7 Ways to Fix Your Haunted House

The lights flicker on and off. The doors mysteriously shut by themselves. But this is no seasonal attraction for those who delight in fright: It's your own home. If your house is haunted, follow our fixes to drive away those spooks. By Roy Berendsohn

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Every house has secrets. Doors open or shut themselves. Lights flicker randomly. A toilet flushes on its own. And there's that deathly odor. You've been catching whiffs of it for years now, but you still can't seem to locate the source.

Sorry, but your house is creepy. Even if you don't believe in ghosts, the noises you hear in the dead of night still give you the heebie-jeebies. At the very least, you feel conflicted: You love your place, of course?but it really bothers you that it does stuff that you just can't explain.

Here at Popular Mechanics, we call it SHS (spooky-house syndrome). Rich Robbins, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pa., is something of an expert on the subject. Each October his lecture "Ghosts and Hauntings: Decide for Yourself?" draws a standing-room-only crowd. "We carry a prototype in our mind of what a house should be like," says Robbins, who holds a doctorate in social psychology. "When something out of the ordinary happens, we may or may not seek to explain it in rational terms."

Robbins says he's "agnostic" about ghosts; he's never seen one but can't disprove them, either. At PM, we're a bit more matter-of-fact. When things go bump in the night, we reach for our toolbox and get to work.

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