Real Estate Horror Story: Potential Buyer Finds Dead Body During Home Tour

In what is sure to become the stuff of urban legends, the Age reports that realtor Jack Alves took Phil Gustafson, a potential buyer, on a home tour in Milwaukee earlier this month. The showing took a wrong turn when the second house on the agenda produced an unexpected house guest:

As they walked through a different house shortly after noon, this one a vacant city foreclosure on the corner of 25th and Michigan streets, Phil Gustafson looked in a first-floor closet and quickly ran from the room.

“There’s a dude in there!” he told his friend, Keith Frank Jr, who had joined him in searching for a fixer-upper to buy.

Mr Alves stepped toward the closet, announcing who he was and that he was showing the house. The man did not move.

“I didn’t touch him,” Mr Alves said.

He called 911 and soon the house was buzzing with paramedics and police officers. They knew what this was.

The man was dead.

As if that weren’t enough to traumatize any one, the first home Alves had shown Gustafson that day had had a trash cart with live kittens.

Dead body found in closet during showing of house to prospective buyers [the Age]