Coffee, Murder, & Mystery · Dark and Ominous Entertainment

The Ghostbuster ruling

·33 min·1 clip

The family says the house answered commands, from bed shaking to a window stopping when Mary said, 'That's enough now.'

Coffee, Murder, & Mystery opens with the Ghostbuster ruling, the strange court case that got its nickname because the court explicitly referenced Ghostbusters to explain a legally haunted house. Right away, the show settles into its familiar kitchen-table pace, with Melissa, Mandy, and Kelly moving through the facts in a plain, conversational way. The haunting centers on an 18-room Victorian in Nyack, New York, a cliffside house overlooking the Hudson River. It is the kind of place that sounds elegant from the outside and a little tired once the hosts start listing the details: nearly 5,000 square feet, original inlaid floors, arched doorways, stained glass accents, a wraparound porch, a turret, and pocket doors. A couple bought the home in the 1960s while looking for a place for their four children, and the story starts there. The episode follows how ordinary family life slowly got crowded by something harder to explain. The family’s accounts include a presence on the stairs and repeated sightings of Lady Margaret. The hosts do not rush past those moments. They let the story breathe, which helps the strange parts land without feeling exaggerated. One of the most vivid accounts comes years later, when Cynthia’s fiancé, Mark, spends the night and wakes to feel the bed dip and a figure lean over him in the moonlight. His reaction is not heroic, which is part of why it works. He is scared enough to wake Cynthia in a panic, and the episode stays with that ordinary kind of alarm. There is also a useful amount of skepticism and self-correction as the conversation moves along. The hosts sound comfortable saying when something is unclear or when a detail is more rumor than certainty. That keeps the story from turning into a polished ghost tour. Helen later wrote about the family’s experiences and sent the stories to Reader's Digest and the local newspaper, giving the haunting a public afterlife of its own. The house itself becomes the point, not just the apparition. Even the deaths connected to the home are handled with restraint, which fits the show’s grave but conversational tone. By the end, the case feels less like a scare piece and more like a long look at how a family lives inside an unsettling place. The Ghostbuster ruling is the hook, but the episode’s real pull is the way it moves through the history, the testimony, and the weirdness without losing its footing.

As heard by us

A haunted-house story that gets stranger once the court starts explaining it with Ghostbusters.

A haunted Victorian in Nyack, New York is the kind of story that sounds half like folklore and half like a paperwork problem once the law gets involved.

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Why you'd press play

You want a haunted-house story that ends up with a Ghostbusters reference in court.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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