Just after midnight, in a dark basement corridor of the venerable Capitol Theatre, ghosthunter Troy Wood checks the dim red glow of his temperature scanner and stops dead.
"It's really cold right here. Did you feel something?" he whispers. We hold our breath and shiver as a door creaks down the shadowy hall. Is it George?George is the mischievous spirit of an usher who burned to death when the theater caught fire during a Rita Hayworth double feature on Independence Day 50 years ago.
To this day, the smell of smoke occasionally wafts through the theater.
"I feel his presence every once in a while," said Doug Morgan, the theater's resident stage manager for 23 years. Like during a 'Nutcracker' opening night years ago when computerized lighting systems were still new. Just before showtime, the lights failed; the power source and the program worked, but the stage was dark.
Five minutes before curtain, Morgan got angry.
"I walked down on stage and looked up and let out a bellow, 'D--- it George, knock it off or I'm going to have you exorcised!"' Morgan said. "My stage lights came right on."
On this night the sold-out opera went smoothly, and as dolled-up theater-goers bustled out, we slipped into the stage door of the ornate theater, toting the Salt Lake City Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society's arsenal of heat sensors, motion detectors, videocameras and tape recorders in a search for the real phantom of the opera.
There's even a cell phone in case someone -- or something -- decides to lock us in a stairwell. Wood swears it has happened before.
As security guards lock up the theater, Wood and Gary Mlynarski, who founded the SLCGHRS, surround the stage with motion detectors and nervously eye the rows of abandoned velvet seats and swaying chandeliers.
The Capitol Theatre is a favorite haunt for these ghost hunters, who have also stalked spirits at Salt Lake City's City-County Building and a slew of historic homes and creepy cemeteries around Utah. The group, which Mlynarksi formed in February with help from the Internet-based Toronto Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society, is one of three in the Salt Lake area. There are dozens more around the country.
"We have members in Canada and a few in Mexico now," said Michael Barrett of the American Ghost Society. "It's over 2,500 members now and growing all the time."
In fact, Barrett said, to handle the flood of queries the group has designated about 50 regional coordinators, who are available on e-mail to give tips on researching hauntings.
There are hundreds of other groups out there on the Internet, offering up information as general as how to videotape apparitions and as specific as where to find ghostly sites in Clark County, Wash. And that doesn't include a slew of hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions that advertise themselves as haunted with the hope of luring curious customers.
"I've seen an increase in interest lately, and I don't really know what to put that off to except the interest of recent movies, like the 'Sixth Sense' and 'The Blair Witch Project,' " said Richard Atkinson, a Weber State University psychology professor who teaches a course in paranormal psychology. "It might be that with the onset of the millennium and the millennial fever that people have, interest might be stimulated."
Yet despite America's fascination with the frightening, ghost hunting isn't a hobby everyone understands.
"They all think I'm crazy," said Mlynarski, who has been fascinated by the supernatural since a Coast Guard stint on Iwo Jima, which he says is heavily haunted.
Yet practitioners insist they're not inclined to believe every ghost story they hear. In fact, Mlynarski and Barrett said most of the hauntings they are called in to investigate at local homes or businesses can be easily explained.
"We're not ghostbusters, far from it," Barrett said. "We can tell you if it's definitely not a ghost, if it's a leaky pipe or wind coming through the window. About 90 percent of the time, that's what it is, and we can find it for them and fix it and then their ghosts go away."
But sometimes it's the real thing. Wood and Mlynarski pull out an album of photographs with mysterious specks, orbs, and streaks across them. Sure, those could be technical glitches -- but what about the terrifying face that appears in a curtain in one picture? Or the tremulous voices that appear on normal audiotapes made at haunted houses or graveyards, warning visitors to get out or threatening them with death?
"People have a tendency to want to impose order on anything ambiguous," said Atkinson.
Then there's the Capitol Theatre guard who used to kill time on his watch sending paper airplanes from the balcony -- until one dark night, as he sat in the guard booth alone, he was hit in the back of the head with a paper airplane out of nowhere. And the construction worker who swears he was pushed off a scaffold by a cold hand. And the "ghost light" -- a bare bulb set center stage that Morgan said is to keep a ghost occupied -- that has been said to flicker inexplicably.