By Roberta Vowell
YORKTOWN-Belinda Swindell is hoping for a bone-chilling mist.

Or a milky orb dangling above a head-stone. Or a funky, earthy, inexplicable odor, or even just a prickly feeling running down her neck.

Any sign that ghosts are afoot in Grace Episcopal graveyard this fine fall evening.

Swindell calls herself a ghost hunter.

The sleepy streets of Yorktown are packed with her preferred prey.

She had her best sighting just a few miles away, at Yorktown National Cemetery.

“I was attracted to two trees,” Swindell says, swinging a flashlight in a slow arc as she talks. “As soon as I turned and walked toward them, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a man. He was there from the waist up…”

A hideous shriek rips through the night air, coming from the historic battlefield.

Swindell and her haunt-hunting partner, Trina Kelley barely flinch. They’ve been hearing that sort of thing since sunset-it’s Homecoming Dance night for York County’s high school students, and teenagers, awkward in slinky dresses and rented tuxes, have been hobbling down the Colonial streets all evening.

“Quite a night in Yorktown” Swindell says.

The flashlight swings toward another grave.

Swindell is 35, a Portsmouth mom and cashier.

She heads the Hampton Roads Paranormal Research Group. Membership peaks this time of year, then falls off when it becomes too cold to huddle in a graveyard with a cheap tape recorder.

The ghost hunters head out for Saturday night frights, seeking spots that are historic, haunted and not unfriendly.

“We’ve been chased out of a lot of cemeteries,” Swindell says.

Yorktown is a favorite. Grace Episcopal Church, built in 1697, is prime-a spectral funeral has been sighted there since the 1700’s, according to Williamsburg author L.B.Taylor Jr., who includes the tale in his ninth volume of “Ghosts of Virginia.”

Swindell does not lead quaint ghost tours for tourists, although she and Kelley will cross paths on Yorktown’s dim streets with costumed guides telling tales of hidden panels and mysteriously crashing chandeliers.

Swindell and Kelly-she lives in Chesapeake and is a stay-at-home mom-arm themselves with local lore, but also with scientific tools:

An electromagnetic field meter, to measure electrical current. Swindell bought it on the Internet for $100. “Places deemed haunted have high electromagnetic readings,” she says, “since ghosts are made up of electricity.”

Infrared thermal scanner, another Internet purchase, about $150. “It’s just a really fancy thermometer,” Swindell says, holding up the palm-sized device with the digital readout. “Everyone knows ghosts cause cold spots.”

Cheap camera on a short wrist cord, to record strange mists, muzzy balls of light and hovering milky orbs, which are apparently quite common.” There’s nothing that can be adjusted to create a blur. No straps on it, because another theory is that you are getting pictures of the strap.”

Cassette tape recorder, also very cheap, to capture Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP). Voices from beyond often are captured on, though not heard at the scene, Swindell says. Again, the basic nature of the equipment is meant to silence critics: “You want to have no radio in your tape player. It lessens the possibility that we are picking up a radio signal.”

True says Patrick Huyghe, a Newport News native and writer and editor of books on the paranormal. But the subject holds eternal fascination.

“We’re drawn to it,” Huyghe says, “because if ghosts are remnants of those who have gone ahead, our loved ones, it’s a process we’ll all go through at some point. Maybe.”

At the church steps Swindell clicks on a tape player.

“Right here,” she says, “One night I was only here a few minutes, and heard a kaboom! And then a male’s voice said, ‘Retreat!’”

Tonight, the air hums with crickets and carousing teens.

In the graveyard the temperature drops from the mid-40s to hover between 36 and 39 degrees. Quiet, but for the crunch of leaves underfoot. Dark, but for the play of Kelley’s flashlight along the paths.

“Nothing?” Swindell asks as she scans with the thermometer.

Kelley checks the electrical gizmo. “Nothing.” she says.

They head for a spot they call The Corner, a secluded section where many military veterans are laid to rest.

“We’ve gotten lots of activity here,” Swindell says.

Eyes on their ghost gadgets, the women walk among the graves.

“It’s much warmer over here,” Swindell says. “Are you getting anything?”

Kelley flicks her light to her detector.

“It’s quite dead over here,” she says.

They laugh softly.

“So to speak,” Swindell says.

Since the churchyard is silent of spirits, the ghost hunters walk to another Yorktown haunt, Great Valley Road.

It’s a small path leading from the York River up the bluffs to town. Once, it was a major thoroughfare, lined with wharves and shops. “We always get something from this area,” Swindell says, leading the way into the overgrown ravine.

A glowing orb floated above her head on this trail once, she says. Voices captured on her tape recorder have warned her, “Get out!”

Swindell and Kelley stand in the woods, holding their ghost paraphernalia.

“Maybe if we talk to them,” Kelley says. “I know we haven’t been to visit in a long time,” Swindell calls out. “Don’t be mad.”

More crickets. The sudden smell of honeysuckle, even though summer is long past.

But no ghosts. And so the women tell their own ghost stories.

Swindell was in her early 20s, newly married, when she moved into an old house in Cradock. It was built as housing for shipyard workers in World War I.

“People kept telling us it was haunted,” she says. “We were like, pffft.”

Then they heard voices. Lights dimmed mysteriously, gas heaters lit themselves and during one memorable Super Bowl party, guests were treated to the sound of something heavy being dragged across an upstairs bedroom. “We were there for two months. The next people lasted for three.”

Swindell started studying the supernatural in books and on the Internet, and went on her first ghost hunt in 1997 with her brother. The two of them formed the Hampton Roads Paranormal Research Group; he has since left the organization.

Swindell has scouted out some of the best hauntings in the area, including Fort Monroe’s casemates.

“The last time we had been in the casemate,” Swindell says, on the tape “you can hear us walk out and then there’s the voice of a woman and she sounds so sad, saying 'Hello? Hello?’ She was trying so hard to talk to us.

“I wish I knew what they are trying to tell us. What they can tell us is very brief, very strained. It seems to take everything just to give us one or two words.”

More crickets. Scraps of patter from the official ghost tour, passing on the road above the ravine. Scariest movie ever?

“'The Exorcist,’” Swindell says. “I don’t think they’ll ever make one scarier.”

Kelley grins above her flashlight.

“Amityville – 'The Amityville Horror.’ Still gets to me.”

Kelley’s spookiest encounter came after she visited a Civil War cemetery. She was home in her bedroom when, she says, a soldier appeared. “Male, 5’10’’, maybe 5’1l’’. Two straps across his chest, mustache, short brown hair.”

She giggles.

“Kinda handsome.”

Kelley believes the ghost attached himself to her at the cemetery. The same thing happened to Swindell.

Swindell’s theory: “Some ghosts are scared of what’s next, and don’t want to go on.”

In a Surry cemetery, she says she recorded a woman’s voice saying, “Keep digging.” In a Gloucester churchyard, she says she taped a child saying, “I am afraid of the dark.”

These women are nearly guaranteed to be visited by one last ghost in this world.