I was standing outside a bar the other night, seeking answers to purely journalistic questions, when a man wandered up to me. He clutched my hand and claimed to recognize me: “You’re Mike LaFlamme,” he said. “You’re the guy who writes those news columns and brings things out of the Lewiston closet.”

I’ve done a lot of thinking since that encounter. For starters, I thought: Why am I standing outside of bars rather than going inside? And why does everybody call me Mike?

But it also occurred to me that this man was right. I love Lewiston. It has made me into the fine, clearly insane person you see today. And since I got here, I’ve been groping and clawing and flailing my way into the city closet, looking for the skeletons and the dirty secrets dressed in women’s clothing that reek of booze and marijuana.

There is nothing malicious about this weird endeavor of mine. I’d like to point that out right up front, so that the Honorable Jim Bennett doesn’t file another restraining order against me. I mean no harm to the city of Lewiston because I love it. I love it because it has loved me, in the way that a drunken, one-eyed mother with a hunchback, a crack addiction and a skin disease will love her idiot son.

It’s just that Lewiston has secrets. And I want to know them.

The old-timers talk about the days when they carried beach chairs downtown so they could watch the bar fights at midnight. They talk about a notorious band of brothers who fought every cop in the city and won every scrap. They talk about crooked politicians, murdered starlets whose killers were never caught and gambling debts that were collected in a variety of ways.

Lewiston, to me, is a giant haunted house. I drive down Bartlett Hill and look at its elegant domes, church steeples that could be a thousand years old and tenements that stand only because they are too mean to fall. Lewiston is a haunted city, but few people know all of its ghosts.

I met a man once who was maybe 45 years old, but in Lewiston years, he was going on 90. He lived hard, gathered notes on stained paper, and then died. Before he went, the man told me he would one day tell me tales that would make my skin crawl.

He knew things, he said. He knew where bodies were buried. He knew who had buried those bodies and which wretched city officials were responsible for covering up the nastiness surrounding it all.

Chances are good the young old man was delusional by the time I spoke to him. But I have no doubt of this: Lewiston has secrets. A giant skeleton might stretch across the entire city but we see it only as avenues and intersections. And while I have a tendency for the macabre, I don’t fool myself into believing I’ll be the one to lay bare the ghouls and ghosts that make up this city. I know I will never write a riveting crime story with the headline: “Mystery of Lewiston Solved At Last!”

But every time I babble on and on and on about hookers and drug dealers and brawlers downtown, you should know it’s because I’m trying to penetrate that mystery just a little. I love Lewiston because it is strange and embattled and hard, just like any ghost should be. Lewiston fascinates, scares and enthralls me every day. Lewiston to me is an alcoholic ghost, with weird scars and a knife in its boot, who has not yet announced why it is inspired to haunting and violence.

So, while I may at times seem smug and flippant, it’s only because I’m intrigued and curious beyond measure. I’m intrigued by the mystery of Lewiston and the giant haunted house I had the pleasure of walking into a dozen years ago when I came here by mistake. I don’t know all the ghosts who walk here, but I aim to meet them. I aim to spend the rest of my days calling them out.

It’s a strange way to make a living. But I met a guy outside a bar and he described exactly what it is that I do. Strange indeed, but that’s Lewiston, people. Strange indeed, but that’s me.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. He writes novels when he isn’t knocking on Lewiston’s closet door.