'I live with a ghost' - inside the haunted homes attracting bargain hunters

From the moment Ryua first walked into her rental apartment in Tokyo she believed it to be haunted.

"When I visited the place for a viewing there was a man standing there, glaring at me," she says.

"Since the estate agent couldn't see him, I realised he must be a ghost."

While someone more squeamish would probably have quickly left the flat never to return, Ryua chose to go ahead and move in.

"I'm a bit of a contrarian, so I decided I wanted to become friends with this glaring male ghost," adds Ryua, who works as an aidoru, a young entertainer, and who doesn't wish to share her surname.

Four years later, and still in the same apartment, she says she continues to experience paranormal activity on a daily basis. She says she hears endless footsteps and the ghost talking.

Although Japan has increasingly marked Halloween in recent years, many Japanese people take ghosts seriously all year round. The country has a word, "yuurei", which means a lingering, troubled spirit.

These are the ghosts of people who died in violent or tragic circumstances - those who were murdered, killed themselves, or simply were lonely and died alone. If they died at home, then the belief is that their yuurei won't go away.

For house hunters who are not superstitious or squeamish it means there are big bargains to be found. There is a whole category of dwellings called jiko bukken, which means "stigmatised" or "incident" properties.

Under guidelines issued by the government in 2021, Japanese estate agents must disclose suicide, murder, death by fire, and any death where the body was not discovered for an extended period of time.

For rental properties this information must be disclosed for three years, and it must be revealed indefinitely for any property offered for sale.

By contrast, in the UK there is no legal requirement to reveal that a person died in a property. And in the US, it differs from state to state. For example, in California you have to reveal if a person has died in the property in the past three years, while in Arizona and Oregon you do not.

Ryua was told that a man had killed himself in her apartment. It meant that she gets an almost 30% discount on her rent on her tiny, 25 sq m bedsit in the fashionable ward of Setagaya. She says she pays 45,000 yen ($285; £213) a month, instead of what should have been 62,000 yen.

While a house where there had been a murder or suicide would probably be harder to sell or rent out anywhere in the world, Tokyo estate agent Erik Oskamp says that Japanese people are particularly superstitious and averse to stigmatised properties.

"[Even] an apartment next to a cemetery will be difficult to rent out, especially if you can see the tombs from the kitchen," explains Oskamp. "The worst thing is if a suicide has happened in the apartment. Even if somebody has jumped from the roof, many renters will move out. Other issues are a serious crime or a lonely death."

The latter issue, that of a person dying alone, would not generally affect the price of a property in, say, the UK or the US.

But in rural Kagoshima, in Japan's southwest, it enabled Diane Tincher to buy a large three-bedroom house for about half of what would have otherwise been the asking price.

The 79-year-old American has lived in Japan for nearly 40 years, working as a tour guide. She says that the estate agent had been straight with her – there was a heavy discount as an elderly lady had died alone, thereby stigmatising the property.

Tincher paid 20m yen for the house, in a location where similar properties usually sell for up to 45m yen.

"I don't believe in ghosts. But I know that the Japanese are very superstitious," she says. "If there is a ghost I'm thankful to her every day... to live in such a splendid and affordable home."

Researching the house, Tincher had found it on a website called Oshimaland, which lists jiko bukken properties, giving details of the events that occurred. It was launched in 2005 covering Tokyo, before expanding across Japan and then internationally in 2011.

It is crowdsourced, meaning that members of the public add the homes and their details.

Teru Oshima, the founder of Oshimaland, says that in the past such properties were "not very attractive options" in Japan.

Yet as house prices have surged in the country in recent years, as well as a big increase in the wider cost of living, one 2025 survey found that more than half of Japanese people would now rent a jiko bukken if it was cheap.

Back in Setagaya, Ryua says she is happy living with her ghostly flatmate. "I believe that ghosts were once living human beings, so they deserve our respect," she says.

For support and more information on any of the topics raised in this article, help is available on the BBC Action Line.

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