Land-Grabbing Ghosts (story)

Land-Grabbing Ghosts is a story in Scooby-Doo! #69 by DC Comics.

Premise
Mystery Inc investigates a Seattle neighborhood that is being haunted. It seems that the neighborhood was destroyed by a flood in 1889 and built over. Now, the Mayor is planning to build new apartments on the site but the ghosts of the original owners have come back to claim the land. The gang traps the ghosts to find out it is the county clerk and a few phony descendants who are trying to get the land with fake documents so they can sell it back to the city for a profit.

Reception
Two brilliant mysteries can be found in this issue of Scooby-Doo. In "Land-Grabbing Ghosts" the milieu of Kolchak: the Night Strangler becomes the underground center of exploration. However, the setting merely provides interesting window dressing and slug-trappings; the slimy creatures seem to be everywhere.

Alex Simmons more openly engages the gang in a real-estate swindle, but one must pay extremely close attention to the artwork and the dialogue in order to solve this puzzle. Whodunnit isn't as important as how the gang solves the crime.