“Are you male, or female?” the psychic asks. She seems to be addressing the empty air.

Her arms outstretched, Martina Baker holds a pair of L-shaped copper dowsing rods, one in each hand, pointed directly at the massive gravestone, as if she’s about to fire off a couple rounds, six-shooter style, at an already-vanquished opponent. Cylindrical handles allow the rods to pivot freely. “Um, cross for male, open for female,” Martina adds, as if an afterthought.

A clock loudly tolls the hour. Abruptly, the rods swivel away from one another. Female. Whoa. Did those rods just move by themselves? Martina, motionless in the bright sunshine, appears to be holding her clenched fists perfectly still.

“Interesting!” says my wife, Jennifer. After a few more questions delivered to granite marker, Martina moves along to quiz another headstone. Another ghost.

The decrepit monuments, most bearing birth dates in the 1800s, list crazily in the sunlight, the result of northwest soil turning to pudding each winter when the rains come, then resettling as solid earth once more in the summer, over and over, for lifetimes.

In this hushed, poetic setting, the outgoing Martina stands out, with her readiness to laugh, her thick, straw-colored hair and her wide, movie star sunglasses. Even down to her lipstick choice, Martina favors an all-black ensemble, her dark pants and shirt offset by the several colorful bracelets that slip up her forearms toward her elbows as she aims the dowsing rods. Martina’s husband Todd, who, like his wife, is in his late thirties or early forties, is the co-founder and only other member of the Pacific Paranormal Research Society. He stands behind her, camera at the ready, his long, curly brown hair checked by a Pacific Paranormal Research Society ball cap, the front of which reads “Ghost Hunters are Deadicated.” My eyes drift from the hat to Todd’s matching tee shirt: “Back off, man! I’m a ghost hunter!”

Martina and Todd Baker have met us here on this hot July day, in a Victorian-era cemetery in Eugene, Oregon, to help me determine if the memorial park is haunted. I’m trying to answer that question for a pre-Halloween story in a local magazine. My editor wants me to get to the bottom of the ghost stories that have surrounded Eugene Pioneer Cemetery for decades.

The memorial park is situated at the southwest corner of the University of Oregon campus, horseshoed on three sides by the teeming life of an academic community. The beer-soaked escapades of fraternity brothers have over the years given rise to numerous legends, such as shrieks emanating from the cemetery after dark, strange fires burning through the night and even the discovery of candle wax and holes dotting a gravesite. Strangest of all may be the legend of a “Peeping Tom ghost” who reportedly strolls onto campus to glance through dorm room windows.

Here I am, ghost-hunting on a summer day. At first I felt sheepish inviting Martina and Todd to make the two-hour drive from their home base in Portland on a sunny weekend day. I assumed that paranormal investigators would want their investigation site to be suitably dim and foreboding, but scheduling demanded a daylight spook search. When they arrived in the cemetery, however, the Bakers explained that our afternoon visit to the graveyard is just as likely to net us paranormal entities, and that cemeteries, in fact, are often no more haunted than any other locale.

I’m waiting to be impressed. I’m trying to remain open to the idea of shaking hands this afternoon with the supernatural, but part of me is skeptical of how many average Americans claim to have seen a ghost: 23 percent, according to a 2007 Associated Press poll. The number of survey respondents who report a belief in ghosts, 34 percent, is even more impressive – a full third of the population. Perhaps the Bakers can prove my skepticism unfounded.

Today in the cemetery, the Bakers look official with their aluminum briefcases, the type that carry plutonium or state secrets in the movies. From these, my guides produce a complicated array of instruments and gauges. This is the Bakers’ first investigation of Pioneer Cemetery, and they want to document it thoroughly. Todd carries a digital camera to catch images of apparitions. A small plastic box that resembles a Star Trek tricorder turns out to be a device for detecting electromagnetic waves. Perhaps the coolest gadget is a digital thermometer that reads temperature changes instantaneously and from a distance… handy for identifying the pockets of cold air supposedly surrounding specters, as the unquiet dead are said to manifest themselves by leeching energy from their surroundings.

This high-end detection equipment doesn’t come cheap, so the Bakers each keep day jobs. Martina is an administrator for an air conditioning company, while Todd, a physical anthropologist, works for an environmental consulting firm. The Bakers rarely accept payment for their activities, and investigations of haunted family homes are always gratis.

Besides photos and cold spots, the Bakers tell me, today they’re hoping today to catch some good, clear electronic voice phenomena. EVPs are recordings of the environment, made with a simple audiotape or digital recorder. In the moment, in the field, investigators may not hear the verbal communications of ghosts. But simple computer audio programs can enhance these supposedly supernatural mutterings to a level appropriate for the human ear.

While many researchers and investigators have attempted to communicate with disembodied spirits using mechanical contrivance – even Thomas Edison developed a device, sadly unrealized, to assist in spirit communication – other scientists maintain that EVP is nothing more than static and stray noise, transformed in the hearer’s mind by wishful thinking into substantive words and phrases.

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