The owner had been a woman who hunted for golf balls while she took long walks to think about God. Her son explained this to us while sobbing, so we kindly inquired whether we should dispose of the golf balls for him, and he whimpered, No, thanks, I’ll take them to the range.

“His mom’s going to be mad he got rid of those balls by working on his swing,” I said after he was out of hearing range at the golf range. “What if that means she can’t move on?” I can recommend a reputable moving company, but not one prepared to move the incorporeal.

“Where are my Titleists?” my wife spooky-joked. “Where are they, Gary?”

It was me who ruined our fun by debating the ethics of reaping a profit from haunted properties. Did we have an obligation to list ghosts on the condition assessment?

“Even the dead need a qualified professional,” she reasoned.

Her practical wisdom was why I married my wife. Thus, when I was touring a listing to take inventory—black mold, alas, but crown molding, hallelujah—and there was a dachshund in the refrigerator, I immediately texted my wife to get her opinion: Hey, honey, found a dachshund in the refrigerator. A ghostly ellipsis surprisingly indicated she indeed had an opinion about this development, and after an eternity, she texted back: Dick pic? I complied, from astonishment, and snapped a photo down my pants. But I wasn’t expecting a text because, like those whose houses we sold, my wife is also dead.

Now send me the dachshund, she texted.

I sent her the dachshund.

Since I am a professional, I should confess that I have never seen a ghost. The closest I have come to a ghost is a sonogram, which is the opposite of a ghost, the presaging of a life, unless the life is never born. With my wife’s miscarriages, my sales slipped until I was ranked last. When you’re last, you get what no one wants; in the case of Florida real estate, that was the weird homes of the elderly, recently dear and departed. To pass the time, my wife, herself a trained realtor on leave, read ghost stories aloud, and we had a lot of time to pass in no-show showings where a ghost would have been a welcome relief from the drudgery—a good name for an evil spirit, Drudgery. “One should accept ghosts very much as one accepts fire,” my wife read from a book by Robert von Ranke Graves, his actual name. “It is not really an element, not a principle of motion, not a living creature—though a house can catch it from its neighbours. It is an event.”

Fair enough, Rob, but if ghosts are events, then each instant counts as a ghost. The car accident that killed my wife is a ghost. Rumor has it that there’s an astronomer ghost who occupies the derelict telescope at the Ritter Planetarium at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Celestial light is what’s left of stars long extinguished, so the stargazer ghost is a ghost observing ghosts. And when a comet cuts its wake through the black, it’s called an apparition. Science, too, it seems, supports the notion that everything is ghostly.