Anxious to quickly sell their house after buying another, Heidi Morin and her husband, James, turned to Coventry’s Gabriel’s Trumpet. In a basket near neatly organized crosses, books, rosary beads and plastic bottles marked “Holy Water” they found their edge: a tiny statue of St. Joseph, considered by some the patron saint of real estate.

From spring to fall — the traditional house-selling season — the tan statues are hot sellers at the Catholic gift shop for $2 each. That’s a bargain compared with some online retailers who for years have been pedaling a centuries-old tradition that burying the statue and reading a nightly prayer can help sell a house.

Not big on divine intervention? How about hiring a holistic home inspector or trying feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of placement? In a stagnant market, where tidy yards and even steep price cuts don’t guarantee success, sellers are increasingly looking beyond conventional wisdom to woo buyers.

With For Sale signs ubiquitous in many Rhode Island neighborhoods last year, Gabriel’s Trumpet Christian Book and Gift Shop sold about 150 St. Joseph statues, more than any other single item, said Joan McQuaid, volunteer manager of the two-room, Washington Street shop, which raises money for the St. Vincent DePaul ministry.

“I’ve had real-estate people coming in, asking for six or eight of them at a time,” McQuaid said. “I don’t even think they were Catholics. They were just on the bandwagon. When [people are] desperate they’ll do anything” to sell.

The Morins placed their four-bedroom, Colonial-style house on the market without the help of a professional in late 2005, even though Heidi Morin’s mother, Elizabeth Dauphinee, is a real-estate agent.

“My mom said, ‘I’ll give you one open house, one week with a for-sale-by-owner sign on the house,’ ” Morin recalled.

A practicing Catholic, Morin turned to her faith and picked up a statue of St. Joseph. She followed directions for burying it on the Coventry property and began saying a nightly prayer. Within a few weeks, the couple accepted an offer close to their asking price.

Morin then bought the prospective buyers a St. Joseph statue to bury on their property, because the sale was dependent on the buyers selling their house, which they quickly did.

“I feel blessed because we could have had [to pay for] two homes,” said Morin, who dug up the statue from her old property after the sale and, in keeping with tradition, displays it prominently in a hutch in her new home.

“The house was decorated nice and had been touched up with paint,” Morin recalled. “You have to have a combination” of faith and [house] value. “But I just believed [the statue] would work.”

The Rev. Michael Najim, assistant vocation director for the Diocese of Providence, says burying a statue of St. Joseph hoping to sell a house “borders on superstition,” which the church does not support. But he says the prayer that’s supposed to be used with the statue recognizes “a deeper reality: People believe in the power of prayer. And people asking St. Joseph, the protector and provider of the Holy Family, to intercede for them is a wonderful Catholic practice.”

When Morin’s brother, Scott Dauphinee, decided to sell his Cumberland house last year, he hired mom to handle the sale, but followed his sister’s lead and buried a St. Joseph statue. Like his sister, Dauphinee had to sweat out the possibility of making two house payments after buying a new house before his old one sold.

“It was stressful, but we [sold] it the day payment for the new house was due,” Dauphinee said. “It was amazing.”

Phil Cates has heard countless such stories since he launched StJosephStatue.com in 1996. The California mortgage banker began handing out statues to real-estate agents in 1990, after hearing a friend’s success story.

“It was the craziest thing I’d ever heard of, but I thought it could be a cool marketing thing for my mortgage business,” he said.

As interest in the statues increased, it became a side business that’s blossomed recently. Cates envisions a banner year this year, predicting that he can sell 100,000 statues, in kits for $9.95 and $13.95, that include a listing on the Web site.

“In a strong market, greed takes over, in a weak market fear takes over,” he said, explaining why people buy the statues in hot and cold markets.

Buyers of the statues fall into two camps, he says.

“One is the believer, mostly Catholics,” he said. “The other [camp] views it as a nondenominational thing. They’re saying ‘Let’s have some fun with it,’ or ‘Let’s hope, because we’re at the end of our rope.’ ”

Others may not be sold on the power of prayer but say the key to a sale is creating positive energy in the house.

Faith Ranoli, a self-described holistic home inspector and house psychic, charges up to $150 an hour to “stage the feel of the home.” The Colorado-based Ranoli published a book in 2005 entitled The Mystical Guide to Home Inspection.

“I ask, ‘is everybody ready to see the property sell?’ If the grandmother doesn’t want to sell or it’s the little girl or the husband, then there’s still an energetic attachment,” she said. “As soon as you bring a buyer, they’ll respond to that feeling.”

Ranoli sells a “space-clearing kit” for $38 that includes a crystal and tuning fork. In some cases she advocates using a concoction of oils that can be sprayed to help rid the home of bad energy.

Then there are practitioners of feng shui, who study how rooms and furniture are arranged.

“Feng shui (pronounced fung-shway) is becoming mainstream with Realtors,” said Sophie McGinn, who’s been teaching courses on the subject for the Rhode Island Association of Realtors since 2004.

“It’s an ancient philosophy about harmony,” she said. “There’s regular feng shui, in terms of how the house is laid out, and there are rituals for selling your house,” she said. “It’s really a matter of belief.”

A recent three-hour class attracted 25 real-estate agents, a lot for a year when agents aren’t required to take such classes for license renewal, she said.

In one larger class last year some agents didn’t seem to be paying much attention, she said.

“This year there’s less laughing, three-quarters of them were there to learn something,” said McGinn, a Connecticut real-estate agent. She also does private feng-shui consultations.

“Business is definitely up,” she said. “A lot more people are doing it as a last resort.”

Last year was the first since 1993 that the statewide median cost of a single-family house sold through real-estate agents in Rhode Island fell, albeit slightly.

Single-family house sales fell 0.14 percent, or $400, to $282,500, according to the state Realtors association. In the last statewide decline, the median price fell by $2,000, to $115,000.

Sales of single-family houses by real-estate agents also fell last year, by 14.4 percent, to 8,313 — the lowest since 1997. And with more houses on the market, it’s taking longer than in recent years for those properties to sell.

While a glut of houses on the market may be leading more sellers and their agents to look for new ways to attract buyers, the reasons most houses sell haven’t changed, insists Cecile Cohen, president of the state Realtors association.

“We went through a loony period when you didn’t have to do a whole lot to sell” nice properties, she said. “Now agents are working harder, hopefully smarter and definitely trying different things. But it is always about value and location.”

Alan and Jane Humphrey say they understand the sobering realities of today’s market better than most. Their South Kingstown home, surrounded by farmland, woods and open space, has been on the market since October 2005. Originally priced at $829,000, the 9.5-acre lot is now offered at $649,000.

“We thought we’d have it sold by now for sure,” said Alan Humphrey, a former University of Rhode Island professor. “It’s very trying, very tough.” The couple now live in Tucson, Ariz., part of the year, while a son helps maintain the Rhode Island property.

The Humphreys have heard how some people in similar straits have turned to the St. Joseph statue, “but we don’t believe in superstitions,” Jane Humphrey said.

They are, however, considering other alternatives to the conventional advice of their agents.

“Someone will come along and feel as we did” about the property, she said. “But I might start doing updates Realtors told me not to do, like replacing carpeting and maybe updating the kitchen.”

mmello@projo.com