Not long after forming 10 years ago, Maine Ghost Hunters out of Bowdoinham took a new piece of equipment to a Freeport cemetery in the middle of the day to test it out.

The device, known as a ghost box, works by emitting radio signals in the hope that ghosts can try to harness that energy and communicate back, co-founder Tony Lewis said.

“Kat (McKechnie) and I were wandering around and we were asking questions,” Lewis said. “Not a lot was happening at first, but we started understanding what the box was telling us and we understood it to be directions.”

Right. Left. Straight.

Maine Ghost Hunters co-founder Tony Lewis during an investigation of the Anderson Cemetery in Windham, New Hampshire. The Bowdoinham group, which has been ghost-hunting for 10 years, has seen and heard some strange things. Submitted photo

At the same time, “it kept spitting out names at us. Eventually, it led us to a memorial at the end of one of the aisles we were walking down,” he said. “We kept thinking we were hearing ‘Timmy.'”

They stood in front of the four-sided monument and found not Timmy but Jimmy, Jimmy Small.

After all the lefts and rights, Jimmy went quiet.

They’d eventually learn he died as a teen when his rifle went off while he was walking back from a hunt.

“Kat was probably more, not freaked out, but on edge about it,” Lewis said. “It gave her the willies to know that there was actually a spirit talking to us in real time and led us right to the tombstone.

“Spirits are around all the time,” he said. “You don’t have to go ghost-hunting in the dark.”

This story originally was published Oct. 31, 2018, as part of the collection “Weird, Wicked Weird: What’s Halloween without a few ghostly Maine tales?“