Knocks. Missing keys. Reset alarm clocks. Doors flinging open. A cigarette combusts from black ash to burning red. Footsteps and no one else home.

Hmm.

A practical joker? A ghost? Imagination? An imaginative practical joking apparition?

Former and current residents of a Park Lane house say the culprit in a series of unexplained mishaps and noises was “Eve.”

“Eve,” explained Andrea Kress, who lived in the house on Park Lane last year, was the name spelled out on a Ouiji Board during a seance. Strange noises and occurrences at the house prompted Kress and her roommates to hold the Ouiji session.

“We’d hear somebody jump up and down in the attic, other than that, a lot of knocking and random footsteps,” said Kress, a communication senior.

“We’d have jewelry and perfume missing,” she added. “I’d be curious to know if they (the current roommates) hear the knocking.”

The houses current tenants cited several of the same occurrences and also attribute knocks, footsteps and other strange mishaps to a spiritual presence.

“The fist week I was here, maybe it’s stupid, but all my hair stuff disappeared. Then my roommates perfume disappeared, then my other roommates razor disappeared - they were all blue, which was bizarre,” said Colleen McKinnie, a current tenant who has lived on Park Lane since May.

“We’d gone out, locked our doors and our stuff was gone the next morning,” said McKinnie, an apparel textile design junior. “We’ve also been here when we noticed stuff missing.

“We tried talking to her. We’d say, ‘Eve, we’d like our stuff back.’ But it didn’t work.”

McKinnie’s roommate, English junior Jenny Wagner, often hears knocking and footsteps.

“You’ll open the door and no one will be there,” she said of the knocking, which emanates from the front, back and basement doors periodically. “You’ll shut the door and walk away and you’ll hear it again. But nobody’s near.”

Other strange occurrences include the bathroom door randomly flying open unprompted and alarm clocks being periodically reset or turned off. Wagner said she once left a cigarette butt in an ashtray and left the room. When she re-entered, it was on fire.

Creepy.

Spook

Are the experience of these tenants rooted in the mischievous horseplay of a spiritual being?

Tina Carlson says yes. She’s the co-director of a supernatural society called the Shadowlands, an investigator for the Las Vegas Society of Supernatural Investigation, and a self-proclaimed “ghost magnet.”

“Things moving on their own, whispers, shadows at night - that’s just the ghost trying to get us to pay attention to them,” she said “We like to put it in this way: Consider yourself in a country where it’s normally against the rules to acknowledge your existence. Nobody sees you, nobody talks to you and nobody even pretends to think that they see you. What are you going to do?”

“Turing lights on and off, moving things, throwing things - you’re going to try anything to get attention,” said Carlson, whose husband saw a shadowy figure run across the top of her entertainment center a few nights ago.

Carlson uses electromagnetic field detectors, motion detectors, digital cameras, digital recorders and video cameras to investigate hauntings. She said new technology offers solid proof of the supernatural’s existence.

Spoof

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and director of The Skeptics Society, would say there’s no way in hell ghosts exists - if he believed in hell.

“It’s a combination of media hype, noncritical thinking and an acceptance of weird things, because it’s sort of titillating,” he said of those who believe in the paranormal.

Ghosts are a mix of light, shadows and an overactive imagination. The evidence provided in support of the spiritual world by people like Carlson is “pseudo-science.”

“There is no evidence that any such thing exists, or that the body or the person continues after death in some ethereal state that can float through walls. It’s like the ink blot test - it tells us more of the person making the claim than the ghost itself.”

Community Resource Management Company has owned the house since 1996, and president of CRMC, Joe Goodsir, said he’s never had any complaints.

“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” he said.

The knocking and footsteps?

“It could be a branch by the house, it could be something they’re hearing outdoors, or their imaginations running wild.”

The missing items?

“I think that they’re just passing along tales,” he said. “The house is licensed for five people, maybe two of the roommates playing games with the other people there, or maybe they have people over.”

Goodsir thinks there is a possibility that spirits do exist. But not in this house.

Whether or not “Eve” is the one knocking, walking around in the attic, opening doors and pilfering perfume, the roommates on Park Lane are convinced that something supernatural is lurking.

“You can’t logically explain it,” Wagner said. “But for five separate people to experience things on different occasions and for people who lived here before to experience similar things rules out of the possibility that we’re all crazy.”