Two nights earlier at University Park, I attended one of the Paranormal Research Society’s weekly meetings. This one was held in the Hintz Family Alumni Center, and the A&E crew shot from the flanks of Robb Hall as Buell offered up a bit of background on Mothman.

Sightings of Mothman started in November 1966 and lasted a year. Newell Partridge first spotted the creature in his yard in nearby Salem, W.Va., on Nov. 15, 1966. Partridge’s dog chased it into the dark—and never returned. The very next night, two newlywed couples reported seeing a large man with wings and glowing red eyes near an abandoned warehouse in the TNT Area; the night after that, four more Point Pleasant residents told police that the creature showed up in a neighbor’s yard, stared at them for a few moments, then flew away. More than 100 similar sightings were reported around town throughout the following year.

Then, on the evening of Dec. 15, 1967, tragedy struck. The Silver Bridge, which connected Point Pleasant to Kanauga, Ohio, was clogged with traffic when, at about 5:00 p.m., a single steel eyebar—one of the links suspending the bridge above the Ohio River—moaned, buckled, then snapped, sending 31 vehicles hurtling into the icy water below. Forty-six people died.

Many people think Mothman had something to do with the bridge collapse, because after the tragedy, the Mothman sightings stopped. Whether Mothman caused the collapse, tried to warn town residents about it, or randomly coincided with it is as much a mystery to the people of Point Pleasant as the creature itself.

Today, stores in Point Pleasant sell Mothman Tshirts, posters, and refrigerator magnets. Local resident Jeff Wamsley has written two books on the subject and runs the town’s Mothman Museum. Mothman was even one of the suggested designs for the West Virginia statehood quarter a few years back. And the 2002 thriller The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney, Hollywood-ified the spooky events of 1966–67. But as Wamsley puts it, “The real story is a heck of a lot scarier than the movie.”

Back in the alumni center at University Park, Buell finishes up the Mothman tale, then dives into a general discourse about ghosts and hauntings. He also offers guidelines for what to do should you ever encounter a demon. For instance, never use the word “demon.” (Whoops. Broke that one already.) Apparently, acknowledging “one of those things” gives it power and tends to scare clients. Instead of the D-word, use the term “bunny.” If the bunny is an exceedingly evil bunny, use “fuzzy bunny.” These names seem to have a calming effect on clients, and as an added bonus, the humor creates a positive energy that works to counter a bunny’s power. Who knew?

There are other rules: Never identify a particular bunny by name, or if you must—for example, if you need to tell an exorcist what he’ll be up against—write the name down. Do not taunt a bunny. And if you believe in evil presences, then by definition you must believe in good ones—so if you encounter an evil presence, you must have faith that the benevolent forces will help to protect you.

When Buell discusses ghosts and spirits and bunnies, he does so with such nonchalance that there’s no question that he believes they’re real. But that doesn’t mean he buys every ghost story he hears. “When I first started,” he admits, “I was looking for ghosts in every single little thing. But now when I go into cases, I wouldn’t say I’m looking to disprove them, but I definitely keep a good, strong dose of skepticism around me.”

Our investigation kicks off on a Saturday in Point Pleasant, a town of just 5,000 plopped down on West Virginia’s western border where the Ohio and Kanawha rivers meet. It’s a blue-collar town with affable locals, family-owned businesses lining Main Street, and a nine-foot-tall stainless-steel statue of Mothman in the town square.

Our first stop is Jeff Wamsley’s museum on Main Street—“The World’s Only Mothman Museum.” While the rest of the students scour the museum’s maps, newspaper clippings, and papier-mâché effigies of Mothman, Buell interviews Wamsley on camera. In addition to the museum and books, Wamsley hosts a Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant every September, and maintains a website, mothmanlives.com. “I don’t try to convince anyone of whether or not Mothman exists,” Wamsley tells Buell. “I just want to bring the events to the surface and let people decide for themselves.”

