3

You Legally Have To Disclose A Haunted House To Buyers

The astute among you may read that heading and think, "Why should I disclose the fictional state of my home to potential buyers?" Well, that's a pickle. Whether hauntings are real or not, if you've ever publicly claimed that your home is full of ghosts, then you need to disclose that in many states when you put it on the market. No one is going to make you prove in a court of law that there are specters in your plumbing, but if the reputation is there, then by god, you're required to let everyone know.

This all came from an actual court case called Stambovsky v. Ackley, in which one Mrs. Ackley had claimed many times that her house was up to its nuts in poltergeists. There was even a story in Reader's Digest about it. Later she sold the house to a dude named Jeffrey Stambovsky without ever mentioning this to him. So an appeals court ruled that since a haunting isn't the kind of thing you can pick out during a house inspection (since most of us don't bring along Ghostbusters gear), you gotta disclose it.

And hey, maybe you'll find one of those buyers who'll actually pay a premium for the chance to get stalked by the Babadook.

Related: 6 Powerful Groups You Didn't Know Have Post-Apocalypse Plans

2

The Politician Who Obsessively Hunted The Chupacabra

The chupacabra is a pretty popular cryptid, but what you may not be aware of is that it's also a Millennial, as the history of this Puerto Rican goat sucker only dates back to 1995. If you read the first eyewitness testimony and the ensuing analysis by a psychologist, you'll find notes that the description of the creature very closely matches the appearance of the alien from the movie Species, which the witness had just watched. So you might be inclined to think that it's not even real. But you wouldn't think that if you were Jose Soto, former mayor of the Puerto Rican town of Canovanas and zealous hunter of the dreaded chupacabra.

1

Ronald Reagan Discussed Alien Invasion Policy With Mikhail Gorbachev

Ronald Reagan served in an era when the world was continually one button press away from nuclear Armageddon. Yet he spent much of his eight years in office oddly fixated on the prospect of an alien invasion. Sure, sometimes he brought it up a hypothetical or metaphor, like in this speech at the United Nations (about 29 minutes in):

"Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world."

That simply seems like a nice sentiment. But in a very real, if unofficial, way, Reagan and former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev made an agreement that, should aliens ever attack the Earth, they were going to press pause on the Cold War to deal with that shit. The story of how this came to be is short and sweet, as it was literally just a straightforward question Reagan asked of Gorbachev during their brief historic meeting. He'd clearly been eager to bring it up.

Colin Powell said later that he believed this came about because of the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still, which Reagan was a big fan of, to the point of not considering it to be entirely fiction. Sure enough, less than two decades later, those aliens would indeed arrive and start setting minor fires in Italy.

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