www.foxnews.com Bats in the belfry, or more correctly the attic, have ended up costing some New Yorkers a lot of money.
When retired investment manager and antique dealer Stephen Jablonski bought his sprawling Garrison, N.Y., house for $542,000 in 1993, the previous owners and the real-estate agency told him the white stains on the roof were simply bird droppings. It wasn't until after the closing that Jablonski learned the attic was infested with bats - hundreds of which had been "summering" there for years. Jablonski sued the previous owners and the realty company for $9 million, charging that they deceived him by cleaning out the attic and temporarily driving off the bats during his visits and the property inspection. After the case spent years bouncing around various courts, the trial began in late June. An expert testified that the mothballs and bright lights Jablonski saw in the attic before the closing could have kept the bats out during the daytime. Two days after the trial opened, the agency and the estate of the previous owners, now deceased, settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. "Everyone in town knew that house was full of bats when [the real-estate firm] sold it," a rival agent told the New York Post. "I doubt it would have taken long for a jury to find that out." The amount of settlement was confidential, but experts told the Post it would cost at least $1 million to bat-proof the house. "There's very little that I can ethically say," Judge Harvey Sklaver told The Journal-News of White Plains, N.Y. "It was a garden-variety dispute that happened to involve bats."
