Ever Seen a Ghost?

Efforts to document supernatural phenomena began in the 1850s as part of the Spiritualist movement. An exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art includes 120 spirit photographs, including a famous one of Mary Todd Lincoln, who appears with the supposed ghost of her assassinated husband hovering behind her. The movement's séances, theatrics and photography were hotly debated, drawing famous intellectuals such as psychologist William James and author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Today, the debate still features photography, but there are new gadgets too—tape recorders, Geiger counters and electromagnetic field detectors. The use of psychics, however, has been a mainstay since the beginning. I encountered several mediums in the local ghost groups, and two told me they'd provided police departments with information on missing person cases. Most of them say they help lost souls pass on to the other side, or to "the light," as famed psychic John Edward has described in his nationally syndicated talk radio show, Crossing Over.

Paula Schermerhorn, who works for a software company and does psychic readings on the side, told me that after the bus burned up during the evacuation for Hurricane Rita, three elderly and confused ghosts appeared in her living room, seeking guidance. "They had oxygen tanks," she says. "They said they were on the bus, that they didn't know what happened. I said, 'Do you see the light?' They said, 'Yeah, but it's pretty far off.' I said, 'Y'all can make it.'" Thirty minutes later they returned, without the oxygen tanks and looking younger, and thanked her for pointing them in the right direction. When I suggested that many people would likely view this as either a seminal life event or evidence of madness, she shrugged. "I look at it nonchalantly—it's part of my life."

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Driving down a darkened Red Oak street with rain pelting the windshield, I almost miss the turn. At the last minute I see an iron arch that reads "Reindeer Manor" and swing into the narrow drive. It winds uphill for what seems like a long time, and just when I think I must have passed it, the house looms up ahead. Reindeer Manor is used as a haunted house at Halloween, and according to the attraction's Web site, it has an unfortunate history. The original wooden house burned down in 1915, killing an entire family of sharecroppers. After the owner rebuilt it using steel, brick and concrete, his son, James Sharp Jr., moved into it with his wife, who was active in the Spiritualist movement. Sharp lost his fortune in the Great Depression and went insane, and his wife became convinced that the house was cursed. She employed séances, potions and incantations to rid the house of the hex, but she and her husband eventually turned up dead in a murder-suicide—she was found poisoned in the house, he hanging from a noose in the barn.

A group is assembling in the Manor parking lot. Four women who belong to GIRLS (Ghost Investigators and Researchers of Legends and Sightings), an offshoot of the Fort Worth ghost group, are readying headlamps, infrared video cameras and recording devices for the hunt. Waiting to take us into the house are a bearded PR representative for the Manor who frequented the house as a Boy Scout growing up, and Alex Lohmann, a mohawked 30-something in a Dungeon of Doom T-shirt. Though he owns a different haunted house on the property and analyzes audio recordings for another ghost-hunting group, he calls himself a skeptic. His specialty is EVP, or electronic voice phenomena, which along with photographs of orbs and other images is a hallmark of ghost hunting. "People from other groups send me recordings to spectro-analyze," he would later tell me. The frequency has to be below 300 hertz for him to investigate paranormal evidence, he says, because humans can't speak below that level. He's not convinced he's ever come across a ghostly voice, though. "Everything I've gotten below that I've chalked up to anomalies."

Watching as the women prepare their gear, I recall what I'd heard the week before at the group's meeting. I'd listened to EVPs that a veteran hunter told me she'd captured at historic Revolutionary War sites in Georgia. A boisterous woman with long, gray hair who spends much of her free time roaming cemeteries and other haunted places of renown, Lisa Olive had set up a laptop. She handed me a set of headphones and pressed some buttons. I heard her voice and the voice of another woman talking, asking questions of any ghosts that might be present. "We're here to help you. You know that, right?" What came next was like something out of a horror movie—a pair of breathy, whispered voices answered, "Yessss" and "Heyyy." I heard the women chatting away, apparently oblivious to the voices, while a low, male whisper growled, "Get off me." Goose flesh rose on my arms, and I handed the headphones back. "Those can be pretty creepy, huh?" Olive said. An analyst such as Lohmann would likely write the recording off as an anomaly, something unexplained but not necessarily attributable to ghosts. That's the thing about investigating the paranormal—there aren't many answers, just questions, assertions and beliefs. And of course, goosebumps. Which, despite the cheesy haunted house skeletons and signs that read "Graveyard members only," is what I feel as we walk into Reindeer Manor.