Double, double toil and real estate trouble

Detroit News, March 31, 1991 (enlarge)

This column by long-time Free Press writer Neal Shine in a joint edition of the Detroit dailies deals with unsold real estate and includes an incident in which Gundella aided a woman in selling her home via a wax effigy. Said effigy was constructed by pouring melted paraffin into an empty one pint coffee cream carton with an inserted wick. Once dried it was whittled into a workable resemblance of the house to be sold. It was then dressed with pine oil and placed on a triangle of virgin parchment and had to be burned nightly at 7 PM for exactly 21 minutes. When the candle had burned down to nothing the house would sell. The woman, having relayed the story, claimed to have kept faithfully to the ritual to the point of interupting her everyday routines. But by the end of the effigy's life the house sold.