She staked out one of the front rooms and waited for the ghost to appear. At about 2 a.m., she heard some loud banging in the front parlor. Grabbing the video camera, Katherine flipped on the lights and looked around the room. It was then that she saw several books fly off one of the bookcase shelves.

"Obviously, I left immediately after that," said Katherine, although she did mention that an MP returned later to put the books back on the shelf.

The Green House was built in 1880 as officer's quarters, but wasn't painted green until the early 1990's, according to Dave Johnson of the Casemate Museum. It ceased to be used as housing 20 years ago for a number of reasons, and was instead converted to a library for the Casemate Museum. The Green House was formerly the post commander's house, but little else is known about the residence or its inhabitants.

Ten years later, Katherine decided to try it again and I agreed to join her. Our goal was to stay in the house and see if the ghost, or whatever it was, would reappear.

Ghosts that haunt a house or location are said to have died in a traumatic, violent or emotional way, according to Jane Polonsky, author of the classic "The Ghosts of Fort Monroe." Because of the circumstances surrounding their death, the person seeks to complete the mission they were on at the time of their death. Since we did not know who the alleged ghost was, all we could assume was that he or she probably died in an untimely way.

We discussed what items were best for recording the presence of spirits. The internet is full of information for would-be ghost hunters. For several thousand dollars, you can outfit yourself with the basic tools of the trade: infrared film, a magnetic field detector, night vision binoculars, a negative ion detector, geiger counter and more. Since we had a more limited budget, we settled on a video camera, a 35mm camera with high-speed film, a digital camera, tape recorder, and a thermometer. According to popular belief, the room temperature drops dramatically when a ghost enters the room. For added protection, Katherine wore a cross around her neck. I hung onto my trusty notebook and pen.

It was dark when Katherine arrived at 8 p.m.

"When I first walked in, I heard music playing upstairs. It got louder and louder," she reported.

When I got there at 8:15 p.m., Katherine was in the kitchen. The music was still playing and she was recording it. The music was hard to identify. It sounded like classical, but had a sickly sweet old-fashioned sound. The oddest part was that there were no commercial breaks or DJ's breaking in to talk. The music just played on and on as we unpacked our things. I thought it might be a tape that someone rigged up to scare us. After all, several people knew about our plans­non-believers, all of them.

The Green House has a classic layout­double front doors open onto a foyer with a large, open staircase. The foyer leads back into the kitchen, with another room behind it. Off to each side of the foyer are two front rooms. It was in the room to the left, the 'haunted room' as we called it, where the books fell to the floor a decade before. We put our things in the room to the right. Off the kitchen is another, smaller set of stairs and a back door that leads onto a screened- in porch.

Katherine announced we were going to search for the source of the music. We decided to begin at the front staircase. To heighten the mood of utter terror, we left the lights off and used flashlights instead.

We climbed the staircase, calling out to the ghost to come out and make itself known. The music droned on and seemed to be coming from one of the back bedrooms. We carefully checked each room, door and closet as we crept along, until we finally came to the room the music was coming from.

If someone were trying to scare us, I figured they would hide the tape recorder in one of the file cabinets that lined the room. I pulled open a drawer. Nothing. Then I saw it. On top of the cabinet behind a tall stack of papers, was a radio. I switched it off and wondered if it would come back on later. That would be a good test for a ghost, we decided.

Katherine told me to go into the room where she had heard the banging last time.

"It was as if someone were banging their fists on the wall as hard as they could," Katherine recalled.

When I tip-toed up to the doorway, I saw a pair of legs against the back wall of the room.

Okay, I screamed. Katherine screamed. Loudly.

The neighbors had been alerted to our activities. Screams and other signs of distress were to be ignored, the sign of two nuts out doing what two nuts do together.

It was only a mannequin from the museum. There were several of them scattered around upstairs. Each time we ran into one, we screamed, thinking we had finally bumped into the ghost.

Finding nothing of interest upstairs, we continued our search downstairs. We again opened each closet door, peeked into every corner and cranny. Everything, even a pair of men's shoes in a hall closet, seemed eerie. When we got nearer to the kitchen we heard something.

A tapping sound was coming from a box on the kitchen counter. It got louder the closer we got to the box, and continued even after I opened it and dug through the junk inside. Later it stopped, only to start up again right before we left.

