I have always been somewhat of a skeptic when it comes to ghosts, but after hearing Terry Mayo tell me about his 17 years of ghost-hunting experience, I was almost convinced on this night we would see a ghost.

His first of numerous encounters with a ghost got him interested in hunting the paranormal, he said.

“I was working at a well-known university in Nashville one night and my partner and I were locking up the mansion on the grounds,” Mayo said.

His partner, looking up a staircase, saw something that literally made him wet his pants.

“I turned the flashlight and looked at him to see what he was looking at and I turned and I saw the owner of the mansion standing on the third stair,” Mayo said. “She had her hair in a gray bun. She was wearing a beautiful red, blue and purple dress. You could see the doilies around her neck and wrists. The dress flowed to the bottom of the staircase. Our lights flowed through her, but we could see her plain as day.

“I asked her if she was the owner of the mansion and she shook her head in a positive way. I told her we were locking her mansion and we’d be on our way. She curtsied me and floated up the staircase,” Mayo continued.

After going outside, he saw her again looking out the window. Mayo waved at the ghost and she waved back and then disappeared.

The two guards filled out reports and turned them in. About a week later, the dean of the university called them to his office and asked them to not share their encounter with the media or the faculty. Even though the school had received hundreds of similar stories, it didn’t want them out, partially because of its religious affiliation.

Many years later, Mayo sits in The Grind preparing to go look for spirits with his team of Murfreesboro ghost hunters.

The “psychic” hour is upon us. The “psychic” or “witching” hour is between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. and is the most common time to see any action from spirits, Mayo said. However, it is not uncommon to see ghosts during the day.

On the way to the cemetery, Mayo said we will be looking for great temperature variations.

He said he has around $300-400 worth of equipment he uses to locate potential ghosts.

“We have compasses, digital and tape recorders, night vision binoculars, infrared cameras, and electromagnetic field detectors,” he said.

He shares more stories with me about personal experiences as we get closer and I start to worry.

I ask him for advice for “newcomers” like myself who do not know what to expect. Jokingly he told me to make sure I had another pair of underwear. At least I hoped he was joking.

Each member of Mayo’s group, the Society of Paranormal Investigation and Research In Tennessee, or S.P.I.R.I.T., has his or her own unique experiences with the paranormal.

One member, William Boles, had his experience while reenacting Civil War battles. As he was locking a gate, the chain holding the key was pulled from his hand, and throughout the night members of his group thought they kept seeing Boles walking towards them.

This could not have been Boles, though, because he was out on the field during that time.

Cortney Petty, another member, remembered when he was about 4 years old and was awakened by his frightened cousin. This struck him as odd because he claims his cousin was never scared of anything. He finally went to sleep in the guest room of his uncle’s home and was later awakened by piano playing.

“This was odd,” he laughs. “Because, one, no one in that house could play the piano, and two, they didn’t own a piano.”

He says that he entered the living room to see a black woman in her late 20s playing the piano.

The woman asked about sports on the television and said that she noticed blacks and whites playing sports together. She asked Cortney about the relationship between the two races confusing the child a bit. He told her whites and blacks were friendly. The woman began to cry and then disappeared.

Every member of Mayo’s group had experienced an encounter of some sort.

As we were arriving at New Hope Baptist Church in Big Springs, I was beginning to wonder what sort of experience I was going to have. New Hope Baptist is one of the top 10 haunted places in Tennessee, Mayo said.

“Can a ghost kill you?” I ask him.

His response is “no,” but “a ghost can cause someone to hurt (or kill) themselves. Someone can turn to run and trip over a grave stone or trip on a sunken grave.”

However, ghosts can physically manifest themselves and attack a person.

“A friend of mine in Atlanta and I were in a cemetery in the middle of nowhere and just as soon as we picked our cameras up to take shots across the cemetery we saw a red light which came at us a break neck speed and knocked both of us to the ground,” Mayo said.

The two did manage to take a few shots, which Mayo describes as “some of the most awesome pictures anyone has ever seen.”

“Wolf Pictures, who developed the pictures, said that there was no way that those pictures could have been altered in any way,” Mayo said.

The church we are currently at is haunted because of an event that happened in the 1800s where a barrel burst into the church and hit the pulpit and exploded, filling the room with smoke and steam. Some of the churchgoers, in a panic, ran into the woods, never to be seen again. And here I am standing in those same woods.

Mayo has a temperature gauge that shoots a 50-yard signal, detecting variations. Pockets of air around us are significantly lower in temperature than everywhere else. At one spot the temperature is down to nearly 36 degrees, an 18-degree difference from the 54-degree norm this night.

About five members of the group venture behind the church to take photos. A red “orb” or spot stands out in one photo and just as soon as it’s taken, the camera battery dies.

The other four behind the church also experience battery loss. Mayo says it’s because spirits draw off of the energy. While looking in a heat-sensitive imaging monitor, he and I notice a motion behind a tree that we did not believe was a member of the group.

Looking back, I wonder whether we experienced a real encounter or not. Although, I have had moments in my life I think I experienced something paranormal.

After hearing the stories and seeing the conviction Mayo has in his hobby, I do believe in ghosts.

As Boles said about experiences, “they are like dogs. Most people have either had one, have one, or are going to have one.”