It's an unusually warm day for November and even the chilly atmosphere of a graveyard doesn't send a shiver down my spine. I'm sitting on John Dennet Esquire's tomb in the Point of Graves Cemetery, Portsmouth's oldest cementary. Fallen yellow leaves and heaps of twigs cover the flat stone in the grass. There's something romantic about the slabs of deteriorating graves that protrude from the grass. It is a scene reminicent of Edgar Allen Poe, adding to the historical setting. With the late morning sun on my back, my sweatshirt feels like it just came out of the dryer.

Sitting next to me is Pamela Keene, a Children's Librarian at the Portsmouth Public Library. Her hair is in pig-tail braids and she wears a faded gray cap. We've walked from our meeting place in Market Square so she can show me this stop on the Historic Haunted Hike she has led in years past. "If you have that tendency to be attracted toward the supernatural and a leaning toward history, it sort of goes together," she says. "These people are long gone, but if you're able to do research on them, wouldn't they be happy?" She smiles as if she knows that they would.

In the corner to our right, the Vaughan tomb lies shaded under a half-naked tree, collecting stray withered leaves. We sweep them off now to get a better look. The librarian relates excitedly that in recent years a crypt was found underneath the tomb. In the packet she gives me that shares stories and research she collected for the tour, it mentions how an odd glow and unsettling lights have shown up on photos taken of the tomb. Only a few feet away, a fence marks the property line of a white house. I wonder what people see when they look out their windows at night and if they've ever noticed the Vaughan's tomb emitting an unearthly glow.

This is not the first time I have interviewed Pamela. A few weeks earlier in the dark chill of an October evening, I sat with her for awhile before the library closed. It was then that she shared some of her research with me, and told me about a walking tour of haunted places she once guided. She leafed through an album of photographs from the tour to share with me some pictures of some of the supposed haunted sites.

Pamela has been working at the library for thirteen years and volunteered for twelve years at the Strawberry Banke Historical Museum. She met a lot of people through her involvement with these organizations that knew some interesting stories about the history of Portsmouth. Using these stories and a great deal of research, she spent nearly two months gathering the material she used for the Haunted Hike. "I love history, and anything that relates [to it] that might have spooky [elements]," she says to me at the graveyard. While she's not positive that she believes the stories she's collected, she's enthralled with the possibility that ghosts could exist.

Some of the pictures in Pamela's collection included images of a "ghost light." According to tradition, ghost lights are kept in theaters to ward off any unwanted spirits. Apparently Portsmouth Music relies on their own backstage ghost light. Legend has it, that a gravesite from the 1700's referred to as a "Negro burial ground" is buried underneath the Rockingham Hotel and the Music Hall. Recently, archaeologists have found what they believe to be proof that the site existed after unearthing some coffins that are now on display at Strawberry Banke.

Another more famous ghost story is that of the eerie white lady who is said to roam the halls of Rockingham Hotel for many years. The woman who once kept the hotel dedicated a considerable amount of verse to the white lady, as if she accepted the woman as a silent, regular housemate. Employees of The Library restaurant that now resides on Rockingham's first floor say that some employees are easily spooked and dislike working alone.

I also visited the Sise Inn the evening of our first interview, a guesthouse that is rumored to be haunted by two spirits. According to Pamela's research, a group of visitors once praised the innkeeper for the historical authenticity. They had witnessed a woman walking down the corridor and carrying towels in 18th century clothing. The confused innkeeper replied that he had never asked his staff to wear period costume.

There is another story from the Sise Inn. A male visitor claimed he felt the presence of a man sitting on the edge of his bed. It's possible that this is the ghost of a man who once resided on Court Street and sailed the sea during the 1800's. It is said that he returned from a trip to find his wife had been unfaithful with the man who had been hired to look after his property while he was gone Supposedly, he murdered both of the adulterers and his ghost haunts Court Street.

