There are a number of things that new tenants usually discover soon after signing a lease — pipes that leak, mice in the walls, noisy neighbors, angry ghosts that haunt the premises. A family in New Jersey is suing their landlord over one of these reasons… take a guess which one it is.

It was only on March 1 that the family of four had moved into the house in Toms River, NJ. But they tell the Asbury Park Press that they immediately noticed they may not be alone:

The family would come home and find their clothes and towels ejected from the closets and strewn over the floors. Doors would creak open and slam closed in unoccupied areas of the house. Lights switched on and off without human intervention. At night, footsteps could be heard from the kitchen after everyone was tucked in and unintelligible whispering seemed to fade in and out of thin air, according to the couple…

However, such rationalism failed them after the events of March 10 — the night the family fled the house. [The couple] had settled into bed to watch television when he said his attention was drawn to a tapping noise against the set… A short time later, [he] felt a tug on the sheets over him and watched in bewilderment as the bedclothes began to slide off him. He then felt an invisible hand land on his arm. [She] claims she saw what looked like a shapeless dark apparition in the bedroom.

Thus, the tenants decided to forgo the standard sacrificial offerings to Gozer and just file a lawsuit against their landlord, asking for their $2,250 security deposit back.

The landlord has filed his own lawsuit, claiming the tenants broke their lease and that the whole “I am Vinz Clortho,The Keymaster” thing is really just a ruse to get out of the contract because the couple is having financial problems and realized they could not afford the rent.

The couple counters this argument by pointing out they vacated the home and moved into a motel room after only being renters for one week.

“I would not have given anyone $4,000 (deposit and rent) to stay somewhere, just to pick up and leave seven days later,” one of the plaintiffs tells the Asbury Park Press. “I would not have hired a moving truck, packed and unpacked, had my mother take off time from work to watch the kids. The whole idea was to get a nice, big home for the kids.

One local paranormal research group says its investigation into the property is currently inconclusive, telling the Press that the “facts suggest a residual haunting from the past associated with a significant release of psychic energy, but not an intelligence.”

Meanwhile, a second investigator of ghouls and ghosts tells the paper that, “Out of all of the investigations we have done, this is where we came up with the most concrete evidence (of the paranormal) in close to 20 investigations.”

The landlord pish-poshes all this talk of otherworldly activity, saying that he’s owned the house since 1995 without complaint of spirits roaming the property.

Perhaps he should have used the service of the background-checking Brooklyn psychic. Or maybe the tenants could have used any one of these trained professionals to scrub their property of ghosties and whatnot.

We have no idea if the below video shows any evidence of ghosts, mostly because we like our haunted house stories to co-star Jessica Lange and feature an occasionally bare-derriered Dylan McDermott.

Family flees house they say is haunted [APP.com]

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.