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Today’s track: Don’t Haunt This Place — The Rural Alberta Advantage

First, I want to wish a Happy Birthday to Colleen Reilly! Colleen is in charge of operations at Winner. As my family says “Stay as sweet as you are.” Colleen is one of my favorite people in the whole world!

And Happy Birthday to Lisa Tucker, broker of Winner Realty in Kentucky and Indiana as well (a few days ago) ! Also seen, The Rip Phillips, El Presidente!

Now let’s get SPOOKY!

Growing up, we had a foreign exchange student from Thailand named Nara.

One fall, a whole group of us took him to Cry Baby Bridge. If you grew up anywhere near one, you know the deal. Every town seems to have its own, every one has its own legend, and the whole point is to walk out there in the dark and scare yourself stupid.

So we walked out. Somebody heard something. Somebody yelled. And everybody ran.

Everybody except Nara.

Nara had no idea what was going on. Nobody had told him the story. He fell down, and by the time he got back up, he was standing alone on Cry Baby Bridge, in the dark, in a country that wasn't his, wondering why all his new American friends had just sprinted off into the woods.

We came back and got him. But I think about that a lot. Talk about a culture shock.

Same Nara, different night. A bunch of us watched The Blair Witch Project for the first time in the basement of one of my friends' houses. I was locked in on the movie, and at some point I looked over, and Nara wasn't watching it. He was just staring at us. Not the screen. Us.

It creeped me out more than the movie did.

Fall has always been my season. Hay rides, UK and Bengals Football, Formula 1, firepits, all of it. And I've come to believe something about being scared that I didn't understand on that bridge.

We weren't scared because something was out there. We were scared because we knew the story. Nara didn't know the story, so the bridge was just a bridge.

Fear is mostly a story about something you don't fully understand yet. The more you understand it, the less it can do to you. That's true of a bridge, it's true of a basement, and it's true of this housing market.

But first, because it's Halloween, a few Louisville stories most people have never heard.

At the corner of Sixth Street and Park Avenue in Old Louisville, there's a gnarled, twisted tree people call the Witches' Tree. Here's the legend.

A big maple used to stand on that corner, and the local witches met under it. In 1889, the city's May Day committee decided that maple would make a perfect maypole. The witches warned them not to cut it down. The committee cut it down anyway.

Eleven months later, on March 27, 1890, a tornado tore through Louisville. The Courier-Journal called it "the Storm Demon." It only lasted about five minutes, but it wrecked downtown, flattened churches, warehouses and the train depot, and killed more than 100 people by most counts. Legend says some of them sat on that May Day committee. And as the storm passed through, a bolt of lightning hit the old maple's stump, and the twisted tree you can see today grew out of it.

People still hang trinkets in its branches to stay on the witches' good side. It sits on private property, so look, leave something nice, and be respectful.

The real-life footnote I love: the year after that storm, 1891, Louisville hired Frederick Law Olmsted to design our park system. I wrote about how Olmsted designed your property value in September. A city that just watched a storm tear it apart decided to plant forests. That's the Louisville move.

On July 16, 1936, a 24-year-old woman named Patricia Wilson was found at the bottom of an elevator shaft at the Seelbach Hotel downtown. Her real name was Pearl Mae Elliott.

Here's what never added up. That shaft was only reachable through the staff linen closets. Police later found her hat in The Stables, a restaurant inside the hotel, which made people think she was with someone that night. A coroner's jury ruled it an accident and blamed her "carelessness." A lawsuit later accused a well-known Kentucky general of being involved. He called it absurd. Nobody was ever charged, and the question was never answered.

Fifty-one years later, in 1987, a Seelbach employee watched a woman with long dark hair in a long blue dress walk right through the closed elevator doors. The same day, a housekeeper saw the same woman step off that elevator on the eighth floor. Guests still talk about cold spots and the smell of perfume. In 2018 she finally got a headstone at Evergreen Cemetery, with both her names on it.

