MotherTown -

Bill Whitehead and Adam Ingano were searching for spirits in the basement of a local establishment with a high school friend of Whitehead's. It's a place that's allegedly haunted, and they had been there many times before. Whitehead tried hard to put the power of suggestion out of his head.

"It's a creepy area," Whitehead said. "If I hear a knocking sound, is that just me because I'm creeped out, or is there something there?"

As the three walked back up toward the stairs, Ingano, with uncharacteristic alarm in his voice, suddenly shouted, "Run. Run!" The friend obeyed. Whitehead turned around and saw Ingano, who was standing alone, move forward as if he had been shoved. Ingano described the encounter as a push of sorts, as if he was in a crowded line with someone impatient behind him.

Ingano was a bit unnerved by the experience; he said he's seen and heard many things he can't explain, but he'd never been physically touched before. The pictures taken around that time clearly show a round, white orb.

Was it a ghost? The men, while not skeptics, are careful to rule out any logical explanations for what seems to be a paranormal experience. They were in an unused basement, Ingano said, so, after calming down, the guys went back down and tried to shake up the dust, taking several pictures and comparing them to the original photo.

"Nine times out of then, we can reproduce the picture," Ingano said.

But not that time.

Looking for phantoms

Ingano is no stranger to paranormal experiences, though this is the first time anything has reached out and touched him. For most of his life, he's been interested in spirit activity and spends his spare time checking out alleged haunted places. His interest grew out of his childhood - for the first decade of his life, Ingano lived in a house in Clinton's Acre neighborhood which he believes was haunted.

Whitehead, who lives in Boylston, has also been interested in spirits since childhood, though he didn't have the same sort of first-hand experiences.

"My grandmother had a few stories about after her husband died, his spirit or whatever you want to call it was supposedly coming to her," Whitehead said. "Within the first week or so [after he died], it was just her in the house, and he came to her and sat on the bed. He told her, 'Everything will be all right' and hugged her. That's the long and short of the story, and that's what really got me interested."

Even Ingano's recent close encounter hasn't curbed Whitehead's enthusiasm. "Nothing's actually happened to me ... I think it would be kind of cool if it did, but I'm saying that now. When it happens, who knows."

Whitehead and Ingano are so interested in the paranormal they've invited anyone who thinks they've experienced a haunting to contact them at haunting.stories@gmail.com. Both men, however, are quick to point out that they do not consider themselves experts. In fact, Whitehead isn't sure such a thing even exists.

"I have a big problem with people who claim to be experts in the field of the paranormal," Whitehead said. "No one is because ... with ghosts or any paranormal activity, you have to wait around and hope something happens and you can't recreate that every time. So you can be an expert in how to conduct an investigation, you can bring certain tools, but you have to take into account a bazillion different things. ... That's where Adam and I want to be very clear - we're not going to claim to be experts. We'd like to find out as much as we can about it and try to come up with our own theories."

The men hope this approach will give those who have had paranormal experiences some reassurance that they are not crazy.

"If you think something's going on and you live with yourself every day, you're going to convince yourself something's going on," Whitehead explained. "But if someone else comes in and experiences something, then you can say, OK, something strange is going on, whatever it might be."

How can you know?

One of the things Whitehead and Ingano do is search for logical explanations to alleged hauntings.

"I always find it interesting that hauntings mainly happen at night in old places that probably aren't sealed up very well," Whitehead said. "I've yet to hear stories about a brand-new house in the middle of the day where there's something going on."

Ingano said he once shared a two-family house with a roommate, and their neighbors had been hearing some strange noises. One night, Ingano's roommate heard an odd noise as well - a clinking sort of noise, he said, that was clearly not the radiator. The roommate thought it was a spirit, but after some looking around, Ingano realized it was a bag of screws that had fallen off a renovated staircase onto the metal radiator below.

But sometimes, there is no such explanation, and this is what keeps the guys interested.

In Clinton, for example, there is a public building where several people have claimed that the elevator will just start moving on its own. So last summer, with the building locked and empty save for one worker, the guys took an afternoon and checked it out.

"We were down in one of the hallways ... by the elevator and there was also a bathroom there," Whitehead said. "It has no door, just an open walkway. We were down the hall and the machinery for the elevator started moving on its own ... and we heard the water running in that bathroom. We ran down the hall and in the middle our running down [the water] stopped. But sure enough, there was a wet sink and it had been bone-dry when we checked it before hand."

Whitehead said he's always a little leery of phenomenon involving appliances, but the sink was something else.

"If it's mechanical or electric, you have no idea if it's a short or doing it on its own," Whitehead said. "But when something like the water faucet has been turned on, that's pretty neat."

Are you there?

