Haunting license

SALEM -- Any ghosts hanging around St. Peter Street the other day must have been laughing like drunken sailors, assuming that the spiritual world has a navy, that ghosts are patriotic enough to enlist, and that they're not above enjoying an occasional pop.

In any case, at 35 St. Peter St. -- the site, by the way, where women were jailed to await their fate at witch trials in the 17th century -- if ghosts happened to drift into the Spellbound Museum, then not far from the shrunken head and the Dracula dagger and the bottle of vampire wine (red, naturally), they would have heard curator Mollie Stewart explaining how some ghosts are poltergeists and so darn mischievous they turn switches on and off and even hide car keys.

This is a weird week in this seashore city of 40,000, which attracts an estimated 800,000 to 1 million visitors a year, about a third of them drawn by Salem's obsession with evil spirits, with ghosts, goblins, demons, witches, denizens of hell, and inhabitants of Pandemonium.

"At this time of year, everybody gets involved," says Carol Thistle, director of Haunted Happenings, a nonprofit group that caters to tourists. "We have the Salem Witch Village, the House of the Seven Gables, the Witch Dungeon, the Witch History Museum, and the Haunted Footsteps Ghost Tour. Even the tall ship docked at our wharf presents scary sea stories."

Over at the Spellbound Museum, which opened this summer, any ghost worth his or her salt would recognize Stewart -- she's the blond woman in black with a lace blouse set off by a necklace with a black bat.

Stewart, 40, was born in Canada and adopted by Americans. She lived in California, Georgia, Nevada, and New Orleans before settling in New England three years ago for the changing seasons, and in Salem specifically because of its affection for the occult.

"I've been interested in the supernatural since I was a kid," says Stewart. "But I don't believe in mumbo jumbo. I'm the world's biggest skeptic, and I became a ghost investigator so that I could actually, scientifically, without a doubt prove that energy forms and ghosts exist."

Even before the museum opens at 11 a.m., visitors are lined up to pay $10 to tour 13 exhibit cases jammed with such supernatural curios as voodoo dolls, alligator feet, and Professor Ernst Blomberg's Vampire Killing Kit, which was popular in the 19th century among nervous Brits headed to Eastern Europe and looking for ways to ward off vampires. Included in the kit, along with the wooden stake, the gun with silver bullets, and such antidotes as holy water and oil of garlic is a small bottle of Blomberg's magic potion, unopened for 150 years and guaranteed to prevent the victim of a vampire bite from traversing to the ranks of the undead.

The first customer is a middle-age woman drawn to a display of Ouija boards, which are meant to facilitate communication between this world and the next.

"We don't recommend fooling with those things," Stewart says. She points to a book in the exhibit. "This book gives examples of spirit possession after people fooled with Ouija boards. Once you put the board away, that doesn't mean the spirits go away, and this is how people get into trouble."

Another woman asks about Stewart's photographs of ghosts, or more precisely orbs (white spots) and ectoplasm (wispy clouds).

"I took these at Gallows Hill Park," Stewart says. "Ghosts are high-speed, so you can't see them with the naked eye. I used 800-speed film and shot randomly, and look how the images are blasting by. That's an orb, which is energy that's actually a ghost, and this is how it manifests itself on film. This isn't cigarette smoke, bee pollen, dust, ragweed, dirty air, or water spots on my lens. I'm meticulous about it."

Tara D'Agaro of Washington, Pa., approaches.

"You're a ghost hunter," she says to Stewart in a voice barely audible above the music, the theme from "Nightmare on Elm Street."

"I'm a licensed ghost hunter with the International Ghost Hunters Society," says Stewart. "I'm also a certified parapsychologist, and so, since 1999, I've been doing ghost investigations."

"This is crazy," D'Agaro says, "but my husband and I are from Pennsylvania, and we think there's something in our house. Can you help get rid of it?"

"I can't do any traveling, but you might want to contact the Philadelphia Ghost Hunters Alliance," says Stewart.

"Well, strange things happen," says D'Agaro. "One night we were in bed and the hair dryer turned on by itself. Two weeks ago, I was in bed watching television and the nightstand moved. And I've seen flashes in pictures, things that wouldn't be there. I said to my husband, there's something in this house."

"It could be a poltergeist, which is a mischievous spirit you'll never see. They love to tantalize. If it's in pictures, it could be orbs or ectoplasm. Do you know anything about the history of the house?"

"It's a new home, four years old."

"What about the property? What was it 200 years ago? Is somebody buried there? If ghosts have an emotional attachment to property or to a physical possession, they visit again and again."

"It might have been farmland," D'Agaro says. "Do animals stay around after death? There was a fire that killed 20 horses."

"I've been told by people who've lost pets that they still sense them," says Stewart. "Like they can hear them scratching at the door or barking or they can actually feel them jumping on the couch. They don't feel anything, but they get residual energy, like they're still here, even though they're dead. And I don't see why that wouldn't be true. When people lose their physical self, they can still have energy forces that fill their volume and we can document them, so why couldn't animals, too? I mean, if the basic law of physics is that energy never dies, then where does the energy go?"

Stewart directs D'Agaro to a display of ghost-finding equipment that includes an electromagnetic meter that measures electrical and magnetic movement. "When ghosts are there, it actually kicks off the needle gauge and you start taking pictures at random."

The display also includes an infrared thermometer that measures changes in temperature. "Like, for example, here, at 10:45," says Stewart, "the temperature dropped from 70 to 31 degrees."

Around the room, the displays feature numerology, palmistry, tarot cards, and African spirits of the underworld. What brings them alive, in a manner of speaking, is Stewart's patter.

Referring to the candle snuffer on the voodoo display, she warns that the flame of a candle should be extinguished only by a snuffer or by squeezing with the fingers,. "If you blow out the flame," she says, "you blow away good fortune and protection."

And, she might have added, you get wax on the tablecloth.