Unless your subconscious has buried this memory among other real life nightmares, you may recall the story about the creepy Clown Motel in Nevada filled to the brim with leering, smiling painted faces — and located next to a cemetery filled with gold miners who died from the plague who are bound to be grumpy ghosts (when they aren’t hiding from the clowns). Anyway, good news! It’s up for sale. [More]
nightmares
If You Love The Ceiling Baby Scene In ‘Trainspotting’ Here’s A Real Estate Listing For You
By 7.18.17
Real estate listings can be weird — from a woman dressed in a panda suit popping up in every photo to a glorious 1980s time capsule — but there’s a difference between “kooky” and “creepy mannequins attached to the ceiling, ready to come alive and suck out your soul.” [More]
New Teddy Ruxpin: Adorable Or The Blinking Demon Of Your Nightmares?
By 9.30.16
When you hear the name “Teddy Ruxpin,” perhaps you’re hit with a wave of nostalgia tinged with a lingering wariness of the animatronic talking teddy bear that read stories off a cassette tape shoved in his back. But now that there’s a new Teddy Ruxpin on the scene with bright blue, lidlessly blinking LCD eyes, your nightmares may have a new face. [More]
Why Are So Many People Reporting Kenmore Oven Door Explosions?
By 2.4.16
Let’s start by pointing out the obvious: oven doors are not supposed to explode. They’re supposed to keep hot air in while letting us view the food cooking inside. Yet hundreds of customers with Kenmore ovens have reported shattered doors to retailer Sears, and Sears and the Consumer Products Safety Commission have reacted with a collective shrug. Past one year, issues like this are officially the customer’s problem. [More]
![The building in San Francisco's Mission district is now being renovated, "presumably for wealthier tenants," notes the judge. [image via Google Maps]](../../consumermediallc.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/luckystreet.png?w=300&h=225&crop=1)
San Francisco Landlord Charged $4K/Month In Rent For Rodent-Infested “Death Trap” Apartments
By 9.8.15
A San Francisco man who fancied himself a landlord and building manager — but who apparently failed to do more than just collect rent that he didn’t always pay up the ladder — has been ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to tenants who paid exorbitant sums to live in “squalid” conditions with phantom appliances, exposed wiring, and rodents run amok. [More]
Texas Neighborhood Displeased To Find Worms In The Drinking Water
By 7.30.15
It sounds like the stuff of nightmares, or a bad drug trip: turning on the faucet for a glass of water, only to have worms come wriggling out of it. Residents of one Texas subdivision claim they’ve been finding worms coming out of faucets and clogging up sprinklers, and have been showing up with water samples to prove it to local authorities. [More]
NYC Apartment Owner Suing Co-Op Board After 16 Years Of Waiting To Move In
By 7.7.15
Anticipation can be a heady thing, a mix of optimism and suspense, with the knowledge that eventually, you’ll get what you’re after. But one New York City co-op owner is likely past the stage of simple expectation, after waiting 16 years to move into an apartment that cost him millions. [More]
![(via WUSA 9 News [link has video that autoplays])](../../consumermediallc.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/snakeskins.png?w=300&h=225&crop=1)
Family Suing Previous Homeowner, Real Estate Agent After Realizing “Dream Home” Was Infested With Snakes
By 6.4.15
It’s the stuff of nightmares: Fearing that the walls of your home are crawling with snakes, only to find out that no, this isn’t a bad dream, there are actually reptiles infesting the house you live in. That was the reality for one Maryland family who’s now suing their home’s previous owner and the real estate agent behind the sale, claiming both parties knew the house was chock-full of snakes before they sold it. [More]
How Do You Accidentally Build A $2M Oceanfront Home On Public Park Land?
