Rumors can easily crop up about homes with old-style architecture, but dismissing these rumors can improve your home's reputation.

Step 2: Give Eerie Rumors the Ax

If you fall into that category where you know your aging house isn't haunted or cursed, but everyone else thinks that it is, your home falls into that wonderful category known in the industry as psychologically impacted or a stigmatized home. That's a term that casts a wide net over a house's perceived problems.

"Some people might see living next to a highway as living in a stigmatized home," Sachs says. "Or if there are high-tension wires and a power grid next to the house, the potential buyer might think, 'Great, am I going to get cancer?' Never mind that there is no medical research indicating such a thing."

In other words, you can't prove the unproven. If your neighbors think your house is haunted by spirits and that a new buyer might often be bumped in the night, how are you going to prove them wrong?

If that's your situation, you need a plan.

Last year, Anne Ewasko, a residential real estate specialist with Rubloff Residential Properties in Chicago, was faced with a conundrum: How to sell the Goldblatt Mansion, a 22-room home built in 1879 that some people in the community called haunted, simply due to its age and creepy Victorian era aura. (Locals had taken to calling it the Bates Motel.)

Ewasko spanked the rumors by lightheartedly discussing them whenever the topic came up, and she held numerous open houses and broker parties. That none of the guests entered a closet only to not return may have put everyone's minds at ease; it wound up selling for $2.46 million five weeks after it was put on the market.

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