Dan Gordon, of Providence, co-author of Haunted Baseball.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

PROVIDENCE — Believe.

Halloween’s here. Strange things happen. Things rise from the dead. Look at the Red Sox.

Twice in recent years the team has staged improbable comebacks in the playoffs. Sunday night, they won the World Series. So fans believe in the players. And, we now learn, the players believe in ghosts.

“They’re a part of the players’ lives,” says Dan Gordon of Providence. “I was surprised that players not only believed in them, but talked about them.”

The conversations occur in a new book, Haunted Baseball: Ghosts, Curses, Legends, and Eerie Events ($14.95, The Lyons Press), co-authored by Gordon and Mickey Bradley. The authors spent 18 months visiting dozens of teams, talking to hundreds of players and personnel.

The authors conclude that the world of baseball goes beyond superstition to the supernatural. This is not to say that Gordon believes in such things, just that many players do.

Trot Nixon, Coco Crisp, David Ortiz, take your pick. And it’s not just Red Sox players past and present. Gordon, who “lives and dies with the Red Sox,” found believers on numerous teams in the league.

Some players and team personnel talk about ball parks where ghosts get involved in games, blowing balls foul or giving them bad bounces. Others talk about haunted hotels where teams share quarters with ghosts. And in a few instances, ghosts make house calls.

Johnny Damon, formerly of the Red Sox and now on the Yankees, claimed a ghost once pinned him down on his couch in his Orlando home.

After 20 minutes, the ghost got off Damon, who’s quoted as saying, “He released me and went off on his merry way.”

How does a book about ghosts in baseball begin?

It starts with a vision, of course. A person from Gordon’s past suddenly appears before him, and speaks to him. This is in 2004. And Gordon is in Cooperstown, N.Y., at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

So naturally you’re thinking it’s a ghost of baseball past, perhaps some disgruntled player who haunts the hall for not inducting him. But it was actually a former college professor of Gordon’s, a guy who had written about baseball superstition and suggested that Gordon go to the next step: the supernatural.

“I had never heard of ghost stories in baseball,” Gordon says. “We’ve all seen the movie Field of Dreams, but there are few instances in which the media are reporting ghosts in baseball parks or baseball players talking about ghosts.”

Gordon gave the suggestion some thought, and decided it was worth looking into.

“It just makes sense with the old ball parks such as Fenway, Wrigley and Yankee Stadium. It makes sense that something must have happened at some time.”

Also, Gordon says, the sport of baseball lends itself to ghosts more than other sports because it’s so steeped in statistics and history, with comparisons made of players of the present to the past. And the sport’s pace helps, too.

“There is more nostalgia in baseball than in other sports. It’s also a slower game so there is more quiet time to think about the meaning of the game and its past players.”

One of the most mentioned places for ghosts in baseball is Yankee Stadium. Many people talk about it as hallowed ground, as they do with some other notable parks. Players speak with awe and respect of being in a place where history was made. “Some players talk about ghosts in the figurative sense. But some believe literally that these old legends — Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Mickey Mantle — are still there and adding a little spice to the ball game.”

Gordon, 42, and Bradley, his Yankee-supporting co-author and friend from their days at Union College, do not attempt to investigate or debunk any ghostly claims made in the book. The closest they come to that is addressing the so-called Curse of the Bambino.

No one knew of such a thing, according to Gordon, until a writer coined the phrase for the title of a 1990 book about the Red Sox.

“We asked some old-time players and they said it wasn’t part of their vocabulary when they were playing,” Gordon says. “But everyone knew the team had hard luck. I think ’86 sealed the deal.”

That year, the Red Sox were one out away from winning the World Series when a groundball bounced between first baseman Bill Buckner’s legs. The late Sherm Feller worked for the Red Sox then as an announcer. Technically, Feller’s 26-year career ended with his death in 1994. But according to Carl Beane, the current announcer at Fenway Park, Feller’s still in the booth.

“Carl talks about inspiration and the memory and awe of sitting in Sherm’s seat,” Gordon says. “But he also mentions technical glitches and headsets flying off the desk. He interprets that as an actual ghost. He feels Sherm is sitting next to him or somewhere in the booth.”

In 1976, former Red Sox Bernie Carbo brought his bat to a witch in Salem, Mass., to have a hex removed from it. Also that year, Tom Yawkey, former owner of the Red Sox died, but, according to pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, he promptly came back to the park in the form of a pigeon. And the current supervisor of the Fenway’s nighttime cleaning crew claims he sometimes hears the sound of a bat hitting a ball in the dark and empty park.

That’s simply eerie, not scary, which Gordon says is how many players describe the Vinoy, the visiting team hotel of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

“Some of the players are afraid to stay at the hotel, or they sleep with their light on. I know the Red Sox don’t stay there anymore. I’m not sure why that is. David Ortiz is one player who didn’t like talking about the ghosts at the Vinoy. He nodded his head about the ghosts, but didn’t want to talk about them.”

Gordon and Bradley have found a lot more people to talk to about ghosts in baseball. The authors are working on volume two of Haunted Baseball. Its focus will be on strange goings-on in the sport in foreign countries, such as Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Japan.

“Japan also has baseball ghosts,” Gordon says. “Teams that are in a slump will put a pile of salt in the dugout to ward off evil spirits.”

In researching his book, Gordon visited many reportedly haunted ball parks. He gathered many ghostly accounts, but he didn’t have a ghostly experience himself, so can’t truly count himself a believer.

“Nowhere that I went did I sense anything unusual. I looked at myself as simply chronicling this story. It would be an extra perk if something like that did happen.”

Dan Gordon has a book signing Nov. 10, noon to 4 p.m., at the Borders Express in the Silver City Galleria, Galleria Mall Drive, in Taunton; and Nov. 14 at 7 p.m. in the Seekonk Public Library, 410 Newman Ave.

brourke@projo.com