit like that because they aren’t lived in.

A couple of friends think I’ve just got a very vivid imagination and that the pictures online are gorgeous and I should put an offer in but I feel really uneasy about it. They’ve pointed out, and I sort of agree, that if it is a blood stain in the cupboard, the owners would have replaced the carpet to hide it. But even taking out the possible blood stain...would you think that the other circumstances are a bit too dodgy to consider putting an offer in?

Would love an update on this one! We have a couple of ‘haunted’ houses in our town, one that housed a particularly violent poltergeist that was active in the 1960s and another where a violent death is supposed to have taken place.

I read a story in the newspaper about a guy who shot himself in the kitchen and died. His daughters had to clean up the mess, so they scrubbed at it with soap and water, which is not the best way to clean up huge amounts of blood. They said that the blood kept seeping back through the floorboards. They were campaigning for more help for cleaning up the aftermath of suicides.

I don't know if there are any in this country, but I know the USA has companies that specialise in cleaning crime scenes.

Quick summary for anyone who hasn’t had the chance RTFT

I found out from the Land Registry that the house is now in the hands of the developers who built it and that it was them it was last sold to. Not long after the house was put on the market there was a crime report in that area (a stretch of only 5 houses) for a violent or sexual offence. The following month there was a report of criminal damage or arson so I think it could have been a case of domestic violence.

Despite viewing several properties at the development, the estate agent called and wanted to know what I thought of that property. I explained that other properties offered more in the way of perks and were detached whilst this house was a semi but the same price etc but he kept trying to push that house on me. I asked if he could tell me why it had been on the market so long, without tenants despite there being a demand in the area for rental houses and why it seemingly hadn’t even had any viewings in months and he got exasperated and said “there is absolutely nothing dodgy about it. It’s just not moving.” He then failed to get in touch to tell me that one of the properties I viewed and liked but considered too expensive had dropped their asking price by 10 grand but did contact me to let me know that the other house I’d expressed an interest in had “had an offer”. This is almost certainly untrue. It feels like the EAs are trying to push the house on me but I’m not prepared to make an offer on it.