Other Posts by Cathy Deshayes

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• Cyn(ical) city
• Freedom fighter
• And so to market...
• Party like it's 2009?
• Flat pack: The highs and lows of flat sharing
• Family planning
• You're just too good to be true
• Is home where the heart is?
• One side of the storey
• Polls apart
• Staring Halloween in the face

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A house with a history

By Cathy Deshayes

Whilst many buyers argue that location, location, location is everything, there are some things that the best location in the world won't cancel out. You can change décor, you can change neighbours, but you can't change history.

Serial killer John Wayne Gacy's home in the Norwood Park Township near Chicago was demolished in 1979, but the plot then sat vacant for more than a decade - nobody wanted to touch it.

The Oxford Apartments, the building in Milwaukee where Dahmer murdered most of his victims in 1990 and 1991, was razed in 1992 and remains a vacant lot. 25 Cromwell Road in Gloucester, the home of murderers Fred and Rose West, was demolished in October 1996.

A beautiful Victorian house near my grandparent's place went for a fraction of its market value a few years back due to its truly gruesome past - a maid had been strangled by the home's male owner years before and her body bricked into a wall in the pantry.

Nobody, it seemed, was willing to take on a property with such a legacy attached. It eventually went to (surprise) a developer who has since pulled it down and started again.

The Tudor-style house at 749 15th St in Boulder, Colorado, was home to six-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey, whose body was found in the basement. There have been numerous new owners over the years, all of whom have purchased or sold the house at well below-market value since JonBenét's death in 1996.

This rather depressing topic is on my mind this week following a trip to Berlin over the weekend. We spent the Saturday - coincidentally my partner's 30^th birthday - at a concentration camp - a rather unusual choice - and a day I know I will never forget.

So, what of the family homes lining the street outside the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg near Berlin? Opening your curtains each morning and being faced with a location of such horror is certainly not going to be something everybody could cope with.

But Berlin has so much history and so much tragedy on the doorstep that perhaps the inhabitants of the roads surrounding the camp have simply learned to live with it and see it as part of their everyday life. Perhaps they don't even think about their infamous neighbour - it's just part of the scenery.

Would you buy a home that had a terrible past? Let me know at Catherine@themovechannel.com

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