Tonya Hansen found the contraption, scuffed and blackened, near an off-ramp on U.S. 77 this winter. When she lifted the blue, rubber-encased camera to her face, it smelled like smoke.

She turned it on a few times after she got home and saw that the image of handprint burned white for 30 to 40 seconds after palm was pressed to table. That the dog's paws left a vanishing trail of prints across the hardwood floors.

Hansen said she had no use for the device that detected presences the eye could not, but she thought someone her husband, Brian, worked with might. She said she had no idea Lincoln Fire and Rescue bought the thing for $10,000 in 2002 and lost it after a Feb. 18 fire.

The Hansens gave the camera to Ted Pool, who knew immediately that he was holding a thermal heat imager. The smell led him to believe it belonged to a fire department.

That knowledge had nothing to do with firefighting experience. He knew what it was for an entirely different reason: "I am an amateur paranormal investigator," he said in March when LFD collected the camera from him.

His wife, Holly Pool, said she's experienced a sensation in her shoulder so cold she felt it to the bone.

"I just want to have a face-to-face experience," she said.

Ted Pool, a former bouncer, said staff at Guitars and Cadillacs told all kinds of ghost stories.

They decided to go out and look for those things that go bump in the night, and Crossroads Para-Investigations was born.

They say they've photographed a few "orbs," white, translucent flashes.

At a San Diego cemetery, they recorded what sounds to them like the faint voice of a woman.

And on June 7, they conducted Crossroads' first Lincoln ghost hunt - at the home of Tonya and Brian Hansen.

"The reports were of the children in the home seeing shadows moving past a doorway in the basement, the owners hearing 'wrestling' sounds from upstairs while they were all downstairs," reads the case description.

"One of the owners having feelings of presence throughout the house, one of the children actively talking to someone and referring to a 'friend' in the house."

A little after 9 on a Sunday evening, the Pools went to the home on La Brea Avenue in north central Lincoln. The Hansens' two sons stayed with their grandmother that night.

The Pools unzipped their laptop cases - Ted's emblazoned with a winged skull decal, Holly's with a flaming butterfly.

They placed a digital audio recorder, a still camera, video camera and digital laser thermometer on the dinner table - about $1,000 worth of equipment, and no thermal heat imager.

Lincoln's new ghost hunters work on a tight budget.

"I don't have night vision on my camera," Ted Pool said as he looked at the Hansens'. "That's nice, dude."

He set that one atop a notebook in the basement, its lens pointed at the wall where the shadow is said to have run.

The Hansens have lived at the house for about two years, and said they noticed enough things to make them wonder if they aren't the only ones who call it home.

"I'll get a cold sensation," Tonya Hansen said, as if "somebody passed me, but nobody's here."

Brian Hansen said he once heard dogs fighting upstairs when he was in the basement watching TV.

"The dogs were outside," he said. When he walked upstairs, he said, "the noise just stopped, dude."

In the boys' bedroom, their faces lit by the glow from the laptop, Tonya Hansen and Holly Pool took turns asking questions.

"Are you here just to watch over us?"

"Are you here just to watch over the boys?"

"Are you a man?"

"Can you show us that you're here? Can you speak loudly into the recorder and give us your name?"

"Can you make some kind of noise to let us know that you're here?"

They repeated their queries in the master bedroom, the weight room, the den in the basement.

But no tables levitated that evening. No chairs creaked. No one answered.

A cat that crossed the street out front was more tabby than black.

That's more the norm than the exception, Ted Pool said.

"Ghosts don't perform on cue."

The Pools said the evening reminded them of a recent wedding they attended in Colorado, at the hotel where "The Shining" was filmed.

"It was kind of like everybody was expecting someone to jump out and say 'Boo,'" Holly Pool said. "It was disappointing we didn't get anything."

Later, Ted Pool would comb through audio and video footage from the Hansen home, looking for for EVP, or electronic voice phenomena, before closing Crossroads' first case.

"No images were found that couldn't be debunked, no detectable audio was discovered, and no video evidence was collected," he wrote.

"We advised the clients that just because we didn't get anything doesn't mean that it doesn't exist."

He told the Hansens he'll come back if there's anything further to inspect.

And he and Holly are open to suggestions for new places to inspect.

They're looking for others to volunteer, too. Those with thermal heat imagers are encouraged to apply.

Reach Cory Matteson at 473-7438 or cmatteson@journalstar.com.