"For example, we'll use electro magnetic field detectors or meters," Juliano said. "Most of them are hand-held units and they're used to find unexplained energy fluctuations inside a home."

Skeptics might welcome the hardware of science to explain the inexplicable. But a skeptic may also point out that energy fluctuations are often caused by any one of a number of things - malfunctioning appliances, bad wiring, even plumbing.

"A lot of appliances, like your TV, the refrigerator, as well as computer monitors, and even wiring, give off electro- magnetic fields," Juliano conceded. "But when you use a meter around these devices, you generally get a constant, steady reading."

"Normal power surges in electrical lines would be enough to trip the meters," Juliano acknowledged, "Normally, though, you'd blow a breaker at that point."

"But we map out where all the appliances are in the house that would do that, "he said. "So we would be sure beforehand to be leery of strange readings in those areas."

"We have a variety of different thermometers," he said. "There are non-contact infrared thermometers and air temperature thermometers, all to help look for temperature changes."

"The non-contact thermometer registers surface temperature only, so if I'm pointing it at a wall that goes from 78 degrees down ten to 20 degrees, you know something's there," he said. "If it's a pipe in the wall (carrying, say, cold air or water) you should be able to go back to that wall and get the same reading."

"We use infrared night-vision video cameras, basically filming what the human eye can see," Juliano said. "We use a variety of regular consumer cameras, digital and regular 35 mm cameras, and I guess another big piece of equipment would be our passive infrared motion sensors."

"These passive sensors," he said, "are calibrated to look for an infrared heat signature for an object above thirty to forty pounds so that cats and bugs wouldn't be tripping it."

So, forgive the skeptic, but what are we saying here? That a ghost has to weigh over 40 pounds to be detected? Ghosts, you'd think, wouldn't weigh anything at all.

"Not weight, but mass," Juliano explained. "If they're interacting with the sensors they must have energy and energy would have mass, even though it's not within the spectrum of light that the human eye can see."

"I grew up in a haunted house in Magnolia on Evesham Road. I can't tell you exactly where it is now days resides in Philadelphia. "There were apparitions, objects would be moving. I witnessed all of that stuff."

"Residual haunting are where the same vision plays out over and over again, but these were different," he recalled. "These would appear in different ways, try to appear in different ways, or interact with me in different rooms, doing different things."

His family tried tracing back through time to get a fix on who had lived in the house before. Maybe that would offer a clue as to who the strange duo had once been.

"But we were unable to trace anything. We were only the second owners of house," he said. "The land the house is on had once been part of the Albertson farm. Half of present day Magnolia was once part of that farm. Our house is situated on what was once open land between the main mansion and the sister's house."

What has long fueled skeptics' mirth is that those who see ghosts see them clothed, which of course begs the question: Are there such things as spook clothes?

"The old man would say things, or at least his mouth would be moving but I could never make out what he was saying," he said, noting that every now and then he would perceive a ghostly voice in his parents' house.

"They would call our names," he said. "You'd go into the room where the voice was, but no one would be there. Our home was a very, very active place. There must have been dozens of ghosts."

The reason his family's house is so active, he suspects, is that Evesham Road through the 17th and 18th centuries was a major thoroughfare through what was then still wild country. All manner of people came and went. All manner of people stayed and died.

Sometimes hauntings start out as lights going on and off, doors closing; sometimes there are the noises of what, to the less imaginative or psychic, could just be an old house settling into itself.

"I think all of that is to get our attention," he said. "If we think strange noises are just the house settling, they do more to get our attention. Then, too, some of them are limited in what they can do."

"When we're out on a case, our batteries will get drained a lot, and sometimes go dead for no apparent reason," he said. "It's not uncommon to have to change batteries in equipment three or four times during a three-hour period, whereas normally they'd last for weeks."

Then again, Juliano is scientific enough in his outlook to acknowledge that many sometimes vivid apparitions people claim to see may very well be simply hallucinations.

"People experience hallucinations during sleep paralysis when they are coming in and out of REM sleep," he said. "You can get very vivid visual input but you're really in a dream-state. We have a girl in our group who gets it all the time. She's also psychic, and she doesn't think the two phenomenon are related at all."

A haunting, then, can hinge a lot on what the mind sees or thinks it sees. Still, hauntings, as in retail and real-estate, rely a lot on location, location, location.

"The Inn Philadelphia on Camac Street downtown dates back to the 1700s, situated on this little alley of a street, with years and years of reported haunting activity, " Juliano said. "While we were there, one of the two glass chandeliers on the ceiling started spinning by itself at a pretty good speed and it did that for ten or fifteen minutes and then it suddenly stopped dead."

"When we talked to the owners, they said they had experienced the same thing many times in the past," he said. "They also said they had seen Hession and Red Coat soldiers on the floor where the chandelier had done the spinning."

"They were tripped twice by an unseen force, and at one point after the sensor got tripped, I saw a male walking where the sensor was," said Juliano. "He was a tall white male, dark hair, had jeans on. He could have been from the1940s on up to modern time. He wore a black, light weight-jacket. He looked straight ahead, and walked ten feet before he just disappeared."

"An upper floor used to be a prison at one time," Juliano said, noting hauntings tend to happen in places where emotions were most keen, where human activity was most intense.

"We look for places like that just to test new equipment or theories, or because we know it's haunted," he said. "Theatres are always good places, because you have a whole bunch of emotions there."

"That place is very haunted," he said. "Females tend to have someone come up behind them and pull or touch their hair, when there's no one behind them. Or, they hear heavy, belabored breathing."

"They believe he's the guy doing the touching and the breathing, and during an audio investigation - sometimes we use tape recorders or digital recorders - we can capture spirit voice phenomenon," he said. "We didn't hear it at the time but when we played it back later we recorded a male voice, saying, 'used to work here.'"

"I've seen him before, yeah," he recalled. "He was sitting in about the third row middle seat. I pointed out the seat to friends at the time of the sighting. I'd say he was a man in his thirties or forties. Someone took a picture of him, and where he was seated, we got a picture of a big ball of light."

"The Ritz had been a Vaudeville theatre and a burlesque theatre, then an adult movie theatre and back to a stage theatre again, so there was quite a variety of things there," Juliano said. "There'd be no record of payroll."

This is cache, read story here