A fright-seeing tour

It was a good day for ghost hunting.

Gloomy skies scowled down on a raw, wet afternoon. And whether it was the clouds or the moody old buildings or the Yankee fascination with history, people had plenty of eerie stories to tell during a recent tour of some lesser known haunted places west of Boston.

Aimee Wagner's tale was set at a local college.

One morning about a year ago, Wagner, 22, was washing her face in the bathroom of Cyrus Peirce Hall, her Framingham State College dorm, when she noticed something bizarre.

There was a red handprint on her bare arm, as if someone had squeezed her hard. But she had just woken up and didn't remember anyone grabbing her arm the day before.

Certainly with such a dark mark, she would have remembered something like that, she thought. She put her own hand next to her arm, thinking maybe she did it in her sleep, but the mysterious hand had longer fingers than she does.

''I called up my mom," said the senior English major, who seemed both fascinated and anxious about her experience.

A college spokesman had offered to set up an interview with Wagner, because she lives in Horace Mann Hall, which is supposedly haunted. But Wagner said her former dorm, Peirce, is the real story.

Paranormal researcher Jeff Belanger and psychic Victoria Laurie, who accompanied a Globe West reporter on the spooky tour, peppered Wagner with questions.

The strange case of the red handprint wasn't the first time she had been rattled by a spine-tingling encounter with something she couldn't quite explain, Wagner said while leading the group through both Mann and Peirce,

Often while living at Peirce, which was built in 1915, she would feel like someone was in her room with her, she said.

''It was oppressive at times," she said, adding that she regularly felt compelled to check under her bed when she entered her room.

Wagner said she had to stop doing laundry in the basement of Peirce because she had too strong a sense of the ghostly presence of a young woman.

The laundry room has sagging ceilings and dim lighting. Rows of wood ironing boards are bolted to the floor across from washing machines. Next to the entrance is a small service door that offers a view of piles of earth in the building's unfinished bowels.

Belanger asked Wagner if she felt nervous being down there, even with three people to keep her company. ''Honestly, yeah, a little bit," she replied.

Belanger helped set up the tour, which included the dorms in Framingham, the Needham Town Hall, and the Bellingham Historical Museum, by choosing obscure haunted hangouts that he had never visited. One of his favorite resources is www.theshadowlands.net/places, a website that lists scary stops by community, including Ashland, Lincoln, Marlborough, Medway, Milford, Norfolk, Shrewsbury, Waltham, Watertown, Wellesley, and Weston.

At the Needham Town Hall, built in 1902, Herb Morin, an affable, grandfatherly custodian, took a couple of minutes from work to say that he, too, has sensed the supernatural.

''It is haunted," he said. ''There's always stuff going on. You hear noises, like somebody walking."

He said he usually gets in around 6:30 a.m., when no one else -- at least no one living -- is in the building. And the sounds he hears seem to come from the attic. Morin said he has named the ghost ''Wilhelmina."

When first entering the building before finding Morin, Belanger and Laurie had gone racing up to the attic, like trick-or-treaters running for the next house. Unoccupied and quiet, with exposed insulation and beams, the attic was creepy. Laurie rolled her eyes. She felt nothing there, though she did feel a presence, possibly a woman, in the basement.

Morin may have been a little spooked, but he talks about the ghost like an old friend.

''I wish," said Morin, ''she'd take a dust rag and help."

For Belanger, 31, who lives in Bellingham, it was all in a day's work. The author of several books on the paranormal, published by New Page Books, and the founder of ghostvillage.com, he routinely does this sort of investigation.

Laurie, 38, who works in Franklin, was somewhat out of her element. Usually she spends weeknights giving psychic readings over the phone and her weekends are set aside for writing. Laurie writes mystery novels, published by Signet, detailing the adventures of a sassy psychic.

Riding in the car between stops, Laurie and Belanger talked shop -- agents, book deals, and their colleagues in the business. They dished on how pop culture delves into their (other) world.

They exchanged business cards. Belanger's pictures a friendly looking ghost, and Laurie's has a winged, angelic figure. They chatted about their other jobs that help pay the bills. Belanger does graphic design for websites from home, and Laurie supervises a customer service call center.

Belanger had a lot of questions for Laurie about how she does her thing.

''For me, intuition -- it's a very guided experience for me," she explained.

She said she begins readings by getting her client's name and birth date. Then pictures and words come to her, she believes, through spirit guides.

Pretty, with long blond hair, blue eyes, and an easy smile, Laurie is surprisingly down to earth and often rolls her eyes at the cheesy stereotypes linked with those interested in the paranormal.

She confided that her profession hasn't always been great for her love life.

Once, she said, on what had seemed like a promising date, she revealed her unusual career. Initially her date seemed interested and asked for a reading. She said she doesn't usually do ''sideshow" readings, but she had downed a stiff drink and worked her magic.

She told her date that his mother and sister both worked in healthcare. It was true. He was a little taken aback, but not horrified, said Laurie. Then she told him there was something important in his life related to skiing. He had just bought a condo in Utah for that purpose.

She imitated the startled look on his face. ''That was the last date we ever had," she said.

Belanger said his wife, Megan, has been completely supportive of his specter-seeking. Last year they never got around to putting up a Christmas tree, but they always deck the house out for Halloween, he said.

A couple of years ago, when they had only two or three strobe lights for the yard, his wife said they definitely needed more.

''I knew I had married the right woman," he said.

Belanger is no ghostbuster. He doesn't wear a proton pack or carry an ecto-containment system. His number one tool, he said, is breath mints because he ends up talking to the living much more than the dead.

He's a researcher, and for him good ghost stories are just as much about history and folklore as about things that go bump in the night. He claims no psychic abilities whatsoever and sounds truly disappointed when he admits he has never seen an apparition. That's why Laurie was along -- Belanger wanted to see if she could sense anything.

The two were put in touch through a mutual acquaintance -- the mother of one of the players on the girls' soccer team he coaches.

In Framingham, Laurie felt nothing, she said. But in Bellingham, at the Bellingham Historical Museum, the occult vibe was strong.

''When I first walked in here, I felt this tightness," she said. ''It's like walking into an overheated room. It's just thick."

She put her hand up to Belanger's chest to demonstrate the feeling she gets when some kind of energy is right up close to her.

The lower level of the museum, which was the library from 1930 until 1989, is supposedly haunted by the ghost of a librarian. But Laurie said she got no hint of her.

The presence she felt, she said, was male and might be associated with one of the several old military uniforms on display. She said she kept feeling the echo of an explosion, like from a grenade, near her face, and she wondered if maybe the presence was trying to show her how he died.

The museum doubles as the Bellingham Historical Commission headquarters. Ernest Taft, commission chairman, said he hates talking about the supernatural.

But then he helpfully related the stories he has heard about the old library -- chairs being pushed out, books moving, and a giant dictionary opening on its own.

''We're not here to talk about spirits and ghosts. We have the doors open to promote Bellingham history," he said. ''[But] we're not going to deny what happened here before we got here."

Back in the car, Belanger said he thought Taft was holding back because there were too many interviewers there. Sighing, the ghost hunter said he would go back alone and try again.

Lisa Kocian can be reached at 508-820-4231 or by e-mail at lkocian@globe.com.