To say that I dig the paranormal, that’s a given. It may even be an understatement.

I was raised on ghost stories, the way some kids are raised on skim milk and whole grains. It was a steady part of my diet, alongside Rice Krispies and horror movies.

I remember sitting on my mother’s lap as a wee lass of about five, falling asleep to tales of the house she grew up in: the misty apparition in the kitchen and the footsteps on the stairs when no one else was home.

Every time we went up to visit her dad in that same house, I’d be on the lookout for ghouls, peering out into the darkness, straining to hear those phantom footsteps.

My grandfather backed up my mother’s tales with “sea stories” of his own, swearing on his ancestors’ graves that they were true. I never doubted him for a second.

As a Catholic since birth, I grew up believing in purgatory, or limbo. It was my own theory that those lost souls who still walked the earth resided there, in neither heaven, nor hell.

I put my fascination with the supernatural on back the burner as I entered high school, and eventually college. Boys were just way more important.

But several years ago I happened upon a site called ghoststudy.com, and my childhood obsession came back.

I’d spend hours surfing the paranormal Web site, pouring over its galleries of ghost photography.

Pretty soon I was breaking out the old family photo albums, magnifying glass in hand. Apparently my enthusiasm was contagious, because my mom was quick to join in on the ghost hunt.

We freaked out the day we discovered a face in a window that didn’t belong to anyone in the family. We analyzed the photo from every possible angle, then blew the image up on a copier, scoping out any minute detail we might have missed.

My dad thought we were crazy, but it was too late. Mama and I were hooked once again.

When Fresno Adult School debuted their ghost-hunting class in 2007, we immediately signed up and joined a group that shared our supernatural sentiments.

I absorbed all of the information that I could, reading up on orbs, ectoplasm and EVP. I even rented “White Noise”.

And I had never wanted anything so badly as to capture a spirit on film.

After touring several local haunted hot-spots, our class embarked on an overnight field trip to the Sierra Sky Ranch in Oakhurst, cameras and voice recorders on hand.

We combed the entire hotel and its grounds with our equipment until about three the next morning, and I raced over to Walgreen’s for one-hour developing as soon as we got back.

Most of the roll was quite forgettable, but the last two pictures took my breath away.

I’d snapped two shots of the same space (as they’d told us to do for comparison purposes) of a closet in the living quarters above the dining area.

Supposedly a ranch hand named Elmer had lived there in the 1930s and had hung himself from a tree outside his residence during the Great Depression.

In one of my photos was a foggy cloud of mist that appeared to be coming from the closet, and in the next, it had moved over toward the front door.

This was the precise moment I laid my obsession to rest. I had proved to myself that I was capable of capturing a lost soul on film, and that was all I had ever wanted.

Proof. Because I guess a part of me had never really believed.