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On the way to show an apartment in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, the real estate agent turned to the prospective renters and said something unnecessary.
“Before we get here, I should tell you that the guy who lived here before committed suicide.”
The renters, Julia Dahl and her boyfriend, Joel Bukiewicz, shared an uneasy glance but decided to view the rental anyway. Besides, in 2007, it was a steal: a one-bedroom in a prewar walk-up for $1,250 on the southern lip of Prospect Park. Despite the broker’s disclosure, and the portentousness of their move-in date, the couple signed the lease and settled in that Halloween.
A short while later, neighbors introduced themselves, made the couple feel welcome, and talked about the former tenant, who had killed himself in the apartment a few weeks before it came on the market.
“They did a good job cleaning it up,” one neighbor told the couple.
Ms. Dahl, 39, who writes crime fiction, and her now-husband, Mr. Bukiewicz, lived in the cozy apartment for four years. Their situation was unusual, not because someone had died in the space, but because their broker had alerted them to it. Ms. Dahl and her husband might never have discovered the apartment’s grisly history had someone not told them about it.
Throughout the city and state, buildings are often more than a century old; in Victorian-era homes especially, someone likely has died there. But in recent years, brokers say, an apartment touched