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"FacebookPinterest\n\n As you settle in to watch the season finale of American Horror Story tonight, the biggest question on your mind (other than \"Is Dylan McDermott going to put some pants on for a change?\") may be \"Who in their right mind buys a murder house?\" The idea of an average American family like the Harmons moving into a home where lives ended so violently seems almost unthinkable\u2014don't they just knock down houses like that, smudge some sage over the vacant lot, and try to forget about the whole thing?\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Not quite. Yes, the sites of some of America's most high-profile slayings\u2014including the Los Angeles home where the Manson Family murdered Sharon Tate and co., and the Milwaukee, Wisconsin apartment complex where Jeffrey Dahmer slaughtered fifteen victims\u2014have been razed. But most houses where violent crimes have taken place are resold, and become family homes where children are raised, Thanksgiving dinners are eaten, and no one falls in love with a sexy teenage ghost. So, who actually buys a murder house?\n\n Homes where murders have been committed (\"stigmatized properties,\" in realtor lingo) are generally purchased by three distinct kinds of buyers.\n\n The most prominent group is comprised of people who look at these homes and see not an Amityville Horror, but a great bargain. Houses with dark pasts \"do sell,\" says Jill Sackler, a New York real estate agent who has written about stigmatized properties. \"[They] may be on the market for a while, the price may have to come down, but eventually, you find somebody who just doesn't care what its history is.\" Most homes with horrific histories sell for less than they're worth\u2014according to a 2006 New York Times article, the Beverly Hills mansion where Lyle and Eric Menendez killed their parents in 1989 sold for more than $1 million less than its value. But sometimes, that low price tag comes at a different sort of price. A woman in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood got a deal on a house that once served as a sex dungeon-cum-meth lab where a man had been burned alive\u2014but she had to fix the fire damage herself. In an anonymous 2002 SF Gate interview, the owner claimed that, though she was still at work fixing the damage several years after buying it, \"I love my house.\"\n\n Murder houses are also purchased by those who relish the house's history. The Fall River, MA home where Lizzie Borden allegedly mistook her father and stepmother for some logs in need of chopping became the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast / Museum in 1994. But curator Lee-Ann Wilber said that, due to the passage of time and the historical importance of the homestead, the house's main tourist appeal lies more with \"the mystery behind the fact that the case was never solved\" than morbid murder tourism.\n\n But not all murder house enthusiasts are content to stick with crime scenes from the distant past. Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor was one of the last inhabitants of the Sharon Tate house before it was demolished in 1994\u2014he lived there while recording The Downward Spiral, and even built a home recording studio, which the ever-subtle Reznor named \"Le Pig.\" And in 2007, Nicolas Cage picked up New Orleans's infamous LaLaurie house, well-known site of numerous grisly early 19th century murders, for several million dollars (the property was foreclosed in 2009).\n\n Though Sackler and others agree that disclosing a house's history is always a wise business practice, most states have no law requiring that realtors reveal whether a crime has taken place in a home. So, technically, no one is required to tell you if some sexy student nurses met their unpleasant ends right on the spot in your brand-new pad where you were planning on setting up your Wii.\n\n And sometimes, murder houses are owned by people whose motivations are murky. Los Angeles's \"Los Feliz Murder House\" was the site of a gruesome December 1959 murder-suicide\u2014a wealthy surgeon bludgeoned his wife to death, severely beat his daughter, and then killed himself. Though the house was purchased by new owners almost a year later, they never moved in, and left the interior of the home largely untouched, which it remains to this day. The house has fallen into a state of disrepair, but the current owner refuses to sell, despite complaints about the house's state and many interested buyers.\n\n Buying a former crime scene may seem taboo, but plenty of regular folks do it\u2014the risks are closer to chasing thrill-seeking teenagers off your lawn than dealing with an asylum's worth of American Horror Story-style disgruntled ghosts. So why not give it a shot? If you're lucky, you'll get to deal with both.\n\n Gabrielle Moss is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find her on Twitter at [@GabyMoss](http://www.twitter.com/gabymoss)."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/real-american-horror-story-murder-houses-sharon-tate>