Grant Wilson, left, and Jason Hawes head up TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society), a close-knit organization of volunteer paranormal researchers — ordinary people who investigate and attempt to debunk claims of otherworldly activity.

SCI FI Channel / David Drebbin

Every Wednesday night two famous plumbers not named Mario or Luigi capture the attention of TV viewers. But it’s not audiences Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson are hunting. Creating the most compelling nightvision video since Paris Hilton’s infamous tape, the Rhode Island-based Roto-Rooter employees are the co-founders of TAPS, The Atlantic Paranormal Society, and stars of the SCI FI Channel’s Ghost Hunters.

Since 1990, when things go bump in the night, TAPS has bumped back. Armed with a skeptical mindset, along with an array of gauges and audio/video equipment that records noises, electrical fields and infrared heat signatures, the group investigates homes, hotels, ships, plantations, prisons, lighthouses and military bases in an effort to debunk purported hauntings.

With current viewership near 3 million for the season, more viewers are consistently tuning in to watch since the 2004 premiere. Last year’s live investigation on Halloween night drew 2.8 million viewers, and TAPS is set to do it again with a live seven-hour program beginning at 7 p.m. on Oct. 31 in which the team will investigate Fort Delaware in Delaware City, Del.

When Hawes and Wilson are asked why their show introduced paranormal chats around the water cooler, and even inspired others to launch their own ghost-hunting groups, they respond with the laid-back attitude you’d expect from two family-oriented friends who work together and barbecue in each other’s backyards.

“I think the main appeal of our show is we’re normal, down-to-earth guys,” Hawes says. “We’re not scientists out there talking over everybody’s head … and I think one of the main things is that we’re not a group that was put together to make a television show like most of the other shows out there. We were a group that existed long before the television show, and will exist long after.”

Those “other shows” typically involve a spook crew with British psychic mediums who declare every location haunted. By contrast, TAPS attempts to help families, first and foremost, and seek to prove the existence of the paranormal by disproving bogus claims of activity. The team is among the first to do so and, as such, have episodes where the scariest things they find are leaky pipes and creaky floorboards.

“It’s funny because when we first started off, a lot of people hated us because of the way we saw things and how vocal we were about them,” Hawes says. “We just looked at the field differently, and were willing to call it out.”

Still, when the team’s methods fail to explain the unexplainable, like disembodied voices on digital recorders, exploding water glasses or human-shaped “shadow people” caught on video, the evidence that remains suggests something otherworldly.

“The only time we even entertain the idea that it’s paranormal is once we’ve exhausted all the science at our fingertips,” Wilson says. “Once we’ve exhausted all our expertise and our knowledge, then we don’t know what it is, we will put it out there for experts to find out. Once they don’t know what it is, then it’s truly paranormal.”

Certainly TAPS wasn’t the first ghost-hunting team, but the “TAPS method” of debunking before believing has had more ramifications across the paranormal field than any of Spengler and Venkman’s work with Gozer in the 1984 Ghost Busters film. Across the country, normal professionals are clocking out of day jobs and pulling paranormal nightshifts searching for spooks.

“It just seems like everybody came out of the paranormal closet,” says Dave Schrader, host of Darkness On The Edge Of Town, a St. Louis Park, Minn.-based paranormal radio show that airs on 100.3 KTLK FM in Minneapolis, and simulcasts on darknessradio.com, Saturdays and Sundays from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. ET.

In addition to the show, which has been highly regarded in the community since the January 2006 debut, Schrader and co-host Tim Dennis hold several ghost-hunting getaways and investigations each year at famous haunted locations across the country. The events attract up to 250 paranormal enthusiasts from as far away as Australia.

Schrader partially attributes the success of his and the Ghost Hunters show to a renewed interest in the afterlife that’s affected everyone from lawyers to firefighters to, well, plumbers.

“Especially after 9/11, people were seeking more of an interest in the spiritual side of life … Back in 2000, if you talked about ghosts at the water cooler at work, people rolled their eyes at you. Now you talk about ghosts and everybody seems to have a story they want to share.”

Schrader might be on to something. According to a 2008 poll from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and a 2007 Harris Interactive Poll, TAPS has indeed tapped into a belief of hauntings shared by about 40 percent of the population. Plus, the darknessradio.com site nets about a million unique visitors every year, and averages between 10 thousand and 15 thousand downloads of the show after it airs each week.

