PITTSBURGH -- Do you believe in ghosts?

Poltergeists?

Haunted houses?

Plenty of people do. A Gallup poll finds that 73 percent of Americans believe in the paranormal.

Team 4 recently spent some time with investigators from Pittsburgh Paranormal Society. They are booked several nights a week and almost every weekend, with requests from homeowners and others to investigate strange happenings.

"There are a lot of people out there who have things going on in their homes and they want to know what it is, why it's happening," investigator Andrea Pinigis said.

These investigators charge no fee for their services. They say they do the work because they believe -- and they use a lot of gadgets to try to hear a voice or see an image.

"A K2 meter is used to pick up electromagnetic fields," lead technician Donnie Wagner said. "I can run all my night vision cameras hooked up with cables, but they run into the back of the computer. Voice recorders. We use microcassettes and the digital voice recorders."

Last year, Wagner snapped photos of an antique store in Monongahela that has been rumored to be haunted for more than 100 years.

"The story is there's a little girl trapped up on the second floor. She can't leave there," he said.

In one photo of a second-floor window, there is what Wagner claims to be a 19th-century girls' nightgown.

"You can pretty much make out pleats in what we think would be a nightgown," he said. "The very next photo, she's gone."

Wagner and his crew snapped pictures in the dark at another supposedly haunted building -- R&R Station restaurant in Mount Pleasant.

"These all came from the same window," Wagner said.

Later, they looked closely at a photo of an empty hallway. At the end, in a mirror, was a bluish image.

Zooming in closer, they saw the distorted image of what they claim is a man with a mustache who resembles John Polonosky, who owned the building 100 years ago when it was the East End Hotel. Polonosky also died there.

"I think it's him, to be honest," Wagner said.

"I just think it's so awesome that we caught these apparitions in this mirror," Pinigis said.

Is it really an apparition, or something else?

"It's the same as looking at the clouds and seeing elephants and whatnot," said Thomas McBurney, a psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

McBurney specializes in the science of perception. He has a dim view of paranormal investigators.

"There is an explanation, but these people are not qualified to find it, because they don't have the scientific training to know how the mind works and how physics works and all the other things you need to know in order to do it," McBurney said.

Last month, about 1,000 people attended a paranormal conference hosted by the Penn State University student organization Paranormal Research Society in State College, Pa.

The society's founder, Ryan Buell, and other Penn State students will star in "Paranormal State," a new cable network reality series.

"I worked on a case in Pittsburgh that you would call a demonic haunting, and I worked with a family," Buell said. "Blood would materialize on the walls, crosses were bending, we'd hear sounds. Just crazy things."

The public's recent fascination with the paranormal amuses McBurney.

"There are always things we don't understand," he said. "Things fall off the wall. There are strange things that happen to everybody. But you don't make that into a science."

But as long as clients come to Pittsburgh Paranormal Society with concerns about hauntings, these local ghost hunters say they will answer the call.

"We just try to give them peace of mind, whether they have activity going on in their home or not," Pinigis said.

Pittsburgh Paranormal Society said it captures paranormal evidence in about 30 percent of its cases, and investigators don't take a case until they interview a building's occupants and try to rule out physical and psychological explanations for a reported phenomenon.

McBurney said Pittsburgh Paranormal Society is not qualified to make those kinds of judgment calls.

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