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Interest in paranormal activity is spiking and – fright flash! – Maine has its share of haunted places and ghostly faces.

By DEIRDRE FLEMING, Staff Writer October 29, 2009

Haunted hangouts are apparently in vogue.

The Maine haunted places listed in Jeff Belanger's recently revised "Encyclopedia of Haunted Places: Revised Edition" are supposedly hot spots (quite literally) for visitors.

"Ghosts have become good business," Belanger said. "People are interested in having that experience, but not in their house. People go out of their way to eat in haunted restaurants or sleep in a haunted bed and breakfast or inn."

Given that, Belanger is fussy about the haunts he lists in his encyclopedia, because he wants them to be legit. We pooled his research with our own reports to come up with the top three haunted spots worth visiting in southern Maine this Halloween.

In his world encyclopedia on haunted public places, Belanger lists the Joshua Chamberlain Museum in Brunswick, where there have been reports of apparitions peering out the window. Two other southern Maine haunts, Portland's Empire Dine and Dance and Cape Elizabeth's Inn by the Sea, have had enough strange stuff going on to make these locations worth a creepy visit.

At Empire Dine and Dance, manager Jason Heatley said the old building in Portland's arts district has been thought to be haunted for years, but the first documented video of Empire's ghost was only caught by Heatley in June 2008.

Heatley was alone at the bar late at night when the long curtains began moving and flapping wildly. The windows were not open. There was no vent near the curtains. He couldn't explain it.

"I was in the office. I thought it was a barback messing around just to give me a hard time," Heatley said. "I come to find out, nobody was up there."

Heatley said the staff has experienced martini glasses flying off the shelves and unexplained noises.

Recently, the owners had a team of paranormal investigators come in to check it out. Their findings will be released on Halloween night during the club's public party, scheduled for 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.

In contrast, nothing is being done to promote the ghost legends that have surrounded the Joshua Chamberlain Museum in Brunswick. But Belanger has heard reports that visitors there have experienced hauntings.

"It's interesting – he had been shot in the hip when he was alive. It didn't kill him. Some people actually report feeling a pain in the hip," Belanger said.

Museum curator Rebecca Roche said the myths about the museum are not included in its historical tours. However, she relayed one ghostly incident that she heard had happened at the museum, a story from a woman who lived there when it was an apartment building almost 30 years ago.

Roche said the woman took a photo of the building before she moved, and when the photo was developed, the former resident said it showed a woman in full Civil War period dress standing in the upper-left window on the second floor.

"That was one of his apartments, when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was living there when he was a professor. He lived there with his first wife," Roche said. "But I haven't seen the photo."

Meanwhile, at the Inn by the Sea in Cape Elizabeth, a well-known ghost has been in residence for years. And rather than be frightened, the staff has embraced the apparition.

The inn's ghost is a historic figure, a young Freeport woman named Lydia Carver who traveled to Boston before her wedding to buy a dress. She tragically died in a shipwreck on the return trip on July 12, 1807. Sixteen of the 22 passengers died, including Lydia, who was found next to the trunk containing her wedding dress.

The one concrete sign that Lydia may haunt the area around the inn is her grave's headstone, located in a cemetery near the inn.

"It is a very strong, very impressive gravestone," said Rauni Kew, the Inn's public relations spokesperson. "Typically, those old New England graveyards have broken, crumbling headstones. And the others are broken there. But Lydia's is quite...