January 7, 1948. Capt. Thomas Mantell was 25, a World War II veteran with the Kentucky Air National Guard, flying a P-51 Mustang home to Louisville's Standiford Field. The tower at Godman Field at Fort Knox radioed his flight. Hundreds of people across Kentucky were watching something big and bright hanging in the sky. Could they go take a look?

Mantell climbed after it. He kept climbing. His plane went down near Franklin, Kentucky, and he became one of the first military pilots to die chasing what the papers called a flying saucer.

The Air Force later said it was probably a top-secret Skyhook balloon, a program so classified Mantell couldn't have known it existed. The Army's own newspaper, 75 years later, still called the flight shrouded in mystery. He's buried in Louisville, at Zachary Taylor National Cemetery.

Funny thing about that name. Skyhook runs in my family too, just a different one. My great-grandfather and the grandson of Robert Fulton invented the Fulton Skyhook together for the Cold War, a system that let a plane snatch a person straight up off the ground using a balloon and a line. I told that story in The Pride of Louisville. Two secret Cold War Skyhooks, two totally different machines. You can see why this one stuck with me.

On March 3, 1876, in Bath County, a woman named Mrs. Crouch was outside making soap on a clear, sunny morning when chunks of meat started falling out of the sky around her. That's the Kentucky Meat Shower. Two local men actually tasted it and called it mutton or venison. The best explanation scientists have landed on: a flock of vultures throwing up in flight. When one vulture does it, the rest tend to follow.

And the Pope Lick Monster, the half-man, half-goat said to live under the train trestle over Pope Lick Creek out by the Parklands. I'll be really serious for one line here. That trestle is roughly 90 feet tall, the tracks are active, and freight trains still cross it several times a day. People have died out there chasing that legend. The monster is a story. The trains are real. Stay off it.

Somebody always asks this time of year, and the answer is useful, so here it is in plain English. (I'm a realtor, not a lawyer, so treat this as a starting point.)

A "stigmatized property" is a home that's affected by something that happened there, not by anything physically wrong with it. A death, a crime, or a reputation for being haunted.

In Kentucky, since June 24, 2003, the law (Kentucky Revised Statutes 324.162) says sellers and agents don't have to bring that stuff up on their own. Murder, suicide, violent crime, ghosts. Indiana's law works about the same way. But in both states, if a buyer asks directly, you have to answer honestly.

So buyers: if it matters to you, ask in writing. Sellers: if it's the reason you're moving, it's usually smarter to say so up front than to have it come back and haunt you later.

Does it hurt the price? A Wright State University (My sister’s stomping grounds) study of 102 stigmatized homes found they took about 45% longer to sell and went for about 3% less. And a Zillow survey found nearly 70% of buyers said they'd buy a house they believed was haunted if it checked all their other boxes. A 3% discount and a little patience, in exchange for a story to tell at parties. That's a trade a lot of investors would take. Wright State is where they took the plane crashes from wars and would reverse engineer other technologies…..some say this is where they take crashed alien ships. Why wouldn’t they reverse engineer them there as well? Food for thought!

Here are the numbers that might make you want to run off the bridge. All of these are single-family homes in Jefferson County, from our MLS (the Multiple Listing Service, the database where every agent's listings live).

In September there were 2,527 houses for sale. A year earlier, 1,922. That's 31% more inventory.

In September, 669 houses went under contract. A year earlier, 888. That's 25% fewer.

And in just the last 30 days, 658 sellers took their homes off the market and haven't put them back on. Some canceled, some let the listing expire. Same 30 days last year, it was 498. That's 32% more people giving up.

That sounds scary. Now look a little closer, like turning on the basement light.

Sold homes in September: 858. A year earlier: 847. People are still buying houses in this city at almost exactly the same pace. What changed is that buyers have more to choose from and less reason to rush. When buyers have choices, they have leverage. That's not a scary market. That's a negotiating market.

