This is not a story about ghosts.

It's not a story about the mutability of the human soul, or whether you will be a guest of either God or Satan for eternity after your grand exit from this earthly realm. It's not about life after death, or biology versus creation; it's not about metaphysics or ectoplasm. It is about a man. A man who, despite the hostile reactions his work sometimes engenders, believes something that is decidedly not for everyone.

Robert Bess is a paranormal researcher, although his business card says "Ghosthunter." This is tricky business, because, one, it doesn't pay very well, and two, not everyone believes in ghosts. Ghosthunting sounds interesting until you scratch at it a little. Questions compound faster than anyone could possibly answer them. Among all the unknowns in this field, one thing can be said with dead certainty - you will receive few answers that satisfy.

This then is fundamentally a story about faith. Science gets dragged into discussions about the paranormal, but it has no real place there. A provable hypothesis is an unaffordable luxury around these haunted parts. It can be frustrating to try to nail down the nature of Bess's work.

Money is his biggest problem. It turns out you can't catch ghosts on the cheap. He hasn't been able to interest investors in his project. He has photographs, which show either schmutz on the lens of a digital camera or energy orbs which can't be seen with the naked eye. The next logical step, having solved the problem of ghostly existence, is to capture one for verification. He's ready to prove it. In fact, he's already proven it.

According to Bess, in May 2007, he caught two ghosts, the first such capture in human history. It was vindication, proof positive that he isn't just chasing smoke. Which is exactly what the apparitions look like - smoke. A better analogy would be when your windshield fogs over on a cold, rainy morning. I know this because there are pictures, as well as a DVD of the event.

More than a year ago, Bess and a handful of cronies hauled a plexiglass box 8 feet tall and 4 feet by 4 feet wide into the Pump House near the Boulevard Bridge. It cost $10,000 of his own money to build. He refers to it as a chamber and he designed it with the express purpose of luring in and capturing a ghost. It's tricked out with electromagnets, lasers, sensors, internal and external digital thermometers, and magnetic locks to prevent the entity from escaping once it was inside.

This is what remains of a human being after death - a mass of energy that is constantly trying to reform itself. Why, after passing beyond the cares of this world, a former member of humanity would want to return to it is another question that can't be answered.

There are a great many contradictions to Bess and his quixotic quest. He is willing to spend a heaping pile of money building a chamber to catch a ghost, taking great care with the fabrication and design. And yet, on a Web site that specializes in matching investors with those seeking funds, Bess wrote a proposal that seems hastily assembled and loaded with misspellings.

One might conclude he isn't a serious person. But he is serious. Before the city would allow him to stage his ghost hunting exhibition, they demanded he be insured for $1 million. This for an event that lasted eight hours. Bess ponied up.

During the event at the Pump House, the doors of his chamber suddenly closed and locked, the internal temperature dropped, and the plexiglass fogged over. What happened? Did, as he asserts, two ghosts enter the chamber, lured by the electromagnets? Alternative explanations present themselves, but these have more to do with the vagaries of human nature than anything ethereal. Questions like this lead directly to the solid wood door of skeptics.

James Randi is a famous skeptic, and he has made it a life mission to debunk claims of paranormality. His bête noire is Uri Geller, the famous spoon bender, who he continually derides as a charlatan. Randi is a former magician, so he knows a few tricks of the trade. He set up a foundation through which he has offered a $1 million reward to anyone who can show "under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event."

Employing a Randian skepticism leads to some straightforward explanations. It wouldn't take much to put the doors on a timer, so they close automatically. A small amount of liquid nitrogen placed in the bottom of the chamber, again set to release at a specific time, would adequately explain the temperature drop and the frosting of the plexiglass.

In short, if a skeptic chose to employ Occam's Razor, and assume that the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be true, the whole episode could be explained as nothing more than smoke and mirrors. So, what really happened? Again, it's impossible to be sure, it is a very slippery slope.

When I mentioned the $1 million reward, Bess scoffed and disparaged Randi, saying it wasn't really worth his time and money. But then he later phoned and left a message saying he was ready to take on the challenge. That story is developing.

The issue of paranormality is fraught with the unexplained and the unexplainable. After all the questions are posed and the evidence is sifted, what remains is Robert Bess, no ghost, a man. He believes in what he is doing. He established something called the Foundation for Paranormal Research, but that too is mysterious.

You can talk to him at length, argue, suggest alternative explanations and he will not be moved. He knows what he knows. Who can gainsay his beliefs? Who would scoff at his wanting to capture a ghost, to communicate with it in order to find out what lies on the other side? Surely there are less noble and more destructive human endeavors. Look at the news, the folly of humankind is demonstrable.

It occurred to me that what he is really battling is the darker part of human nature. He is rubbing against established orthodoxies (science, religion, metaphysics). This makes him an easy target for those who, firm in their own system of belief, seek to belittle or ridicule him for his faith. The ghosts it turns out are in all of us. And like the entities that Bess hunts, they can be either powerfully destructive or benevolent. We at least get to decide the nature of our demons.