We head over to the town’s tourism center to meet Linda Scarberry, one of the Mothman eyewitnesses. Now in her 60s, she’s a stick-thin Southern belle, and with a soft-but-scratchy drawl, she tells Buell about her encounter with Mothman: She was 19 and driving through the TNT Area with her new husband, Roger, and another newlywed couple. As their car approached one of the area’s abandoned warehouses, they spotted the creature’s red eyes. The closer they drove, the more they could make out what looked like a large man with wings, one of which was caught on a wire guardrail. Once the creature freed itself, it turned toward their car, stared at them, then darted into the warehouse. Roger floored the accelerator all the way into town, where the couples went directly to the police with their story.

Scarberry also tells Buell that for about a year after her first sighting, she would be walking through her apartment and suddenly freeze, finding Mothman staring through the windows at her. She confesses to Buell that she’s a still a nervous wreck. “It’s just a time in my life,” she says, “that I wish never happened.”

Faye Dewitt has a similar story. She was 14 when she encountered Mothman. Her brother was driving her and her younger siblings home through the TNT Area after a drive-in movie, when suddenly he turned a horrified gaze in Faye’s direction. Faye turned to look at out the passenger window, and saw the creature hovering just inches from the glass. Faye’s brother stopped the car and Mothman jumped on the hood, staring at them, then flew off. Dewitt also claims that after her encounter she began to experience premonitions—including one that made her beg her father not to take the family across the Silver Bridge for a holiday shopping trip on Dec. 15, 1967.

The Paranormal Research Society is one of the only university student clubs in the country dedicated to paranormal research. Buell founded the society in his first semester as an undergrad at Penn State in 2001, after spending his teen years hunting ghosts and other oddities in his hometown of Sumter, S.C. Once the society was off the ground, Buell started directing on-campus investigations of all the rumored spook spots, like Old Botany (where President George Atherton’s wife, Frances, is rumored to watch over her husband’s grave from the attic windows) and the stacks in Pattee (where Betsy Aardsma was murdered in 1969 and is said to still walk the aisles). The group has grown to roughly 30 members now, and each October it draws hundreds of paranormal devotees to University Park for UNIV-CON, a national paranormal conference. Between that and A&E’s Paranormal State, the Penn State Paranormal Research Society is becoming quite popular among the nation’s paranormal circles—circles that are getting persistently larger. Innumerable paranormal groups have surfaced all over the Web in recent years; one of the most popular sites, ghostvillage.com, gets six million hits a month and has more than 30,000 e-mail subscribers. And with TV shows like the SciFi Channel’s reality series Ghost Hunters and the Discovery Channel’s docudrama series A Haunting, paranormal investigation now has more mass appeal than ever before.

Finding Mothman has been on Buell’s to-do list for a number of years—he calls it “one of the Holy Grails” of the paranormal—but it’s atypical of the club’s cases. Most investigations don’t involve hunting for legendary creatures, but rather responding to calls from an individual or family looking for help. Buell and his colleagues have worked, for example, with families in Pittsburgh and in Syracuse, N.Y. The latter of those clients was the Brayen family of Syracuse, N.Y.; they reported a strange force touching and shoving family members, even levitating them off the bed as they tried to sleep. An Internet search led Teena Brayen to a paranormal investigation group in New England, who in turn linked her up with Buell. The Penn State group arranged for an exorcism, and now, a year later, the strange happenings have ceased. You may find the idea of a bunch of college students hiring exorcists to be a little screwy, but Brayen, like other families the students have helped, sings their praises: “Ryan and his group were a godsend,” she says. (The Brayen investigation was filmed as an episode of Paranormal State titled “Devil in Syracuse.”)

“Anecdotal stories are only anecdotal stories,” scoffs James Randi, a well-known skeptic who has spent much of his life debunking paranormal claims. “We hear these claims all the time. All I’m saying is, prove it. I’m just looking for the evidence.” Through his nonprofit, the James Randi Educational Foundation, Randi has established a “One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge,” which offers a million dollars to anyone who can show actual evidence of a paranormal or supernatural power or event. (Many have tried; none have succeeded.)

“I still don’t even know what I believe about all of this,” admits Alan Lagarde, an A&E producer. “But the [Penn State students are] genuinely making a big difference in their clients’ lives.”

