Cast member Kathy Grace, of Pawtucket, presents a ghostly figure as she walks past the water wheel in the Wilkinson Mill during a ghost tour of the Slater Mill site. The nighttime tours, held twice a night on Fridays and Saturdays through Nov. 7, often sell out.

The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

PAWTUCKET — The sun had set a half-hour before, and the main floor of Slater Mill was dark, lit only by the grey light from the streetlights outside. The looms were feebly illuminated and threw long narrow shadows on the floor.

As Jackelyn Dacanay peered into one of the darkened corners that Friday night, history came alive, or at least it seemed to be suspended midair.“It was a complete face, eyes, nose, it was staring directly at us,” Dacanay said. “It was so freaky.”

Dacanay and her friend Alexa Benjamin were part of a ghost-hunting tour of Slater Mill, an event that has become a regular autumn offering at the historic site.

One of her guides on the tour, Keith E. Johnson, had a meter that indicated elevated electromagnetic energy in the room. Another said she sensed temperature drops in the corner. The third member of the team, Keith’s twin brother Carl, cautioned that sometimes people can look at patterns and perceive what they want to see.

But other times, he added, they see what is there.

By day, Keith and Carl are “interpreters” at Slater Mill, dressing in 1800s costumes and explaining the exhibits to visitors. By night, they are ghost hunters, prowling the same grounds with tape recorders and electromagnetic sensors, trying to capture proof that some essence of those long-dead people remains.

For Keith, a history buff, community theater actor and founder, with his wife, Sandra, of New England Anomalies Research (NEAR), which specializes in “paranormal investigation and demonology,” the Slater Mill tours are the perfect fusion of his interests.

As a child he said he heard sounds from rooms with no one inside; he has heard screams from empty parts of the building. His faith was strengthened by a visit to the site last year by the SyFy Channel show Ghost Hunters. Using the same equipment Johnson’s group does, the team on the show believed it made contact with the ghost of a 9-year-old boy from Central Falls.

“I have no doubt that it’s real,” he said.

Still, the ghost tour isn’t only about mill workers’ afterlife, but their everyday lives, too. Buildings can absorb the emotions of the people who lived in them, Johnson said, so he tries to get visitors to imagine how it felt to work in those mills.

In the Wilkinson Mill, they let the water wheel turn. As the wheel’s gears struck each other, the room was instantly filled with a constant bong-bong-bonging like a never-ending church bell. Imagine working 10 hours in that racket, he said.

“And some of those people worked there since they were six or seven years old, until they couldn’t work or had a serious injury,” he said.

Whether the three buildings at Slater Mill are haunted is far from scientifically settled. But rather than scaring visitors away, site managers say ghosts are bringing them in.

“They get 30 per group, and it often sells out,” said Janice Kissinger, chief executive officer of the Slater Mill site, of the $15-per-person tours. “Not many historical sites sell out.”

The ghost tours are part of a strategy Kissinger called “affinity marketing,” where Slater Mill tries to attract people with particular interests by focusing on different aspects of the mill and its history.

Programs on quilts are aimed at crafters; the grounds’ gardens lure backyard gardeners. The number of people interested in the paranormal is “huge, huge,” she said. And besides, by having the tours twice nightly, at 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays through Nov. 7, they draw people, and revenue, at a time that the mills aren’t normally being used.

It worked with Dacanay, who said though she grew up in Pawtucket, she hadn’t thought much of Slater Mill.

“I really want to come back,” Dacanay said. “It was really unexpected.”

jhill@projo.com