By Cole Lauterbach/Illinois Radio Network

SPRINGFIELD – Illinois has dozens of homes for sale that are advertised as being haunted or having some sort of spooky characteristic.

Home-finder website Trulia scoured their listings for keywords like haunted, spooky, cursed, ghost and others that would infer something supernatural in the home for sale. Shockingly, they found more than 3,100 listings with the ghoulish keywords. Illinois lists 59 “haunted” homes for sale.

Managing editor David Weidner said his team was shocked when they found as many scary listings as they did.

“To think that there are 59 in Illinois and thousands of others across the country is really amazing,” he said.

That may not be the best sales pitch, considering they found that 43 percent of people would likely pass on a house they thought was haunted, and only three in 10 people surveyed said they’d live in a home where a death occurred.

“We found that there are some buyers that are interested in that kind of thing but our survey found that they’re definitely in the minority,” he said.

The age gap was telling. Young men aged 18-34 were more likely to be adventurous and buy the house, ghosts and all. And seniors didn’t really care. More than 60 percent of them said it wouldn’t matter to them if a house is haunted or not.

Wiedner thinks realtors get a little too excited about the history of old homes and will use language that gives the wrong impression.