And those 658 sellers didn't stop needing to sell. They just stopped being on the MLS. Which means most buyers can't see them anymore.

I'm hearing from a lot of them. Sellers who couldn't move it on the market and now want to try our network instead. They want it on OffMarket.deals in front of 70,000+ buyers, pushed straight to the top 25 buyers for that exact kind of property, and pushed out every way Winner Realty agents know how: Facebook Marketplace, all the Facebook groups, and this newsletter. At Winner Realty, we just believe nobody in this market can put more eyes on a deal than we can.

If you're a buyer, that's the opportunity. If you're a seller whose house didn't sell, that's your second chance. Either way, the scary part is mostly the part you don't understand yet.

I said something like this in The Top of the K: the smart money right now buys the dated house in the good spot and adds the value itself. The houses that have been sitting are where that money is hiding.

Maybe it isn't a house. Maybe it's a partnership that went bad. A tax problem you've been avoiding. A loan you can't figure out how to get. An inherited property with five siblings attached to it. The complicated stuff nobody wants to talk about at dinner.

Hit me up. If I don't know the answer, I definitely have the person who does. Attorneys, accountants, lenders of every kind, people who've been through the exact mess you're in. Let's get things moving, so you go into November with a few more things to be thankful for. Text or email me.

I've been sitting on three short horror stories for a minute…I just got in the mood one week months ago. This felt like the week to trick you….I mean treat you.

Dead Wax. A man has a wall of two thousand records, and on purpose he never alphabetized them or kept a list, because he wanted the records to choose him. One Sunday at five o'clock he finds a gap about a finger wide. One record is gone. But which one?

Appetite. A happy guy who lives for walks, his hammock, his two dogs and a really good breakfast feels something squeeze, low and to the left, under his ribs. The doctors find nothing. The dogs keep staring at the spot. And whatever it is seems to want exactly what he wants.

Strong Bones. A school fire in a small Ohio town. One ten-year-old walks out without a mark on him, and he tells everyone the same thing: he ate his protein, like the cartoon cowboy told him to. The psychologist assigned to explain it can't. And she can't stop thinking about breakfast.

Read them, then hit reply and tell me if one landed well with you.

If you like the old Louisville stuff, Built to Come Down and The Pride of Louisville are good places to keep digging. And if you see Nara, tell him we came back.

Free tools for Louisville buyers, sellers and investors, no sign-up and no email wall: the investment property analyzer, the BRRRR calculator, the Kentucky seller and buyer closing cost calculators, and a lot more on the tools page.

Know somebody who'd like this in their inbox every morning? Send them your personal link. One friend signs up and you get my daily Top Five. Three friends and you get Insider Access.

📊 Yesterday's poll: What would actually get you to a monthly real estate meetup? A real deal on the table every month won with 38%. Help building AI systems that actually work got 31%, group perks like health insurance got 23%, and 8% of you are proud homebodies. Notice what nobody asked for: another speaker and a slideshow. Deals and tools. Bring something people can use and they'll show up. I'm taking notes for December.

Today's poll — be honest. Monday I'll share what Louisville said, plus the first step and the right kind of pro for each answer.

🏆 Want this morning's Top Five? Every day I screen the whole Louisville MLS for the five best deals and the five most ripe for a lowball, with the number I'd offer. I can't blast other agents' listings to a list, but I can send them to you. Reply "FIVE."

Hauntingly yours,
Rob Bergeron

Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty: (502) 305-8915
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company

Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind — book me here.

The Morning Bergeron daily track playlist

PS: Haunted house shopping list. Every one of these is clickable, so go be curious.

PSS: All 18 Winner Realty listings on the MLS, in one spot. Treats only. And here are the open houses this weekend, every one we know about. Go walk through a house on Halloween weekend. Just check the basement first.

PSSS: One more for the road. This one's mine: "Something Creepy Crawly."