BELGRADE LAKES, Maine:

The house in which I grew up was haunted by a cloud of cold mist, a mysterious woman in white, and an entity we called "the conductor," since he walked around wearing a mourning coat and carrying a baton in one hand.

For the most part, these spirits manifested themselves in what I suppose is the usual manner: as mysterious footsteps in the attic, as doors that opened and closed by themselves, and as clouds of sentient fog.

The house, in Devon, Pennsylvania, was creepy, to be certain. Still, it wasn't exactly the Amityville Horror. As a teenager in the 1970s, I found my house's ghosts mostly a social embarrassment. It was humiliating to have to explain to my friends spending the night in the Haunted Room: "Now don't worry if you see a blob come out of that closet. Usually it will go away if you whistle Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. If that doesn't work, try the Ninth."

Our house was known as the Coffin House, built by one Lemuel Coffin in the 19th century. It was a three-story Victorian eyesore that at one point had had a pointed tower on the front, although this had been removed in 1944. One of my neighbors explained that this was because someone had been killed up there.

"Who?" I asked. "Who got killed?"

"Nobody," he said, and shrugged. "Just some kid."

The most discouraging of our specters was the woman I called Mrs. Freeze. She appeared, occasionally, in the mirror of a third-floor lavatory. This was known as the Monkey Bathroom because the family who'd lived in the Coffin House before us, the Hunts, had kept a monkey in there.

One night, coming home late from a friend's house, I looked into the mirror and saw her standing behind me. Mrs. Freeze was a middle-aged woman in a white nightgown. Her eyes were small red stars. Cold mist rose from her hair and shoulders.

I turned around, but of course there was no one there.

I probably saw her about a half-dozen times in high school, usually a day or two before some calamity befell the family - my father's diagnosis of cancer; a sibling's unfortunate wedding. Once she materialized on the night before an overflowing toilet on the second floor flooded the whole house as we slept. In the morning, there was a river rushing down the stairs; all the downstairs ceilings bent, and then collapsed, beneath the weight of water.

My parents went to considerable expense to renovate the house. The old wallpaper was steamed off and replaced, the floors sanded and stained, the walls repainted. By the time I went off to college, the whole place had begun to seem considerably less creepy, a process that coincided with our family's migration from working to middle class.

As the years went by, I began to wonder, as I looked back on my adolescence, if I'd imagined the whole thing, if the house's haunting was something I'd invented out of perversity, or boredom, or sheer loneliness.

I went back to the Coffin House last year with someone whom I can only haplessly describe as a paranormal investigator. The woman, a cheerful, round Philadelphian named Shelly, was associated with an organization called Batty About Ghosts. When I asked her to check out the house, she'd said she'd be glad to. "Actually," said Shelly, without a hint of sarcasm, "this is my dead season."

Shelly came through the front door and stood there for a moment holding her hand over her heart. "Holy cow," she said. "There's a lot of activity here."

We busted ghosts for an hour or two, with mixed results, until we arrived in my parents' old room. My father had died in that room on Easter Sunday 1986, from malignant melanoma. The Ninth Symphony had been on the radio that morning. Two days before, on Good Friday, he'd told me that the conductor had come into his room. The conductor wanted my father to go away with him, and conduct his orchestra.

"But I couldn't go," my father said. "Because I did not know the music."

Shelly raised a pair of copper divining rods, which immediately began to spin around wildly, like the blades of a helicopter. "Is there anybody there?" she asked, but I could already sense my father's shy, gentle presence.

"It's my father," I told Shelly.

"Talk to him," she said. "Talk to him just like you used to."