Staff Writer

They arrive at the Portsmouth Music Hall looking like doctors, each toting little black bags containing the tools of their trade. One man is pushing late middle age, sports a dark goatee and has short curly hair; the younger man has a military haircut and a nylon bomber’s jacket.

In a sense, they really are like doctors. They’re here to check out symptoms, to make a diagnosis and, if necessary, to prescribe treatment.

One luxury they have that most doctors do not is they know they’ll never face a life-and-death situation in their work. For them, death has already occurred: call it a death-and-death situation.

Shane Sirois, 30, of Milford, and Mike Sullivan, 50, of Merrimack, are paranormal researchers, or ghosthunters, and they were invited Wednesday to do what Sirois called a "light investigation" of the Music Hall.

With the approach of Halloween, Sirois is getting into his busy season. "I do this all year ’round," he said, "but Halloween, that’s when all the TV people call, the newspaper calls," he said.

Sirois said he has done about 40 household investigations so far this year. They receive no pay: Sirois makes his living remodeling homes and Sullivan works with computers.

Sirois’ method for checking out private homes is different from what he’ll be doing today. "When I do a household investigation, I go in and kind of chill for 20 minutes, let things settle down." Then, Sirois said, he and his team spread out and set up "cameras everywhere." Today will only be a walking tour of the longtime Portsmouth landmark.

The Music Hall has long been rumored to have ghosts. A list of haunted places in New Hampshire available at newhampshire.com said the Music Hall has "a ghost of unknown origin (who) is said to block the view of some patrons and shuffles from place to place. Noises can often be heard outside the lobby box office."

The theater’s production manager, Zhana Morris, who has co-authored a book on the theater’s history, says she doesn’t know of any tragedies that befell anyone on the site that might make a spirit want to hang around and resolve its "issues."

"I have never heard of any injuries or deaths (that have taken place in the Music Hall)," she said. "There’s not much down that route."

The absence of a death on the premises in the 125 years the Music Hall has stood there doesn’t mean there’s no ghost. "The building that was here before burned down Christmas Eve, 1876. It was called The Temple," she said.

Though it’s possible someone could have died in the fire, Morris can’t confirm this. "I have not been able to collect any information on that fire," she said.

Genevieve Aichele, who has directed a number of shows at the theater over the years, said she’s often suspected the place was haunted. "I’m particularly sensitive to different kinds of energy. I’ve sensed that there are different kinds of presences there, but I’ve certainly never been scared," she said.

The investigators are here to see if those presences can be documented using some fairly advanced technology.

Once inside the elegant, tiled lobby on the day of the investigation, the men crack open their cases and get to work. "This thing’s going crazy right here," Sirois said, holding a small black EMF meter. The meter measures fluctuations in electromagnetic fields. The numbers on the digital readout screen are jumping from 0 to 4, hitting every decimal point in between.

Activity on the meter doesn’t necessarily mean the presence of a ghost, Sirois explained. Wiring in the walls of a room can cause the meter to get unreliable readings, Sirois said, but, "If I’m in the middle of the room and it’s [the meter] bouncing up and down, that doesn’t mean you have a ghost. If there’s nothing to blame that energy on, it could be something paranormal," he said.

Sullivan carries an EMF meter as well. His emits a piercing weee-ooo-weee-ooo when it picks up a reading. The meter, however, is not Sullivan’s ghosthunting instrument of choice.

His specialty is electronic voice phenomena, referred to in common ghosthunter parlance as EVP. EVP are captured, Sullivan said, by leaving any kind of recording device in a quiet place then "playing it back to hear voices and sounds that shouldn’t be there and can’t be explained."

Sullivan has lots of examples. He said he’s caught voices on his recorders coming from "the other side." When he plays some of the clips back, the sounds are muffled and often full of static, yet they do sound vaguely like a human voice speaking. Sullivan said his luck at catching the spectral sound bites has gone up since he has started speaking out loud to his ghostly audience. "If you talk enough to them, they begin to realize you’re here and they will respond."

Sullivan claims to have picked up sounds where voices seem to be commenting on his actions. Once when Sullivan was recording while working late at night, he told a co-worker he wanted to go home to watch a movie with his son. Later, when he went back to listen to the recordings he’d made, voices can be heard saying "Sullivan wants to go home" and "look at movie," he said.

In his black bag, Sullivan has more than enough recorders for today’s investigation. He stashes his recorder of choice, a Sony digital voice recorder he got at Staples for "like 30 bucks," in a closet near the lobby ready to pick up any messages the hall’s ghost may want to send.

Though this trip marks their first investigation together, both men have been searching individually for evidence of spooks for quite a while.

Sullivan has been trying to nab EVP samples off-and-on since the 1970s. He says it took a long time to get the first one.

In a quiet cemetery, Sullivan set up a cassette recorder on the gravestone of a woman who had passed away some time before. When he listened to what he captured, "there was a woman’s voice," Sullivan said, "she was saying ‘help me, help me’."

Though he’s been at it sporadically for quite a while, Sullivan said the last two years have been his most fertile time for EVP captures, in part because he has spent more time searching. He said EVP researchers disagree about the genesis of the voices. "There’s a lot of speculation about where the voices come from," he said.

Sullivan is convinced the voices are of human beings whose earthly lives have ended. "I haven’t personally had this happen to me, but a lot of people have heard from people they know who have passed. Nobody really dies," he said.

Sirois’ experience with paranormal phenomena date back to the ’70s as well, though at that time he was only a child. "When I was younger we lived in a house where there was some activity, mostly the apparition of a man. He would pretty much just stand and stare at me," he said.