It was time to explore the back staircase. This was a smaller, darker staircase, despite the glare of the kitchen lights. At the top was a white door that was shut tight. I was hesitant to open it. It reminded me of every scary movie I had ever seen where the main character opens the door and oozy, scary things come bursting out.

Katherine was right behind me with her video camera. Finally I got up the nerve, turned the knob and pushed the door open. Again, we screamed.

It must have been a trying night for the neighbors.

The door opened to the upstairs again. Whew. For a moment I feared finding some sealed off back room where the family had hid their own version of Quasimodo.

It was 10 p.m., and the temperature in the kitchen was 78 degrees, up from an initial reading of 72 degrees.
"Too warm for a ghost," Katherine said.

We decided to walk around post, check out the pet cemetery and Matthews Lane. Matthews Lane is the haunt of the "White Lady," a well-known ghost of Fort Monroe who, according to Polonsky, makes an appearance once every twenty years. We hoped it would be our lucky night.

We gathered up our cameras and notebook and locked the back door. The front door was already locked.

The Pet Cemetery seemed shadowy and menacing, but no cat or dog ghosts barked, meowed or came near. The "White Lady" must have been somewhere else that night, because she didn't show up either. Discouraged, we went back to the Green House, unloaded our stuff in the kitchen and went to lay out our sleeping bags in the front room.

I was plumping up my pillow when I heard Katherine scream.

She was in the center of the foyer, facing the room where the books had flown off the shelf ten years ago.

"How did that get there?" she asked, pointing a shaking finger at a wig that was draped over the telephone on the desk. The wig had been on a display case before we left. I remembered the wig because it was so black and so ugly that it was scary all by itself.

Somehow it had moved from the top of the display case over to the desk, a distance of about 6 feet.
As far as we know, no one was in the house when we left. In fact, our decision to leave was completely spontaneous. No one was told we were going to leave the house for awhile and we had locked the door.

I moved the wig back to the display case, both of us genuinely scared now.

Throughout the evening, we kept hearing tapping in the baseboards. The house has baseboard heating and we tried to be logical about the sound.

"It must be the heat turning on and off," I said, in an attempt to be rational, but at the same time knowing that it might actually be the ghost making all the noise.

At around midnight, the phone rang in the 'haunted' room.

"Who is that?," I asked, beginning to wonder if this was a good idea after all.

It was Dave Johnson. Katherine told him about the wig. He was doubtful. She asked about the baseboard heat and he insisted it wasn't turned on. After she finished talking to him, we sat in the room to the right and listened for each tap and creak. They weren't very loud, but they all seemed to come from one spot in the front of the room. I figured the spirit needed some coaxing.

"Okay ghost," I said out loud, "If you want us to believe you're here, you're going to have to tap a little louder than that."

The tapping stopped for awhile. Did I insult it? Then, inexplicably, there were some louder taps from the same spot in the front of the room. We were trying to sleep, but I wasn't having much luck. I don't know about Katherine, but every time I heard one of those taps, my heart would jump and I would wake right back up.

At precisely 2 a.m. we both awoke to a loud smacking sound, not unlike a magazine falling to the floor. At first I thought I had pushed my notebook off the table. The thought of that was disappointing. After all, nothing too dramatic had happened, and if the noise was caused by us, well, our ghost-catching was a bust. I lifted my sleeping bag and the notebook was still on the table. What was that sound?

Katherine and I got up and forced ourselves to peek around the corner at the foyer.

Lying face-down in the center of the floor was a magazine.

Left photo by Diana McFarland; Right photo by Katherine Franz

It had not been there before. In fact, I had seen the lighthouse magazine in the 'haunted' room earlier in the evening. Somehow that magazine had flown from the room to the middle of the foyer­a distance of more than 15 feet.

We froze, squeezed our eyes shut and waited for terrible things to happen; books to fly, howling, banging, white apparitions, whatever it is that ghosts do.

Nothing happened, not even a tap.

Katherine flipped on the light and we tip-toed around the "haunted" room. It was quiet. The wig was still on the display case where I had put it. We watched the bookcases, hoping some books would fall, but they didn't.

Whatever the ghost had planned for us, she had done it. It was time to go home.

Despite the hype, the ghost didn't seem to notice it was Friday the 13th, the full moon or that it was getting close to Halloween. Those things are for the living. It seems the dead have their own timetable, and for this ghost the important factor was 2 a.m. As we locked up the back door, the box on the counter started tapping again.

"Goodbye ghost," we said, and left.