All these experiences, Whitehead said, beg the question: Why are places haunted and are the dead trying to tell us something? There have been many studies done which conclude that extreme emotional states can make a psychic print on the environment, he said.

"That's why London Tower is so famous, because horrible things happened there," Whitehead said. "Then we think about it ... is it the actual spirit visiting? Is it trapped here on earth and can't move on, or is it a psychic print, where it's almost like watching a film, and just repeating itself. ... That's why it's important to find out the history of the building and talk to everyone at some point."

Whitehead has always wondered if the opposite is true as well.

"If someone experiences extreme pain or whatever it might be enough to make an impression, what about a place of extreme joy?" he said. "But no one ever hears about a happy haunting. That would make more sense, rather than a spirit just randomly coming to pay you a visit for absolutely no reason."

Another theory, Whitehead said, is that spirits need to absorb energy to manifest themselves. Ingano and Whitehead saw this first hand as part of an investigation with media personnel who brought cameras, tape recorders and video cameras with them. Even though all the batteries had been charged right before the group met in the allegedly haunted space, within 10 minutes, they were all drained completely.

The idea that energy and spirits are related is relatively common, Whitehead said.

"In science, they say energy is not created or destroyed, it's just transferred," he explained. "So that means the entire planet is just the same energy being recycled. If your brain is creating 'electricity,' when your body dies, that has to go somewhere."

Answering the call

Ingano and Whitehead have invited spirits to connect with them and, frankly, Whitehead said he saw no reason to wait until 2 a.m.

"If a place is supposedly haunted, I don't see why it wouldn't be active during the day," Whitehead said.

So the men went over to the Holder Memorial in Clinton, a 100-year-old building full of memorabilia of both famous and ordinary Clintonians and some donated items, including a Bible from the 1500s.

"You cannot have this many objects that were dear to someone in life and not have some of them bring along a little bit of baggage," Ingano said.

"We tested this by calling out, 'If there's anything herd with us, could you please make a sound,'" Whitehead said. "We said that a few times, then I said, 'could you please make a knock' and we heard a knock. I tried it again, nothing, then I asked again, and there was another knock."

Still, Whitehead, ever the realist, is not willing to say that noise was definitely the Ghost of Something Past.

"We believe it was something, but we can't say 100 percent," Whitehead said. "It could have been lucky timing on my part with the knock, or ... an acorn fell on the roof. If you go into a situation 100 percent convinced that you're going to hear a ghost, you're going to hear a ghost. ... I want to look for the simplest explanation."

One way researchers try to "prove" the existence of ghosts is through photographs. Ingano recalled a talk he did at the Holder when he was suddenly aware of some sort of presence over his shoulder.

"I told people to take pictures," Ingano said. "I said, 'You're going to find something up in this corner.' And they did. I've got three different cameras, each with a weird spot up there."

"So many of them can be explained, but every so often we have pictures of orbs that are either really big and or bright compared to other particles in the air," Whitehead said. "Sometimes, I think it might be something caught."

Can Heaven wait?

If there is a glorious afterlife, then why would one want to hang around on the earthly plane? Whitehead has a few ideas, theories about which he's read that ring true.

"I would think if they're conscious spirits who know what they're doing, either something so horrible happened to them that they don't know their dead, or they realize it and they are so angry about it that they're sticking around and they're not leaving," Whitehead said. "You feel bad for them, if that is the case with some of this stuff."

In general, Whitehead doesn't think ghosts mean us any harm, but he has heard of times when people have been physically attacked. While Whitehead acknowledges that in this era of technology, it's easy to cook up a hoax, he said he has seen a few videos - a door violently shaking in its frame when there is no one around it, for example -- that seem to be credible.

"I'd love to see something like that," Whitehead said, and then added, "And have a few other people see it at the same time."

The men are respectful of the potential spirits, and of the places they may be. For that reason, unless they have specific permission, Ingano and Whitehead do not disclose the places they've investigated. This protects the privacy not only of the current owner, Whitehead said, but also of the spirit itself. This is also something the men try to convey to the spirits.

"I try to think ... to them, 'I'm not here to bother you, I just want to know if you're here,'" Whitehead said. "I'm really not there to exploit anything."

Death goes on

Most of us who believe in an afterlife take solace that our loved ones, when they die, have gone somewhere and maybe even watch over us from time to time. Whitehead agreed.

"People are most afraid of unconscious death - that or you black out and that's it," he said. "I think it's even more comforting knowing that even if no one is watching me right now, once we're dead, there's a conscious afterlife. I think that's what everyone hopes for. It's comforting thinking there's something beyond this and that in certain circumstances you can communicate with each other."

If you have an experience to share with Adam and Bill, or a place you'd like them to visit, they can be contacted at haunting.stories@gmail.com.