Sirois saw the man "probably about 10 times." His mother as well as tenants in the apartment below Sirois’ family also saw the phantasm.

When he was about 10, Sirois’ unusual experiences intensified. "I got real sick and a lot of spiritual things happened to me then," Sirois said, declining to comment in depth on these experiences, except to say they were "good."

Sirois was traveling around New England investigating claims of haunting by the time he was 20. That was 10 years ago now, and Sirois has seen more than his share of bizarre occurrences.

A poltergeist case in Woonsocket, R.I., stands out to Sirois as memorable.

Sirois, who runs www.trueghost.com, a Web site devoted to hauntings in New England, said the people afflicted in the Woonsocket case contacted him even before he had the Web site up. "Somebody heard my name on the Internet and gave them my name. It was word-of-mouth basically," he said.

A poltergeist is a specific type of ghost, Sirois said, and does not constitute the majority of hauntings. "Poltergeist means noisy ghost. With them it’s common to get growling, banging, loud noises and a lot of aggression," he said.

In this particular case, Sirois got to see the aggression firsthand. "The homeowner met me on the porch and said, "They’ve been acting up. It’s like they know you’re coming," he said.

Sirois and the homeowner walked through the door and, "a lamp flies off his computer desk and hits him in the leg. I saw the whole thing. No one touched it. No one moved it," he said.

Flying furniture was only one of the problems the homeowner was facing. "He was tormented with rotten flesh smells that would make him sick to his stomach, and the apparition of a horrible-looking woman. He would get smacked and hit in the head," Sirois said.

Some of this violence, Sirois himself witnessed. "We were talking for about 20 minutes. He never left my field of vision. All of a sudden he stood up and pulled up his shirt and said, ‘See!! This is what I’m talking about!’ You could see scratches on him just starting to rise, like they just happened," he said.

Sirois said his techniques were helpful in eliminating activity in this case. Others had investigated the case before him to little avail.

Sirois said stress, fear and negative thinking on the part of the victim can feed a bothersome ghost, giving it energy to become a real nuisance. Sirois said he tries to address the source of the problem.

"I usually focus on the people," Sirois said, "Usually you find something going wrong in their lives that’s bringing a lot of negative energy into the home. I’ve found that in a majority of hauntings you treat the person and the problem will go away. Going in there with that love for people, we get results."

Sirois’ description of his ghost hunts sometimes sound like sessions with a therapist. "I meet new friends and we talk through their problems and if the problems (with the ghost) don’t go away, they become minimal."

In the case of the Woonsocket poltergeist, Sirois’ technique worked. "I asked him what was going on in his life. He said he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two years ago when all this started to happen. He (the homeowner) just sat around dwelling on all this negative stuff, being a Vietnam vet and the cancer, and that was feeding all the stuff (with the ghost)," Sirois said.

Sirois said after his visit, the persecuted homeowner began to make some lifestyle changes. "He led this whole fight to save this church that was going to be torn down. It was one of the oldest churches in the area. That gave him purpose and drive. And you know what? The (poltergeist) activity stopped."

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No one has ever claimed the ghost at the Portsmouth Music Hall is a poltergeist. In fact, except for the ambiguous fluctuations on the EMF meters, nothing much catches Sirois’ attention until he reaches the stairwell in the northwest corner of the theater’s darkened balcony.

"I felt something right here" Sirois said, dropping his bag on a nearby table. He starts shooting pictures with one of the three cameras he’s brought. This one, a digital, displays a copy of the image captured in its LCD screen almost as soon as the shutter clicks.

In photographs taken at sites suspected of housing a ghost, the pictures will often show translucent round shapes, or orbs, floating in air. Sirois snaps a few pictures of the stairwell. The orbs are there. Small glowing balls show up in the picture. They cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Sirois admits the balls could be something other than the footsteps of the hall’s ghost. "They could be dust reflecting the flash," he said, "but normally dust shows up in a diamond shape." The shapes in these photographs are quite clearly round.

At the bottom of the stairs, Sullivan stands with another of his recorders in hand whispering, "Would anyone like to talk to us?"

Sirois stalks across the balcony to the opposite staircase where he had not felt the presence of any unusual energy. He shoots a few pictures, This time, no orbs show up.

"Is there a river near here?" Sirois asks Morris, the production manager, who had accompanied the ghosthunters on their tour. When told the Piscataqua River flows only a block away, Sirois nods his head. "Water can often be an aiding factor in these kinds of things," he said.

The two men move on. They complete their tour by clattering up the thin metal staircase leading to the rigging above the stage. Though the boards creaking beneath their feet in the catwalk create a creepy atmosphere, no more areas of the theater draw Sirois’ focused attention.

Back in the lobby he gives his diagnosis.

Though he thinks there may a ghost roaming the hall, "It’s nothing bad. Nothing dangerous." he said. Sullivan retrieves the recorder he’d put in the closet at the beginning of the hunt. Something has tripped its voice-activated recording mechanism and left a 20-second message.

With the push of a button, sound begins to pour from its small speaker. Sullivan’s eyes narrow and his face grows serious.

"There’s something there," he said. He flicks the button again and the sound, mostly mumbling and a weird shuffling sound, jumps out a second time. "Did you hear that?" Sullivan asked Sirois, "He said ‘Give up’ or ‘Get out’."

Morris, the theater’s production manager, walks over. Sullivan plays the sound for her.

"Did you hear him say ‘get out’?" Sullivan asked. She tilts her head to the side, half a smile spreading across her face.

"Maybe I’m just a more positive person than you," she said, "but I thought he said ‘good morning’."

Dean Abbott can be reached at 742-4455 ext. 5395, or by e-mail at dabbott@fosters.com