A cemetery in the middle of the night is a good place to hunt for ghosts. Cemeteries are crammed full of the dead. Ghosts would be lining up and taking numbers to scare us.
But a cemetery is too easy for the expert ghost hunters I tagged along with last week, so we poked around a basement instead.
It made a certain amount of sense. In a darkened graveyard, the average human imagination will insist that anything is a ghost. But in a basement you have to rely entirely on - well, OK, imagination.
The basement in question was in the aging Fort Douglas Museum, although why ghosts would bother with a museum is a whole other column. When I'm a ghost, I'm haunting Jennifer Aniston's bathroom.
The ghost hunters were a combined team of the Idaho Spirit Seekers and the Utah Ghost Hunters Association willing to tolerate the presence of an avowed skeptic.
After dark, we crept down into the musty basement with cameras, video recorders, and temperature gauges. I'm not sure it's possible to sneak up on a ghost, but we gave it a good try.
We listened, filmed, recorded and poked around in places only spiders would hang out. We were after ''grounded'' spirits, ghosts who couldn't move on.
Eventually, someone claimed to have recorded two young female spirits.
Back out in the light, I watched the video but couldn't see anything even when a ghost hunter traced their outline on the screen. "See?" Nope. We tried again and got zip.
''Please come back,'' the hunters pleaded with the spirits. ''We're friends. . . . We won't hurt you.''
When the ghost girls refused to cooperate, I hollered, ''Get out here right now. Don't make me get the belt!''
The mood blown, we went over to the old fort cemetery.
Today, the Fort Douglas Cemetery is several tidy acres overgrown by a technology park, its mute headstones a silent library of Utah's brightest and darkest history.
I stood in the middle of the cemetery and felt 150 years slip past me in the night.
Col. Patrick Connor, annoyer of Brigham Young and killer of Indian women and children, is buried here. His wife, who hated Utah, is ironically ''grounded'' here forever.
So are massacred German POWs, suicides, murdered marshals, cholera victims, deserters, prostitutes and veterans of half a dozen wars. Shoulder to shoulder they lay, waiting for us.
With that kind of company, who needs ghosts?
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_4345165
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