What a Home is Worth After People Come There to Worship Satan

Among his tips for clients: Don’t waste money tearing down a house; the stigma attaches itself to the land, not the building. For example, in 1984 a gunman murdered 21 people at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, a neighborhood in San Diego. The company bulldozed the fast-food restaurant, then donated the land to the city. San Diego tried to sell it but got little interest. Nearly four years after the tragedy, the city sold the land at a deep discount to a community college.

In death, celebrities and ordinary people are equal — their murders lower a property’s value by the same percentage, Bell says.

Nothing matters more — even the horrors that took place — than perception. That’s especially true in the case of Resnick’s mansion, where Bell says no evidence supports stories of ghosts and mob murders.

Randall Bell is a “doom-and-gloom” real estate developer, which means he helps homeowners and landowners figure out how much their property is worth after they become stigmatized for various reasons. He’s been involved with selling JonBenet Ramsey’s house in Colorado, Nicole Brown Simpson’s condo, the mansion where 39 Heaven’s Gate cult members committed suicide, and homes that have shown up on shows like The Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures and have the perception of being haunted. The L.A. Times followed Bell as he figured out the property value of a mansion in Las Vegas that was featured in Ghost Adventures and then was subsequently vandalized by visitors and Satan worshippers (estimates were that the value dropped by about a third).

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