It’s common practice to yell “REALTOR!” when entering a home. An agent never knows exactly what they’re walking into …

There might just be a ghost party roaring in the basement.

That’s what Teri Herrera, a broker with Windermere Bellevue West, said she discovered at a listing in 2005. By that point, Herrera had been in real estate for 15 years, and she’d never believed in the paranormal. “I always thought it was sort of a joke,” Herrera told Seattle Agent. “Until it happened to me.”

Herrera was showing a waterfront Bellevue property to a potential buyer, a two-story home on Lake Sammamish which also boasted a daylight basement. Herrera was representing the buyer, a friend of hers, and had never been inside the house. But she had the keys.

Herrera said their visit was typical at first. No one else was home, and she and her client were checking out the main floor, when, out of nowhere, they heard a piano start playing. “It almost sounded like a player piano, you know, like 1930s music.” She described a swinging beat.

“I thought there was [maybe] a party going on in the back yard, so we looked outside. There wasn’t,” Herrera said. “All of a sudden, we could hear people dancing down in the basement! And there were muffled party sounds: multiple women and men laughing along with the piano playing and dancing.”

Herrera opened the door to the basement to find a staircase with another closed door at the bottom. As soon as she opened the top door, Herrera said, the sound amplified. “We could clearly hear people laughing and talking,” Herrera said. “I yelled down the stairs — ‘REALTOR!’ And nothing changed. The party was still going on.”

She walked halfway down the stairs and again yelled out, “REALTOR!” Then everything went quiet.

Herrera continued down the steps and opened the final door to the basement. A little tabletop clock was ticking, loudly. She then ventured around the corner of the room. “Hello? Hello?” She asked, but there was no answer. Then she saw it: an old piano with no one at the bench. “I start running back upstairs and blew past my client, flying out the door,” Herrera said, breathless just remembering the event.

Her client rushed out after her as Herrera told her, terrified, “There was nobody down there.” As they drove away, fast, Herrera realized they’d left the door open. She called the listing agent and told her about the invisible soiree. The agent then revealed a spooky backstory: the seller’s mother-in-law lived in the basement and had died just three days earlier.

“And I told her, well, she was having a hell of a party.” Looking back, Herrera says she’s glad her client was there with her. “She’s my witness.” They’re still good friends and to this day, the client’s husband insists there was probably some just radio playing down there. “But there was no radio,” Herrera insists.

Now, Herrera is fascinated by the paranormal. “I know it exists 100%.” She loves ghost tours and sharing her own creepy story, all these years later.

She knows of another agent, just north of Seattle, who went to show a vacant home and, out of habit, called out, “REALTOR!” Just like Herrera had in 2005. “And someone said, ‘Come on in!’ Clear as a bell.” Turns out the house had belonged to an elderly person who’d recently died.

“These stories are not that uncommon,” Herrera said. “Any agent whose been in this business with any longevity has had at least one paranormal experience within a house.”