Back in Point Pleasant, in the TNT Area, we walk in the dark along a narrow, snaking pathway that runs through the woods, near two abandoned bunkers. The group decides to scope out one of the bunkers to let Chip Coffey, the psychic, work some extrasensory magic while Buell leads an Electronic Voice Phenomenon session as part of our search for Mothman. EVP sessions—standard fare in many paranormal investigations—involve using tape recorders or other electronic devices to record the voices of spirits. (James Randi argues that many of the recorders used for EVP are over-sensitive. “It gives them spurious signals that they haven’t got an immediate explanation for,” he says, “from which they jump to the conclusion that it must be something paranormal.”)

Inside the bunker, voices bounce about the seamless interior walls with a ghostly reverberation, but a hush glides across the group shortly thereafter. Audio recorders flip on, flashlights flip off. Were it not for the small lights mounted on the crew’s video cameras, we’d be swimming in absolute black.

As the session begins, Buell asks an unnamed source for a protective “circle of white light” to keep everyone safe.

“This around us has more of a purpose,” announces Coffey. “I’m experiencing two times the energy all around.”

“Why did you choose to show yourself in Point Pleasant?” Buell asks no one in particular. Silence. “We’re just here to record voices,” he reassures. “It doesn’t steal anything.”

Coffey informs us that the force he’s picking up on is moving, appears to be taking a particular interest in Buell, who continues his line of questioning. “Is there a Mothman?”

Coffey, now apparently tapping some higher force, provides an answer: “You know the answer to that.”

Buell: “Did Mothman cause the Silver Bridge collapse?”

Higher force via Coffey: “Absolutely not.”

Buell: “Why did it stop appearing after the bridge collapse?”

Force: “Did it?”

So it goes for 20 minutes. We learn that “this is beyond what we can comprehend,” that “everything comes together here,” and that “they know.” Then Coffey, still speaking on behalf of the higher force, informs us that someone in our group will receive a sign, possibly even a visit, by this force before sunup. One of the crew members pokes me in the side and jokes that it’ll probably be me. Great. As if the woods aren’t scary enough. Now I need to worry about a Super 8 motel room?

Buell brings the session and the night’s investigation to close. “Let’s shut down,” he says gently. “We’ve asked it enough questions.”

A half-hour later back in my motel room, I pick up the new issue of Wired magazine. I’m exhausted, though, and reading proves futile, so I place Wired on the nightstand, hit the light, pull the blankets over my head, and doze off.

Not long after, I awaken to a thin string of light sliding under the curtain in my motel room window. I don’t believe it. The thing, the force, has actually come to give me a sign. My heart hides behind my liver, until I realize that it’s just the sun. Apparently, I’ve slept soundly and the only sign I’m getting is one of a bright morning following a completely thing-less night.

That’s when I notice it. The magazine. The issue of Wired.

Last night I closed my magazine and placed it on the nightstand. Now that very magazine is resting on a pillow on the floor at the opposite side of the bed, as though someone had picked it up, walked it around, and gently placed it there. And the weirdest part is that the magazine is lying open at a two-page Banana Republic ad. This can hardly be sign, can it? Maybe the thing had come after all. And maybe it has good fashion sense.

Later I meet Buell and the others in the Super 8 lobby to dive into another day of investigation. No one mentions anything about receiving a sign in the night. I decide to keep the Wired story to myself. I mean, come on. I’m a sound sleeper, and I’ve been known to chuck a pillow or two off the bed in my slumber. If I’ve learned anything this weekend, all this ghost stuff has to be the result of overactive imaginations, right? A chilly breeze when the windows are shut? Have the thermostat checked. Banging from behind the wall? Try a clanky radiator. Weird moaning from the hallway? Could be those creaky doors or squeaky floors.

But who knows? It could be something … else.

Patrick Kirchner is a freelance writer in Lancaster, Pa., and a former associate editor of The Penn Stater. He has never seen a ghost, but would like to. The series Paranomal State debuted Dec. 10 and continues through March on A&E.