IT'S 7 P.M.—ghostbusting time. Andrew Laird is the first buster up the gangplank. He's built like the magician Penn Gillette: six foot five, conspicuously larger through the middle than on either end. Laird weighs 300 pounds, he tells us, and struggles with diabetes. "I've lost 80 pounds," he says, unpacking a video monitor from its case and setting it on the captain's table. That's an impressive amount of fat to lose. I find myself calculating yield. Eighty pounds of blubber means around nine gallons of oil. If a barrel holds 31.5 gallons...

Laird and his 46-year-old colleague Gene Miller, a social worker by day, spend the next two hours setting up. Modern ghostbusting is a high-tech affair bearing little resemblance to the old-school methods used by Scooby and the gang. (In a nod to his Saturday-morning counterparts, Miller owns a pug named Lady Scooby Deaux but does not bring her along on cases.)

Laird believes the reason we can't see or hear dead people is that they exist and communicate in wavelengths outside the spectra of human sight and hearing: infrared and ultraviolet light, infrasound, ultrasound, etc. So he and his crew set up cameras and microphones that detect energy in these wavelengths. For this case, Laird sets up four infrared video cameras: in the blubber room, on deck, in the hold, and in the forecastle. The cameras will be wired to a closed-circuit TV with a four-way split-screen monitor, the one set up on the captain's table. This will allow Laird and the eight journalists and cameramen on hand to observe what's going on all over the ship.

At the moment, that isn't happening. What's happening is a scene reminiscent of what happens when ordinary people try to disconnect the VCR and hook up the DVD. Jacks going in, jacks yanked out. Intermittent cursing. Laird has been ghostbusting for 20 years, but you don't get a sense of that from watching him.

"I got two screens jumpin' up and down," he says in the flat nasal accent of Rhode Island. "And I got two of the same picture." He leans over and yells down the length of the ship. "Hey, what's goin' on with the camera in the fock... the fore... the front of the ship?"

Not wishing to distract him, the Globe reporter asks Gene Miller whether Laird prefers to go by Andy or Andrew. "It's Dr. Andrew Laird," states Miller.

Laird looks up from his pasta of wires. "Andy's fine," he says. Laird is a likable, humble, if not especially scientific sort of guy. "It's just an honorary doctorate," he says of his degree. "It's from... I forget where it's from."

Laird got into ghosts during college. A friend dragged him along to an abandoned insane asylum, which he insisted was haunted. Laird dropped the skepticism when a dead lunatic appeared from out of nowhere and just as quickly disappeared. Ghostbusting doesn't pay—it costs, big time—so he earns his living elsewise. These days he works as a freelance photographer.

While Laird and Miller grapple with the electronics, four female TRIPRG "sensitives"—including Miller's smoky-voiced wife, Steph—wander the ship, gathering psychic impressions and checking for "cold spots," which they interpret as a sort of invisible spirit-world calling card. Most of them also carry TriField Natural Electromagnetic Meters and/or handheld gauss meters, both of which measure electric and magnetic fields. They wear headlamps and carry their gear in canvas tool aprons. Paranormal "investigators" resemble utility-company employees on a field call, until you talk to them.

The Globe reporter asks Miller what a gauss meter measures. Miller thinks for a minute. "Andy?"

Laird answers without looking up. "It's like when a car pulls away, it leaves a residue, a smog," he says. "Our theory is that when a ghost uses up energy, that's what it leaves behind, an electromagnetic smog... Sonuvabitch, now we lost the blubber room!" At the end of the evening, gauss-meter "hits" will be one of the things mentioned by Laird as an indication of paranormal activity on the ship.

Several days later, I call a company that manufactures gauss meters and ask what sorts of things could make the needle jump on a 19th-century whaling ship. I learn that iron carries residual magnetism and that simply moving the meter past, say, the anchor chain or the windlass, each of which has its own magnetic field, could register a hit. The man I speak with is the president of the company, but he won't let me use his name, or its name, for fear that being associated with a paranormal organization could hurt business.

The makers of the EMF meter that TRIPRG members use, Salt Lake City–based AlphaLab, take a more pragmatic approach: They've actually marketed their TriField Natural EMF meter as a "ghost detector." I ask their production vice president, an unflappable guy named Joseph Hicks, if he thinks the meters actually detect ghosts. "Who knows?" he says. "Maybe they do."