Gloria Fritz's home in Whitehall hardly looks like a haunted house. Built in the early 1950s, the cozy two-story Cape Cod is more "Leave It to Beaver" than "The Munsters."

Tony Tye/Post-Gazette From the living room of her Whitehall home, Gloria Fritz can monitor her Web site devoted to people who have had experiences with the paranormal. Fritz says she has had ghostly encounters in her house for the past eight years. Click photo for larger image. GHOSTLY GATHERING GhostChatter's Spring Paranormal Get Together will be held April 24-25. Cost is $65 per person, not including overnight accommodations, and includes two meals in two haunted locations as well as guided tours of haunted sites. A $20 non-refundable deposit (money order or certified check) must be received by Saturday. For more information, visit www.haunteddiary.com.

Still, for the past eight years, the teacher, now 56, has experienced an amazing number of ghostly encounters within its walls. In addition to unexplained footsteps on the stairs and knocking on the doors, she's been awakened in the middle of the night by music and rattling and, even more spooky, the sounds of a motor running in her basement.

At first, Fritz thought the house was simply settling. But other inexplicable events ultimately convinced her that someone -- or something -- was hanging around. The shadowy figure of a man appeared in her first-floor bedroom, along with a scampering neon-green light. An alarm clock would flip on at 3 a.m. A shopping bag full of coffee went flying across the kitchen floor.

Her teenage daughter, Gennie, also experienced it. Her bed would shake when she lay on it. A little ball of light, which she christened "Tinkerbell," would dance around her room. Eerie, music box-like music emanated from nowhere.

"I wouldn't sleep in there for years," says Gennie, who now lives in Virginia.

Some people would laugh off such experiences, chalk them up to nerves or -- if they were sufficiently unnerved -- put the house up for sale. Fritz, though, took what she considered a more practical approach -- she went looking for people who had had similar experiences. In January 2002, she and her daughter, now 22, created a Web site devoted to the paranormal.

"Too many things were unexplained, stuff no one had answers for," says Fritz, who is currently housebound due to a foot injury and can monitor the Web site 24 hours a day. "So I decided to start a site to share my experiences and see if anyone else was having things happen."

Apparently people were. The site, www.haunteddiary.com, which features personal stories, photos, a message board and a ghost cam, was a hit. A chat room, www.ghostchatter.com, came next, followed by two offline get-togethers last year for the most ardent chatters.

"People want a safe place to come and talk about their experiences, where nobody laughs at you or calls you crazy," says Fritz.

And now the group is gearing up for its largest, and most comprehensive, event: a two-day Spring Paranormal Get Together April 24-25. In addition to lunch and dinner at two haunted restaurants, the gathering will include a seance, professional ghost tours of two haunted locations (including a cemetery) and the chance to sleep in a haunted bed and breakfast.

Meeting online is fine to trade stories and ask for advice about paranormal activities, but at some point, "people want to put faces to names," Fritz says.

Nearly 50 chat-room regulars have already signed up, with some coming from as far away as Missouri and North Carolina. But what if you're not among the chat room's 2,400 members? Not to worry. For the first time, the group is opening the event to the general public. To discourage party crashers and cynics, however, organizers are keeping the exact location secret until they receive a non-refundable deposit.

"We're a peaceful group," says Gennie. "We don't want to be heckled."

The same applies to GhostChatter.com, which requires people to register and create a profile so as to weed out the hackers and spammers from the true-believers. Participants must also adhere to a strict set of rules, including no profanity or flirting and no interruptions when someone is telling a story. And the non-believers can be pretty nasty. Not only do they routinely try to take over the room and clone members' profiles, they've also been known to ruin on-site photos and just generally cause problems.

"A lot of people don't like me because I'm strict in the chat room," says Fritz. "But there are too many crackpots out there."

Gennie agrees it's not always easy keeping things serious, because not everyone believes in the paranormal.

"We get a lot of 'I see dead people, ha ha ha,' in the chat room, and that gets old after a while," she says. Other times, she says, people take it upon themselves to try to convert chatters to a particular religion.

The community's first get-together took place last July and included lunch at Point View Hotel in Brentwood and dinner at Larry's Roadhouse in Brookline, both of which are supposedly haunted. That was followed by a dinner with Ouija boards at century-old Max's Allegheny Tavern on the North Side, which some say also has ghosts.

The chat room is busiest in the evening, with 20 or more chatters at one time. One of the reasons it's so successful, says Fritz, is that she and her daughter keep everyone on topic. And like many other chat rooms devoted to a particular subject, regulars have developed close friendships.

"We've become a family to a lot of the people in there," says Fritz. "This is their time."