Wanting to sense a vibe for the place, I walked up the stairs of the Sise Inn. When I push the heavy front door open and walk into the quiet lobby, I see lady fishing for something in the closet. I ask her if I can talk to her about the ghosts. She coldly and adamantly states that there are not any ghosts at the inn. Her tone of voice is stiff and sharp like a pinecone.

After my cemetery meeting with the librarian, I grab a tuna sandwich at Ceres Bakery. The bakery is attached to Sheafe Street Inn, a 19th Century townhouse located at 3 Sheafe Street. Most people don't want to talk about ghosts but I figure I'll try anyway. I ask the lady at the counter if it is true what Pamela has told me, that the bakers at this particular bakery have felt a presence at times. She yells to a lady in the back. The worker, who wishes to remain anonymous, tells me that she has worked at the Ceres Bakery since it opened in the 1980's. She admitted to feeling a ghostly presence in the kitchen during the 1990's. Objects would move around and fall to the ground, and she would see movements out of the corner of her eye. This happened right after they expanded to the Sheafe Street Inn in the mid '90's, but has since stopped. I leave the Bakery and go to the Portsmouth Athaneum, a private library featuring historical information on the town. There is an air of literary pretentiousness mixed with scholarly ambition here. It hangs in the air. I ask the librarian at the desk for any information she may have on local ghost legends. She looks skeptical. I observe an academic-looking man in the background, wearing a brown sweater and with a neatly trimmed beard and wire-rimmed glasses. We strike up a conversation that goes on for at least an hour. He has enough energy for both of us.

His name is Dennis Robinson. He's a former UNH professor and alum, and has edited www.seacoastnh.com since 1996, a website catering to the Portsmouth community that features everything from news, tourism information, and to my luck, a page on local ghost legends. The page is a site devoted to the "dead", which he believes is the proper name to give to "spirits" that in his opinion don't exist. He's mainly interested in what influences the cultural context of people's interest in ghosts. "I'm into the connectivity between people- showing how the culture changes but the fears are still there," he explains.

Dennis says that in the late 1800's it was normal for people to believe in there being a chance in contacting the deceased, because Spiritualism was so popular. "People would go to seances like they would go to nightclubs now," Dennis says.

Alexander Bell attempted the telephone to try to communicate with his dead mother, according to Dennis. He explains that in the 1600's, however, the Puritans believed in the walking devil and "dead people" instead of ghosts.

Dennis enthusiastically said that in present times, his belief is that our culture knows better. We are a scientific generation and we understand the psychology of the mind. He compared it to the sensation of pressing your fingers against your eyelids and seeing the reverse image in your head. I found myself entranced by his justifications for the skepticism, but something seemed to be missing. It's fine to provide cold hard facts, but what about sensations you get that you can't explain? Can we really just write it off as an image our mind conjures up?

"We don't accept emotional knowledge, we accept intellectual knowledge," Dennis says. He thinks that the people who claim to see ghosts see them because of an emotional belief that they exist. It's "mass hypnosis" according to him.

Belief or no belief, people still let the idea of ghosts scare them. Dennis worked for a while at the John Paul Jones house in Portsmouth and heard noises late at night. He called the police on two occasions, both disturbances caused by a bat. The cop who came to investigate the noise turned a corner and saw a mannequin that he almost shot at. He told Denis that he didn't want to be called to that scene again.

"It's frightening, its dark, you don't know- There is an entire Dewey decimal system of what these things are that we've assigned to our culture- I'm just trying to get people to stop thinking about these things seriously. I don't write about ghosts- I write about dead people- but to me they are not dead because I'm telling their story," Dennis says. Does Dennis know that the John Paul Jones house was a stop on Pamela's walking tour? I've discovered this only now, in the last stages of writing this article. If not, perhaps he'd be happier never knowing. Dennis may very well write about dead people, but that doesn't explain exactly why some people see people long dead. The next time you're walking around Portsmouth, step inside one of the historical homes or one of the five graveyards. You can decide for yourself if that tingly feeling you get on the back of your neck is a passing breeze or a spirit passing through.