The real-life house that inspired Netflix‘s new horror series The Watcher wasn’t all that attractive to buyers.
The show details the true story of Derek and Maria Broaddus’ experience living at 657 Broadway in Westfield, New Jersey, where they persistently received threatening letters from an anonymous stalker.
After five years of living there, the Broaddus’ listed the $1.4 million home for sale in 2019, but finding a new homeowner was not an easy feat following a 2018 exposé about the frightening ordeal by The Cut.
“There were a million stories about what was going on with the house,” the home’s listing agent David Barbosa, who owns David Reality Group and is a Westfield resident himself, said to Entertainment Weekly. “There was such a stigma on the house. That was our biggest hurdle: Trying to get over that stigma. Plus, you had people riding by the house, taking pictures, walking up to the front door, it was crazy.”
The Broaddus family began receiving letters saying they were being watched by someone obsessed with the home just three days after they moved into the house in 2014. The letter said the anonymous sender’s family was put in charge of watching the home for decades and hinted at grim secrets within the home, in addition to a “second coming,” according to The Cut. From then on, the family continued to have spooky encounters in the home such as noises and peculiar neighbors.
After several other real estate agents failed to sell the home, Barbosa took on the listing and put it on the market for $999,999 in March 2019. Despite “a lot of interest in the house” he wanted to make sure the new owners were aware of what went on in the home before committing, so he had prospective buyers read over all the evidence of the frightening letters at an attorney’s office before entering into a hard contract.
He recalled how one potential buyer first said they didn’t “give a s—” about the letters, but after reading the materials they backed out of the deal, saying “there’s no way I’m going in that house.'”
The home eventually was purchased by a couple who “had no concerns at all,” for $40,000 less than the asking price in July 2019. According to the real estate agent, the new homeowners haven’t received any threatening letters since moving in.