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The Bakers have inherited these distinct classes of identifiable evidence – cold spots, EVP, spirit photography – from paranormal investigators who went before. While mention of ghosts in historical and legendary records date back to prehistory, the idea of a paranormal investigator did not come into vogue until the Victorian era. The Ghost Club, a paranormal team founded in 1862 in London, once boasted Charles Dickens as a member. Psychologist William James (brother of novelist Henry James) was an early president of the Society for Psychical Research, another British group, established in 1882 and still operating today. The SPR was formed to investigate mediums and hauntings, and set itself the task of outlining and identifying some of the common traits of spirit activity. Semi-celebrity paranormal researcher Harry Price investigated many purported hauntings, and in 1939, even unearthed human bones, after supposedly being told where to dig by a spirit who wanted to expose her own centuries-old gravesite. Like modern-day investigators, these ghost trackers of the past often sought to expose fraudulent hauntings, the better to strengthen genuine claims.

Today there are hundreds of ghost-hunting teams operating in every state of the Union. Classes in parapsychology and ghost investigation are available online and through some select institutions of higher learning, and the Bakers occasionally offer their own course of study. Because paranormal investigation has no accreditation body, and no special training is necessary to pick up a flashlight and start poking around in the dark, it’s relatively simple for a new group to form on a whim and to disband just as easily. An Internet listing of paranormal investigative teams located at Ghostvillage.com, a website purporting to be “the Web’s most popular paranormal destination,” lists almost 600 groups.

The TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society) Family, an umbrella organization of investigative teams – one of which is featured on the Sci-Fi Network Ghost Hunters reality program -- boasts nearly 80 affiliate teams of 800 investigators. Some of these have been formed, no doubt, as part of the rising popularity of the Ghost Hunters program itself, but TAPS Family membership requires a full year of investigative experience.  The investigators attached to TAPS do not include the countless ghost trackers across the country and throughout the world who have never sought membership. The Bakers, for example, with nearly a decade of experience, consider TAPS somewhat faddish and are content to remain unaffiliated.

In addition to their gadgetry, Martina has one other means of detection: her own intuitive self.  Her least technical but, she believes, her most effective ghost-tracking tools are the twin copper dowsing rods. She explains that the rods pivot and point based on the holder’s own energy in response to commands or simple yes-and-no questions, and, less rarely, when a nearby ghost decides to give them a good spin.

Todd claims no psychic intuition and busies himself with the equipment. Many ghost-hunting organizations arrange themselves in this manner, with staff loosely split along psychic – Martina prefers the word “sensitive” – and “techie” lines when they’re in the field. Like the early ghost investigators of the Victorian era, the Bakers’ debunk as often as they confirm. “We have to go in as skeptics, basically,” Todd tells me. The Bakers believe in ghosts, of course.  They’ve devoted their time, reputation, and finances to the Research Society since 2001, after all, logging hundreds of pieces of paranormal evidence in the intervening years. But how would their clients take any haunting seriously if the investigators labeled every stray creak, every trick of the light, as a ghost?

There has never been a time when Martina did not believe in ghosts. As a child growing up in a suburb of Los Angeles, Martina says she was entertained by the spirit of the blind man who had previously lived in her family’s home, as he continued in death to bump into household objects, just as he had in life. Todd’s childhood, by contrast, unfolded in rural Indiana, where he was exposed to dowsing at an early age. A second cousin named Gilbert, now nearly 80, still practices “water-witching,” the art of locating underground wells with a forked branch. Cousin Gilbert claims a 100 percent success rate.

To Todd and Martina, the paranormal world is divided into two classes of ethereal beings:  spirits, deceased visitors from beyond who can flit back and forth across the divide between this world and the next, sometimes visiting family members, familiar places, or even their own gravesites; and ghosts, sometimes stubborn or guilty beings who have often made a deliberate choice to remain on earth after death.  Ghosts, they say, are generally much more aggressive.  With luck, we’ll encounter spirits today but no ghosts.

Almost immediately, Martina reports that she has detected a presence on the memorial park’s west side. “It’s like a heavy feeling in your chest,” says Martina, “from here” – she points to her larynx  – “to here” – she indicates her stomach.

Martina’s intuition drives her the breadth of the park. At each stop, she poses a series of yes-or-no questions to the spirit, instructing our ethereal hosts to cross the dowsing rods for an affirmative response, part them for a negative. And move they do. It’s a near-breezeless day, and the ensuing motions of the rods appear to be drawing from some other exterior force.

The first spirit, a male, is interred close to a creepy cemetery sign with a warning against unauthorized burials…or removals. Todd soon confirms Martina’s impressions: “Oh yeah, I’m getting spikes up to three and four,” he says.  That’s three to four milligauss, a unit of radiation measure, on his electromagnetic field detector.  Paranormal investigators commonly believe that a spectral visitor will emit an electromagnetic field, the way an antenna or computer would. Ghost hunters, in fact, will often check environments that yield anomalous readings to make sure they’re not picking up distortion from a power line buried in a wall or underground. Here, in the middle of the cemetery, that seems unlikely.

Martina has found a name for her spirit on a nearby gravestone and begins conversing earnestly, matter-of-factly, with him, as if coaxing a shy child out from under the kitchen table: “Do you mind, Perry, if I look at you?” I was expecting a little more oomph to Martina’s mediumship, but she describes herself as a “quiet psychic.” Martina doesn’t showboat.

Even without theatrics, I have to admit I’m on the edge of my seat, or rather, on the edge of the neighboring cemetery plot, waiting for Martina to interpret: What could the spirit want to say to us? What’s Perry’s message to the living from across the great chasm of death?

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