Lights flickered on and a wooden gate swung open -- as if beckoning toward the widow's walk atop the city's oldest beachside home. Four women stood at the foot of the stairs frozen for a millisecond. "The light turned on by itself!" said Liz Stiles, 51, of Edgewater. Another stunned pause followed. Gulps of air. Then Maureen Ferencz, 52, of Ormond Beach, raised a rectangle-shaped instrument slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes. Peppercorn-sized lights -- a red one, a green one and an orange one -- lit up. Ferencz could hardly contain herself. "I'm getting a reading," Ferencz said quickly. The quartet ascended the spiral stairs -- for another set of intense exclamations about how their instruments might be showing what they can't see with their own eyes: Spirits inhabit this 119-year-old home known as Lilian Place. Ferencz and Stiles are part of a fledgling ghost-hunting group, Halifax Hauntings, that, last week, spent from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. trying to measure the amount of ghostly activity in the home that's being renovated into a bed-and-breakfast inn. The group, led by Ferencz's son, Scott, 34, has done the same at the Live Oak Inn and the Halifax Historical Society. Armed with a night-vision camera, electromagnetic field detectors and an electronic voice phenomena recorder -- mostly donated by the Daytona Beach-based business, Spook Tech -- the group also intends to record spectral activity at the Daytona Playhouse and various local cemeteries, such as Pilgrim's Rest.
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