Spookygirl - Paranormal Investigator by Jill Baguchinsky

There was only one sure way to test that theory.
    “Buster!”
    I heard an unholy squeal rattle from the direction of the living room. Seconds later the temperature in my room dropped. Buster screeched with joy, levitated my pillow, and hit me on the head with it. Before getting bopped by my poltergeist, I saw the EMF readout change. The number went crazy, spiking up to 18.9, then wavering back and forth between that and 12.3 as Buster moved around the room.
    Buster picked up the pillow again; like a girl on a sugar high at a slumber party, he used it to whack me on the shoulder a couple of times. I did my best to ignore the smacks and watched the meter.
    “Okay, Buster. Wanna play? Go get your toy. Get your squeaky burger!”
    With a delighted cry, Buster left the room. The temperature returned to normal; the EMF reading settled back down to 1.4.
    It worked.
    A moment later, the rubber hamburger sailed into the room and landed on my lap.
    Buster reentered the room with a squeal, and the reading went back up. This was way too awesome.
    I switched off the detector, then squeaked the burger and threw it into the hall. “Go get it!”
    Soon it flew back into the room and bounced off my arm. Buster made one of his unearthly chuckling noises.
    I could hear Dad downstairs; it sounded like he’d just gotten home. I put the reader back in the box and crammed the whole thing into a dresser drawer, carefully hidden under a couple of shirts. Then, to thank Buster for being so helpful, I played fetch for a few more minutes and rewarded him with a cookie. Overcome with happiness, he screamed and pulled my hair.
    *  *  *
     
    Over the next week, I went through the rest of the boxes and unearthed a scientific digital thermometer, a motion detector, and a sound recorder. Everything was years out of date, technologically speaking, but it would do. In exchange for attention and cookies, Buster was my willing guinea pig for each. The thermometer registered the temperature fluctuations that occurred around him, and the sound recorder picked up his cries and squeals clearly. He was a loud ghost, though; even people without abilities like mine could hear him. I wondered how the recorder would do in the locker room, if it could pick up any EVP.
    The motion detector did absolutely nothing, even when I riled Buster up. It only detected movement when he levitated or threw a solid object, but even then, it only registered the floating item, not Buster. He was invisible, even to me. Maybe the detector would work better on the kind of ghost I could see. Not that I thought I’d have luck with it in the locker room, anyway—I needed tools that could take fast readings, like the temperature gauge and the EMF reader. I sure as hell wasn’t going to sit around for hours and wait for the motion detector to go off.
    I had hoped to find a camera with some kind of infrared feature, or maybe a film camera, but nothing turned up. My own digital camera would have to do if I couldn’t locate anything better. I’d just have to hope for orbs or weird spectral mists.
    I also found lots of Mom’s personal stuff during my search. Some of it, like the address book and the tiger’s eye, I kept out of the boxes and hid away in my room. I kept some of her jewelry, too—the silver chain, a pendant made from a shard of obsidian, a ring embedded with tiny crystal chips, and a rose quartz necklace. I couldn’t wear any of it and risk Dad recognizing it, so I hoarded it away in Mom’s wooden jewelry box and tucked everything into a nightstand drawer. I kept my own jewelry in the box as well—the spider earrings and the various purple bracelets and rings I’d collected.
    But even though I was thrilled to find so many of Mom’s things, it wasn’t until I opened the last box that I realized what I had really been searching for.
    The box held a stack of file folders, and each folder represented a different ghost hunt. All of Mom’s notes and research were there: