GETTYSBURG - Ghost researcher and author Jeff Belanger confessed that he has never seen a ghost.

"I still believe, though," he said. "And that is based on the number of people I've interviewed who believe. I look in their eyes, and they say they saw something, and I believe them."

Belanger is one of three organizers of the Ghost World Supernatural Symposium Conference that will be held Friday through Sunday in Gettysburg.

The site of one of the biggest battles in American history, which left thousands dead and dying, Gettysburg might be viewed as a ghostly convention in and of itself.

"Every street corner has its ghost tours, and the legends around the battlefield are too numerous to mention," Belanger said. "You don't have to be psychic to feel it. All you need is an understanding of what took place, right at your feet. It really is a powerful place."

Loring Shultz, who owns the Farnsworth House Inn on Baltimore Street, said the modern-day fascination with ghosts in Gettysburg got started in the basement of his business.

The brick walls of the old inn are peppered with damage from rounds fired as Union and Confederate troops fought up and down the street in front. Soldiers died in the house. Jenny Wade, the only civilian casualty of the battle, was shot through the heart in a house across the street.

Farnsworth House employee Patty O'Day began telling ghost stories to goose-pimpled tourists in the inn's spooky basement. "That was in 1986, and everybody laughed at her," Shultz said. "Now there are 10 or 12 groups in town giving ghost tours. I was born and raised here, and I've never seen anything like it. It's phenomenal."

Shultz has never seen a ghost, but he knows people who believe they have.

"Everybody's got their thing, you know," he said.

The point of the symposium is to bring together paranormal investigators and parapsychologists from around the world, Belanger said, and to develop a central repository of information that researchers worldwide can access.

Vince Wilson of the New Jersey Ghost Hunters Society said, "The general public's interest [in the paranormal] is booming like it never has before. ... Now people from all walks of life can contribute to the newest discoveries and techniques" into the research of phenomena.

Despite cases in which researchers have been fooled by tricksters, Belanger and his partners said that "evidence overwhelmingly suggests that there is indeed reason to believe in psychic powers," but information from researchers has never been cataloged and shared.

"Through suggestions and proposals made by attendees of the Ghost World Symposium, and through input from the parapsychology community, we hope to change the face of ghost research forever," Wilson said.

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