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On the telephone I told Kriss Stephens I had made a couple of visits to the abandoned Dixmont State Hospital in Kilbuck because it was an incredible place, full of history and cool, crumbling architecture, not because I believe in ghosts and haunted buildings.

"It's good to be skeptical in this line of work," Steven said. "I'm a huge skeptic."

"This line of work" is ghost hunting. Stephens, 35, of New Orleans, scouts out potential locations for "Fear," an MTV "reality" show that plunks a bunch of 20-somethings in creepy, abandoned buildings and tapes every fright-filled action. She said she grew up in a haunted house and has been chasing ghosts her whole life.

Stephens was in Pittsburgh for a week and asked if I'd go with her for the trip's highlight, a visit to Dixmont, a former mental hospital. From Pittsburgh she was heading to Washington, D.C. and Boston to visit more abandoned sites, including two abandoned asylums in Massachusetts.

We met at a nearby Chinese restaurant, and were joined by Marty Patterson and Paul Hughes, experienced Dixmont visitors, professional ghost hunters, and producers of "Raw Fear," a video series documenting their visits to places such as Dixmont.

The dinner conversation was, to say the least, interesting. War stories about ghost hunts, haunted houses and a discussion about what equipment works best (apparently, something called an electromagnetic field detector is very good at sensing apparitions).

Hughes is listed on the Web site as a psychic. I wondered whether he could tell that I thought they were all nuts.

I suppose Dixmont is as good as any other place for ghosts and spirits. From 1859 to 1984, Dixmont was a self-sufficient community of crazy people. It had its own power plant, morgue and farm. At its peak, Dixmont was home to 1,500 patients, but was closed after decades of financial troubles and dwindling bed counts.

Today it's a teenage wasteland of empty beer cans, crumbling ceilings, damage from a early 1990s fire, broken windows and graffiti. Perhaps the most telling chunk of graffiti reads "Wal-Mart sucks," in reference to the mega-corporation's on-again, off-again plans to tear down all of the buildings to make way for a superstore.

Territorial Dixmont fans scare off would-be visitors by filling Internet message boards with all sorts of rumors: everything from "catching asbestos" to developing bad rashes to being chased off the property by the shotgun-wielding owners.

And that might be the best way to keep people away, because, after three visits, I have yet to see anything supernatural. I wonder how much one of those electromagnetic doohickeys would cost, anyhow.

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