One explanation is the system of tin tubes that Piggott installed as an intercom system throughout the house. Supposedly, the system picks up noise from downtown and voices from far rooms, amplifies them, and carries them around the house. The intercom was removed in the 1920s, but the reports of strange noises and voices continue.

4. HOODOO ANTIQUES

Nobody was more surprised than Mike Eadie, owner of Hoodoo Antiques, when people told him that a woman was lurking inside his shop late at night. When it was closed and locked, the alarms were set, and Mike was home with his wife, you could look in through the big display windows and see a woman in a long dress and a bonnet standing near the back of the shop.

Years ago, Eadie's mother-in-law, Ellen Wellborn, had an artist's studio in the Erickson s Saloon building nearby,

once a major combination of gambling hall, beer parlor, and whorehouse, boasting the longest bar in the world. In what was once a prostitutes crib, Ellen found a lovely pencil portrait tucked between the clapboards of the wall. The picture is oval, about six by four inches, and shows a young woman wearing a bonnet and a typical 1860s dark dress.

Ellen gave it to Mike, who's hung the small picture in his store, just inside the front door, but not so you can see it from the street. Even inside, unless you know where to look, you'd never notice it.

Since then, night after night, walking tours pass the shop and see someone inside. They insist she's not a reflection, the woman in a long dress and bonnet, standing in the shadows near the back of the store. Still, the motion detectors don't trip. And nothing is ever taken.

Hoodoo Antiques is at 122 NW Couch Street.

5. BAGDAD THEATER

There are parts of the Bagdad Theater at 3702 SE Hawthorne Boulevard that the employees just don't go into.

Built by Universal Studios as a movie palace in 1927, the theater offered live vaudeville acts until the 1940s. Today it's a combination beer pub and movie theater. Behind the huge movie screen is a separate theater, closed since the 1970s, that may someday become condominiums and a rooftop bar. But right now, it's supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a movie projectionist who hanged himself behind the screen on Christmas Eve decades ago.

That story is decades old. Whenever the auditorium's cantankerous lighting system acts up, they've always blamed the suicide.

According to theater manager Jason McEllrath, someone hung a cardiopulmonary resuscitation dummy behind the screen. They hung it years ago, and the dusty, spooky thing still dangles back there, ready to scare the uninitiated.

The theater basements are another story. The front one, along SE Hawthorne, is pretty ordinary. However, the back basements under the stage and backstage . . . "That's just plain scary," Jason says. "There's no lights, and it's full of creepy junk. Doors that go nowhere. We just don't go down there."