By 6.17.14
Spoiler alert: If your home is built on land you don’t own, you’re going to have to move it or lose it. The owner of a $2 million home in Rhode Island found out the hard way that not all engineers are up to snuff when it comes to figuring out what is and isn’t public park land. [More]
We’re Filing Creepy Clown Motel Under “Things That That Should Stay In Nightmares”
By 6.17.14
If the richest person in the world walked up to me right now (Scrooge McDuck, he’s still in the lead, right?) and offered me my very own pool of money to swim in on the one condition that I stay at the Clown Motel overnight, well, my moneyswimming suit would stay firmly in its wrappings. Because if there’s one thing capable of turning even the most grown-up grown-up into a puddle of quivering, horrified mush, it’s clowns and the dark*. [More]
Expedia Doesn’t Really Care That The 25-Acre Hawaiian Vacation Rental You Booked Is Now Closed
By 6.11.13
You go online to book a vacation through Expedia.com and there it is — your dream Hawaiian house, located on 25 secluded acres with an ocean view. So you book the 6-day package through the site and jet off with a couple of your friends for fun in the sun. But when you get there, your Pacific island fantasy is shattered. [More]
Condos Sold Without Owners’ Permission For 1/3 Their Value
By 6.28.12
Imagine that you’ve recently purchased a condo for $100,000. The complex where it’s located is about 90% rented, and 10% owner-occupied. The complex’s owner struggles, and the whole neighborhood goes up for sale in a foreclosure auction. The new owners dissolve the condo association, since they own all of the rentals, or 90% of the homes in the complex. This gives the owners permission to sell the entire complex at once, including what used to be condos. Your proceeds from having your home sold out from under you: $33,000. You still owe the rest of your mortgage, but have nowhere to live. Condo owners in Reading, Pennsylvania experienced this nightmare recently, and there is no legal way out for them. [More]
Woman Loses Legs After Weight-Loss Surgery
By 9.14.11
A woman lost more than her love handles after a weight-loss surgery went awry. She lost both her legs. [More]
Government Employee Dies At Desk, No One Notices
By 2.16.11
It’s the nightmare of every employee who feels undervalued and isolated at work: you could die at your desk and no one would ever notice. This actually happened to a 51-year-old employee of Los Angeles County: she passed away at her desk sometime on Friday, and wasn’t discovered until a security guard found her on Saturday. She had last been seen alive at 9 AM on Friday. [More]
68 Families Evicted Because Landlord Owes $79,000 Water Bill
By 12.16.10
Terrible: being forced out of your home during the Christmas/New Year’s holiday stretch. Even worse: losing your home because your landlord hasn’t paid the water bill in months. That’s what is about to happen to sixty-eight families in Oklahoma because their out-of-state landlord hasn’t paid the apartment complex’s water bill in months. [More]
Verizon's FiOS "One Bill" Service Is More Like "Six Bills, None Of Which Make Any Sense"
By 10.13.10
MIke writes that he’s having some catastrophic billing issues with Verizon. He’s never had good luck with their customer service, which was fine with him because he never really had issues with his account. The simple act of choosing a new home service bundle set off a chain reaction ended up with Mike receiving multiple bills with different charges for different things, totaling about $1,100 for a 45-day period.
When he threw up his hands and asked Verizon to just cancel his service, waiving the early termination fees for his trouble, they couldn’t handle that, either. Update: Verizon has fixed the accounts and given Mike a full refund.
Check Fraud Leads To Kafkaesque Nightmare For Wachovia Customer
By 10.8.10
What do you do when you have tried every possible tactic you can think of to resolve a situation, and you can still make no progress? Michael, a 20-year Wachovia customer, now finds himself in just this situation with the bank. No one at Wachovia has the power to straighten out his customer service nightmare that began when someone forged a check on his account back in June. [More]
Continental Takes Three Days And Counting To Fly Passenger From Texas to New Hampshire
By 6.20.10
Poor Ashley, all she wanted was to fly from Houston to Manchester to visit her friend for the weekend. She planned to leave on Thursday, but Continental apparently overbooked a whole mess of flights and could only get her to Detroit the next day. From there Continental planned to send her onto Manchester with Delta, but that didn’t work out either. After spending a night stuck in Detroit, Ashley made it to Atlanta, where Delta figured she would manage to catch one of their many flights to New England. Nope! Instead, things got much, much worse. [More]
