Search "haunted" on eBay and you'll find a slew of junk that its owners claim is spooked in some way. Usually, that invisible something extra will significantly bump up the asking price.
From The Awl:
An ordinary barcalounger might go for forty-five dollars, but throw a ghost in that sucker—you can transfer a ghost into a non-haunted item with a “transmute bag” that Creepy Hollows sells for thirty-seven dollars—and watch that price skyrocket. “If you have had an item you were trying to sell that languished, you could just list it as haunted and it’d sell faster,” said Weisberg. “It could double or triple the asking price.” One can see the temptation for a seller to simply close their eyes and come up with a story about how this DVD copy of Happy Gilmore was somebody’s now-dead nephew’s favorite movie, and the skipping is his way of trying to communicate from beyond. “A lot of the stuff on eBay, people just make up a story,” Weisberg said.
As one tale from an eBay listing for haunted doll named Kurtis goes, Kurtis was “always literally clowning around.” After enough friends suggested he should give stand-up comedy a try, he did. But the transition between being real-life humorist and stage comedian didn’t take. One tragic day, at the age of twenty-eight, Kurtis died in a car accident after “having a little too much to drink.” Because he was always the jokester, Kurtis chose the utterly creepy 1961 Knickerbocker-designed clown doll as the vessel for his spirit. “He is very active on ghost speaker,” wrote the seller, “and I have heard his voice on hack radio.” (This is a cheap radio that’s been modified in order to pick up signals from the beyond; there are tons of How To videos online for how to mod one properly.) The end of the listing points towards the other big selling point for those interested in buying Kurtis. “Bought him from Sherri,” wrote the seller, “he was on tv show haunted dolls episode shipping wars.”
