Ever Seen a Ghost?

The house is roughly hewn, made to look like some old, abandoned haunt filled with cobwebs and the macabre evidence of evil. Phyllis Clark, a middle-aged woman with bright blue eyes, shows me her standard tape recorder and points out the attached microphone. "This is the best kind to use for EVPs—it helps the sound," she says. The table in the front room is covered with random plastic limbs and creepy doll heads. Above it hangs a skeleton, suspended face down, with a plastic intestine trailing down onto the table in Nazi doctor fashion. Amy Wainwright, a 30-ish mother of two who acts as the group's organizer, sets up a tripod. "The last time I was here, I was standing there in the doorway talking to the owner, and I saw a man—that's why I'm setting the camcorder up here," she says. "He was old and creepy—like something you'd see on The Twilight Zone." She used to date a mortician, she tells me, and one evening while they were in the funeral home they saw a "black, winged thing" that came toward them and pushed them up against the pew. They ran out and never spoke of it again. "Part of me thinks I was just hallucinating, and I want proof," she says. Soon after, she found the ghost group online.

We walk through a narrow hallway and into the living room, which the public relations guy explains used to be the entry room. He doesn't say much more, because the women want to see what they can glean about the history on their own. There's a coffin with a skeleton inside and shelves lined with books and skulls. The women talk about how their hearts are pounding or their scalps are tingling, and Clark says she has a weird taste on her lips. I don't feel anything, but as one of the women shows me a crated wall space where at Halloween they keep rat snakes, I remember why I've always hated haunted houses. We walk into the back room, and one of the women sets up the tape recorder. Donna Hawkins, a stock trader who says she's always had psychic abilities and has worked on missing person cases, walks the room's perimeter, shining her flashlight on the walls.

"Did anything happen in this room?" Clark asks, looking from floor to ceiling.

"He wants some of us to leave," Hawkins says suddenly. "And I keep getting something about up there—something happened up there." She points to the ceiling. Then she walks out of the room, telling Amy to ask "him" why he's so tired. For a moment the only sound is the crickets outside.

"Why are you tired?" Wainwright asks. "Did I see you that night? The first time I came here?" After a while we walk back out to the hallway, where we're shushed by the others. "Do you hear that movement right there? We heard breathing." "It's a female—like giggling." I strain my ears but don't hear anything. Clark, her headlamp hanging around her neck, slowly waves the microphone through the air. "I think we got too close," she says. Then it gets cold. Really cold. "Whoa," everyone says at once, looking around. "Thanks for coming to see us," Clark says with a smile, taking out her camera.

But as we step into an adjoining room, Hawkins says whoever it was went to the back of the house. I follow her there. "I've been doing this since I was little—I help them move on if they want to," she tells me. "There's something back here. Do you feel the tingling on your scalp?"

"No," I say. "I just feel light-headed."

She nods. "They're saying, 'It's all messed up.'" Then she addresses the ghosts that are apparently swirling in our midst. "You don't need to be afraid," she tells them, heading for the back door, where there's a pile of plastic Halloween bodies: legs, arms and heads in an unruly heap. "I bet a lot of them are hanging out back there," she says, pointing beyond the door. "They don't really like people." Then she grimaces. "I'm starting to feel sick—that usually only happens when they're negative."

Great, I think. I'm feeling a little nauseated myself. And ready, ghosts or not, to get the hell out of that nasty little room. All of a sudden, an image pops into my mind—it's an old, gnarled woman glaring at me with wide, glowing eyes, like something out of Lord of the Rings. She's shoving handfuls of something into her mouth. Alrighty then. Now I'm really ready to leave, since I've apparently lost my mind and could use some anti-psychotic medication. As we walk out, I notice I'm nearly running.

The others are talking outside. Tammy's telling how she sensed a male spirit come from the staircase and follow her out of the house. "It was definitely a man," she says.