William Cook was 16 when he saw the ghost.
His sister owned a farmhouse in New Jersey. Standing outside one day, Cook looked up at the attic window, and saw someone staring back at him. But no one should have been in the attic. No one could have been in the attic; the door was nailed shut.
''It was glowing,'' he said of the figure in the window.
Cook, three decades older than he was when he saw the ghost, told this story last week in the kitchen of the 1818 Tavern in Palmer Township. He's still looking for ghosts, only with a few more people -- he's one of the founders of the Eastern Pennsylvania Paranormal Society -- and a lot of high-tech equipment.
Have you seen the show ''Ghost Hunters'' on the SciFi Channel? Cook, of Bath, trained with those people and uses a lot of the same technology used on the show: electromagnetic field readers, infrared cameras and audio recorders to catch the sound of ghostly voices.
The paranormal society hopes to find the truth about the tavern, where workers have seen and heard strange things over the years: names being called out when no one else is in the building, mysterious figures who appear on the landing and in one of the booths and then vanish, a bar stool that seems to move on its own.
For the Stem family, which has owned the building since 2006, all of those things are evidence that the tavern is haunted.
''I've had too many experiences, my family has had too many experiences, to think that it's not,'' said daughter Kelly Stem.
On Aug. 31, Stem and her sister, Tina Wilder, walked eight members of the paranormal society through the tavern's dining room, attic and basement, telling them stories of apparent supernatural encounters.
A few weeks ago, their father replaced an old heating unit in the basement. It was unplugged from the wall, with no power running to it, yet the fan inside ran for several hours after it was unhooked. The sisters have avoided staying in the basement for very long since then. Stem said they're not sure whose ghost, or ghosts, haunt the building.
''You hear little stories here and there,'' she said, including one about a woman who was murdered there many years ago, when the building was supposedly used as a brothel.
Instead of looking to historic documents, the paranormal society's investigators tried to go to the source. That's where EVP -- electronic voice phenomenon -- comes in. The investigators set up tape recorders around the tavern, and let them go.
''They say your chances of catching a ghost on record are about 3 percent,'' Cook said. ''So it's not too good.''
Despite the odds, he set up a monitor hooked to a series of cameras, each broadcasting from different rooms. One of them, in the second floor office, was crooked, sending back a slanted image.
''It's like
Batman and
Robin,'' Cook said into his radio to his son Brent, referring to the 1960s TV show ''Batman,'' when the camera would slant whenever bad guys were on screen.
Meanwhile, some of the investigators went into the tavern's darkened attic -- there's no electricity there -- and sat quietly, asking questions such as, ''If there's someone here, can you make your presence known to us?'' No response came. At least not verbally.
''I just felt someone breathe on me,'' said Antia Mulholland, a paranormal society investigator from Bethlehem and one of two clairvoyants on the team. The other is Catherine Birgfeld of
Riegelsville, but don't expect her to have visions or read minds.
''It's kind of like this: You get vibes,'' Birgfeld said. ''It's not like, 'I can see ghosts, pay attention to me!'''
According to its Web site, the paranormal society has investigated 10 other sites in the Lehigh Valley, including Cozmos' Food & Spirits in
Stockertown and the Young Republicans Club in Easton -- both of which were found to be haunted. With the other sites -- all private homes the paranormal society doesn't identify -- it was a mix; some were haunted, some weren't.
And what about the 1818 Tavern?
''Absolutely,'' Cook said, based on the evidence from the EVP recordings, in which unexplained sighs and whispers can be heard in the background, if you listen hard enough.
The haunting doesn't scare the owners. Kelly Stem said they think the ghost is a friendly one who appreciates the way they've kept the building from being too modernized. And Stem relatives knew what they were getting into when they purchased the property.
Tina Wilder remembered the warning the family got at the time: ''They said, 'You're buying a house, but you're also buying a ghost.'''
tom.coombe@mcall.com610-559-2157
''I've had too many experiences, my family has had too many experiences, to think that it's not'' haunted.
KELLY STEM
