The day his landlord came looking for the rent, Howard Hobbs was drunk.
It was 1896 and Hobbs had been living on a sliver of an island off the coast of Biddeford, Maine, hunting seals for the $1-a-nose bounty the state was then paying. With his work finally done, the 24-year-old had just spent a couple of days with a buddy on a congratulatory bender on the mainland and had rowed his skiff back to Wood Island. When he bumped into Frederick Milliken it was nearly dusk.
The rent was overdue, Milliken said. Pay up.
Hobbs, still drunk, took exception -- and then, in a fit of pique, he took aim. He shot the 35-year-old landlord and lobsterman once in the abdomen, according to newspaper reports from that week.
Horrified at what he'd done, Hobbs helped carry the mortally wounded Milliken inside, then ran back to his rented shack, placed the same rifle to his mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullet passed through his head and lodged in the ceiling.
The police called it a murder-suicide. The papers called it a tragedy. But the folks around Biddeford called it just the beginning. If you're quiet enough, they will tell you, and stand very still, you will hear the ghosts of Hobbs and Milliken: Strange voices carried in the wind. Footsteps echoing where there are no feet. Apparitions, quite literally, that go bump in the night.
''There are spirits here," said Teresa Lowell, the wife of a lighthouse keeper. She lived on the island from 1984 to 1986 with her husband and believes she bumped into a ghost in her bedroom closet. ''I know," she said, ''because I felt him."
Fast-forward to 2005. The lighthouse keepers have been gone for 19 years. Real estate around Biddeford has skyrocketed and tourism has become more profitable than lobstering. With an effort underway to clean up the island, the Friends of the Wood Island Lighthouse decided it was time to get a handle on these ghost stories once and for all.
Enter The New England Ghost Project, an eclectic outfit out of Dracut, that has been on 150 ghost hunts in seven years -- and found evidence of the supernatural in 149 of them. Their mission: to detect and quantify the supernatural.
''Just about everybody has ghosts," said Ron Kolek, the founder of the Ghost Project, which was asked to visit the island. ''But not everyone is willing to talk about them. That's where we come in."
With at least six television shows touting the merits of psychics who solve crimes and salve heartaches, ''ghostbusting" clubs like Kolek's are going mainstream. The difference between this latest variation and the spiritualists of yore? The tools of their trade.