They say this old house is haunted.
I understand both sentences, but in my opinion they are not very close.
The English sentence (They say this old house is haunted) I belive is more like:
Man sagt, in diesem alten Haus spukt es
I’m just a beginner, so I’m happy to be corrected if I have misunderstood something
I don’t think you can translate “haunted” using “spukt” like that. I’m not a native speaker, so I might be wrong, but to directly translate the English adjective “haunted” we’d have to do something like this:
Man sagt, dass dieses alte Haus verflucht ist.
Man sagt, dass dieses alte Haus heimgesucht ist.
Note how Clozemaster’s German sentence doesn’t use an adjective to convey this, but rather a noun. A more literal translation into English would be:
Man sagt, dass in dem alten Haus ein Gespenst lebt.
They say that a ghost lives in this old house.
And of course, in English we have an adjective that conveys the idea of a ghost living in a house: we say that the house is “haunted”. But in German (again, I’m not a native speaker, so I may be wrong), I believe that Clozemaster’s use of a noun to convey that idea would be more common than using an adjective.
I’m not a ghost buster 
but I think you can translate it like that.
I agree with you.
I think “In dem Haus spukt es” is more common than “In dem Haus lebt ein Gespenst/Geist”.
Everything is just my own opinion, others might disagree.