Catching the Spirit (Ghost Hunter)

"Is there anybody here that would like to make contact?" asks Mike Carrico.

The founder of Las Vegas Paranormal Investigations, and his three co-workers, fall silent.

"You have to wait about 10 seconds," Carrico whispers to me. "It gives the entity enough time to manifest an answer."

Such are the rules of electronic voice phenomena.

"Give us a sign if you're here," Carrico continues. "Move something, or touch Corey on the back of his ear."

I interject, volunteering Mike's ear instead.

Did I mention that this is happening in my bedroom -- the one I have to try to sleep in every night until the housing market rebounds?

One night, about two weeks ago, our dog, Sammie, stared up at the landing above our stairway, at nothing, and wouldn't stop. I wrestled him into a couch cushion, but he broke free to continue staring.

I checked every corner of every room and closet, and was happy to emerge unmurdered.

"Why did you turn the bedroom TV on?" my fiancee, Jo Ann, asked me two nights later.

I was about to ask her the same question.

The remote control was face up on the nightstand, out of canine reach.

This is why there now is a wooden cross and a bottle of holy water on our dining room table -- along with $10,000 in unfamiliar gadgetry.

"Sweep it slowly," says Carrico, 39, as he shows me how to operate an electromagnetic frequency meter, which reveals the fields he says are indicative of apparitions (and alarm clocks).

Once a month, LVPI -- consisting of 11 members and four trainees -- gets a call from "doctors, lawyers -- just normal people," Carrico says.

Occasionally, voices, shadows and moving cold spots are recorded. Mostly, Carrico says, "the house is settling or someone's taking medication."

There's never a charge for the service -- which includes an exorcism, if necessary, in accordance with the intruded-upon's religion.

"We're just trying to help people," says Carrico, who earns his living supervising porters at a valley hotel.

"That's something I wanted to talk to you about," interrupts Wallie Luna, who co-founded the group with Carrico in 2004, and who drives a delivery truck. (A friendly debate ensues about how they can expect to purchase more night-vision equipment.)

Affiliated with The Atlantic Paranormal Society -- the Rhode Island-based group that stars in the Sci-Fi Channel's "Ghost Hunters" -- LVPI is part of a post-"Ghostbusters" movement attempting to use scientific methods to prove that your parents lied; that monster in your bedroom closet was real.

"It's a different realm of science that science doesn't want to accept," says Carrico, who is a devout Catholic. "But we believe that science will catch up to where they're gonna believe, and they'll actually come up with the tools to, say, read the energy leaving the body when a person dies."

It's not only scientists; even Carrico's wife of 10 years thinks he's full of it.

"But she supports me," Carrico says, "and I love her with all my heart."

I'm neither a believer nor a nonbeliever. When it comes to otherworldly matters, blissful ignorance is my cup of tea. I saw something unexplainable once, at New York state's Capitol in college, but it didn't follow me home. (I know. I checked under my bed for months.)

What happened to Jo Ann and me seems explainable: dust in the TV's on/off switch, hallucinogens in the Alpo. But you haven't heard what happened next.

About a week ago, before cleaning the master bathroom (because I never do), Jo Ann placed my black sneakers back in the closet. (I left them in the middle of the bedroom floor to remind me to wear them the next day.)

When she emerged from the bathroom, Jo Ann found the sneakers right back on the floor.

She must have been mistaken about putting them away, I told her. (They were high up on a shelf; again, out of canine reach.)

"If that makes you feel better, then I'll say that," Jo Ann replied.

Otherwise, she described her certainty as "99.99 percent." She added: "But I didn't sense anything negative."

I decided not to press the question of how to view anything that reaches from beyond the grave into our bedroom as a positive. Instead, I'm clinging to the 0.01 percent chance that she was incorrect. (The odds of a slot-machine jackpot are similar, and that has never stopped me from playing Haywire Deluxe when I see it and there's time.)

"What you've got sounds exciting," Carrico said, explaining that ghost hunting "gets cooler, and less scary, the more you do it."

Carrico -- who relocated from Lewiston, Idaho, in 1986 -- recounted his first contact, which occurred five years later. He was sweeping up the former Red Rock Theaters on West Charleston Boulevard.

"All of a sudden, the light went off," he said. "So I ran back up, turned it on and went back down and continued cleaning."

The light went out again.

"I thought, 'Someone must be playing a joke on me,' " he said. "When I turned the light on again, the middle seat in the third row was rocking by itself."

Later, Carrico said, he was told that a troubled former manager hanged himself in the lobby.

"Zoinks!" my inner Shaggy screams as I watch my infrared thermometer.

The readout indicates a plunge from 67 degrees on my bed to 19 underneath it -- precisely the last place on earth I want a dead guy to be. This spot isn't just cold; it's an interdimensional vortex to Quebec.

Earlier, I asked the former owner of our house about any unusual activity. He mentioned only a self-appointed homeowners' association vigilante who snoops around for garbage and water violations to report.

Highest on the list of my probable poltergeisting suspects are three grandparents, one cousin and two childhood friends. And a nice-size cocktail party could be summoned using Jo Ann's dead list. But an eerie coincidence points to a more unusual suspect: someone I met only once, for a few hours. About a week ago, I received a call from the mother of a man whose job I took, then wrote about, in July. He died of a heart attack, young and unexpectedly.

"He would have wanted you to know," she said, explaining that her son talked about me often, and that the day my article came out was "one of the best days of his life."

There also was a journal of his writings he would have wanted me to hear, his friends told me. (Some were read at his funeral, which I attended.)

Finally, I'm told he was a prankster -- precisely the type who would pay a visit just to freak me out for an article.

Oops.

"You switched it from Fahrenheit to Celsius," Carrico says, pointing to a switch on the infrared thermometer.

OK, so there's no cold spot. In fact, the ghost is clear -- a prognosis Carrico confirms over the phone three days later, after analyzing video for orbs and audio for disembodied messages.

"We didn't come up with any concrete evidence while we were there," he says.

It's the "while we were there" part that doesn't sit well. The plumbers I call always visit precisely when our water heater is working fine. As soon as they leave, the contraption spews black sediment into the pipes again, and I receive a $50 bill for the visit.

"That's correct," Carrico confirms. "We can't say for sure that you didn't have some sort of activity going on in your dwelling -- or that it won't be back."

Did you hear that noise upstairs?

Watch video of Levitan ghost hunting at www.reviewjournal.com/video/fearandloafing.html. Fear and Loafing runs on Mondays in the Living section. Levitan's previous adventures are posted at fearandloafing.com. If you've got an idea for Levitan, e-mail clevitan@ reviewjournal.com or call 383-0456.