Shane Kelsoe gazed into his video cassette-sized electromagnetic frequency (EMF) detector, a machine that measures changes in the air's electrical conductance.
He and fiancee Anna Risner walked through an abandoned off-the-grid pre-Civil War house and read milligausses in the air as part of a recent environmental investigation.
In the upstairs bedroom, the detector's needle bounced from the zero background and stopped at 2.5.
Shortly afterwards, the needle sank back to zero. "Whatever it was," said Kelsoe, "it's gone."
What disturbance was being measured? Asbestos levels? Nah. Lead paint? Nope. Ghostly spirits? Bingo.
Ghosts, goblins and ghouls remain firmly entrenched in Halloween and scary movies for some. For others, ghosts present a year-round hunt incorporating scientific tools and methods.
Kelsoe and Risner are not alone in their belief that they can track ghosts with scientific equipment.
Eight percent of Americans believe science will some day prove the existence of an afterlife, according to a 2005 CBS News poll.
Catching ghosts has become so popular it has its own reality TV show. "Ghost Hunters" started airing in 2004 on the SciFi Channel.
Kelsoe and Risner have an acronym for their ghost hunting operation: API, or Alabama Paranormal Investigations.
Last year, API looked into 12 possible hauntings. The service is free and offered anonymously.
Another group, the Southeastern Paranormal Society, was formed in Muscle Shoals a month ago. The team includes a long-haul trucker and an engineer.
Dustin Taylor, the team's founder, said SPS uses $2,100 worth of equipment that includes an infrared laser thermometer to detect cold spots left by ghosts.
"We go into it with a scientific point of view," Taylor said.
During one recent API investigation, Kelsoe used digital audio and video recorders and an EMF radiation detector to capture evidence of ghosts.
"Audio -- upstairs bedroom, 8:33 p.m.," Kelsoe said into the recorder before he set it down.
Data from ghost hunts range from ghostly smears caught on camera to EVPs, electronic voice phenomena, or ghostly whispers, inaudible to the naked ear. (Visit timesdaily.com to hear a recording.)
"It's a crapshoot pretty much every time you go out," Kelsoe said. "Paranormal activity doesn't work on no schedule."
"If you could get them to pose -- everybody would be doing this," he added.
Few people would take the hours it took Kelsoe to analyze all the video and audio frame by frame, second by second, to catch fleeting ghostly evidence missed by the naked eye.
"Investigating is the easy part," he said. "Going through the evidence is the hard part."
EMF detection is also a popular method, as several hunters believe that ghosts present themselves to humans as electromagnetic energy, like that produced by a radio transmitter or microwave oven.
For skeptics, video, audio or even EMF evidence, though scientific-seeming, is still based on fantasy.
"(The) problem is selective pattern-seeking behavior on the part of the ghost hunters: How can they tell the difference between a random pattern and a ghostly pattern?" wrote Michael Shermer, executive director of the Skeptics Society in Altadena, Calif., in an e-mail response.
Though the house Kelsoe and Risner were investigating hasn't been hooked up to utilities for years, "All of our homes are bombarded with EMFs from outside," Shermer stated.
Dedicated hunters don't care. This weekend, more than 100 of them are meeting for GhoStock4 in Savannah, Ga., a four-day convention that culminates in more than a dozen citywide investigations to be held today.
What motivates people from Texas to Wisconsin to bring their tracking tools to Savannah for a weekend of patiently chasing ghouls?
"It's driven by a desire to try and substantiate this from a scientific perspective," said Patrick Burns, GhoStock co-organizer and professional paranormal investigator who also costars in CourtTV's documentary series "Haunting Evidence."
But even Burns left room for doubt.
"You can't prove it scientifically, but it certainly does a lot to bolster the claim that maybe something is out there," he said from his Atlanta home.
That boost comes from no discernible demographic, according to Burns. Ghost hunters include everyone from law enforcers, doctors and scientists.
"People that actually work in the scientific profession are invaluable," Burns said. "They can give us insight and valuable guidelines as to how to properly document things scientifically."
But Burns admitted that tracking ghosts might come from a human need deeper than science.
"I think it's driven by a quest, a desire to find evidence of an afterlife," Burns said.
For some, ghost hunting isn't about the method, but the resultant stories.
"Storytelling has always been a big tradition in the South," said Debra Johnston, author of the "Skeletons in the Closet" series of Shoals ghost stories. "Ghost stories are part of it."
Johnston said ghost stories survive as a way to keep oral history alive.
"Here, the ghost stories are the ones that really seem to spark people's interest," she said. "I don't know why that is. I think people like to be scared."
Kathryn Tucker Windham, award-winning storyteller and author of the popular "13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey," agrees.
"It doesn't matter whether people believe in ghosts; the stories are what's important," said Windham from her home in Selma. "Everything is so easily explained by scientific stuff, we need something to keep us wondering."
That "scientific stuff" of data collection and interpretation is exactly what drives the inquiries from API and ghost hunters nationwide.
For ghosts to reach the physical world, Kelsoe said, they need to concentrate tiny quantities of electricity from nearby sources.
API's equipment includes two audio recorders, two digital cameras and one night-shot video camera, all possible sources of electrical activity for ghosts to draw upon.
During the investigation of the pre-Civil War farmhouse in east Florence, API scouted locations to capture ghosts in the act like Hollywood directors in search of a star.
Ghosts most likely to be caught in the two-story red brick house they were investigating include farmers and prostitutes, according to local historian William McDonald.
Word has it that the farmhouse became a house of "ill-repute" before World War I.
"It is a matter of careful worded speculation because we have no way to prove it," said McDonald.
Like history, ghost hunting can admittedly be an inexact endeavor. Unfortunately, the duo came away with no visual evidence but caught two EVPs during the evening.
Outside, the occasional rap song blared from a car and added background noise that disrupted Kelsoe's analysis that includes listening to the audio at high volume to hear ghostly whispers.
For most of the evening, the only spirit seemed to be a yipping dog. During a preliminary investigation of the property, API's camcorder captured one possible ghost, a shadow that bounced off a doorframe of an upstairs bedroom.
On second examination, however, Kelsoe noticed the doorframe was next to a window where muffled streetlights and car headlights peeked through, possible sources of the previous moving shadow.
"The worst thing you can do is jump to conclusions," Kelsoe said, "Not everything is a ghost."
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