Schrader, a friend of TAPS who featured Hawes as the first guest on his “Darkness” show, says the appeal of his show and Ghost Hunters is similar.

Compared to shows like Most Haunted on the Travel Channel, Schrader says, “Jay and Grant were the first to kind of fit their mold of what they did.”

“That’s why people like our radio show, too. We never claim to be experts in the field; we like to learn along with our listeners, and don’t take ourselves overly serious.”

This perspective of Schrader’s and the Ghost Hunters show is shared by Lorraine Woiccak, a mother of five and founder of the year-old ghost-hunting group, Is It Real Investigators in Buffalo, N.Y.

Woiccak, who admits to a lifelong interest in the supernatural, says, before the SCI FI Channel program, every haunted house program “was so Hollywood.”

“What I was looking for that I never seemed to find was the ‘true’ paranormal. The first time I saw the show on TV, I didn’t know you could do stuff like that. They set the bar and basically showed us all how to follow the guidelines.

The “guidelines” are now followed by Woiccak, her husband Tom, and eight other investigators in her group. As it happens, Woiccak’s group was recently accepted into the “TAPS Family,” which is a seal of approval that means TAPS approves of her team’s methods.

As respected as Hawes and Wilson’s team are as leaders in the field, there is concern about how their popular show has affected the community.

Frank Cinelli, II, a healthcare professional, and co-founder of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (The Society for Paranormal Evidence & Conclusions Through Research & Examination), a Northeast Pennsylvania group founded in 2005, thinks the show is great but sometimes gives his clients unrealistic expectations.

“The show is a good thing for bringing awareness,” he says. “But most people who visit the groupspectre.com site expect things to happen like on the show. Clients watch and expect to get all this sexy stuff. They don’t always realize that it takes hours of sitting around in the dark, and even then, you might not get a scrap of evidence.”

Cinelli adds that while he’s pleased “the show has given a rise to paranormal investigators,” he thinks “people go out and get all this equipment but they don’t really know how to use it.”

“I could go out and get a dental drill, but I’m sure you don’t want me drilling on your teeth. I’m sure Jay and Grant would agree that some of these groups should take it slow and learn to crawl before they run with a thermal cam.”

“Are we cultivating a whole crop of inept investigators?” Schrader says. “I’m worried there’s lots of people doing this because they have nothing more than just watching paranormal TV on their side.”

These concerns aren’t lost on Hawes and Wilson. After all, if the main goal investigators share is to provide help, unprepared groups may be unable to accomplish that task.

“I think it’s great you’re seeing all these new people come into the field,” Hawes says. “I’ve seen everyone from nuclear physicists, forensic scientists and everybody else get involved in the field since our show’s been out there. So there’s that huge upside to it ... What they don’t understand is there might have been 10 episodes that never aired because we never caught anything. So it’s a real waiting game.”

Aspiring ghost hunters who want a taste of investigating can get just that from the comfort of their recliner during the live Halloween show. During the telecast, the show’s Web site at scifi.com is offering a “multilayered digital experience” with several video feeds online, along with thermal imaging feeds. Web watchers will also have access to photos from the live event, and should they catch something on the cams, they can alert the TAPS team with an Internet “Panic Button.”

Aside from the interactive training on Halloween night, Hawes and Wilson are optimistic about how they can positively impact emerging paranormal investigation groups while also maintaining the mission of aiding clients and debunking, or proving, activity.

“I think it’s good we’re raising awareness, but with raised awareness, we hope the quality goes up as well,” Wilson says. “We feel a certain responsibility to make sure groups are getting off on the right foot and getting trained right…. We teach these groups to look for the truth, not necessarily a thrilling paranormal adventure, because that’s not going to happen. If you’re pursuing the truth, whether you debunk a claim or catch actual evidence, you feel equal success.”

Hawes says he wants people to get out there and help, but in the right way.

“I recommend people form a group and get out there and investigate, but I recommend that they don’t expect anything to happen that’s the biggest thing right there. And be prepared for when something does happen.”

Ghost Hunters airs 9 p.m. ET Wednesdays on the SCI FI Channel. Ghost Hunters Live, the seven-hour live investigation, airs 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. ET on Halloween night, Oct. 31.