of life. The most spine-tingling evidence of the night came from a more mundane quarter.  "Around 2am, just as someone was wondering out loud whether the ghost might hate the electronic equipment, the flash on my Olympus 35mm camera suddenly went off on its own. And then again. I put it down on the table and completely on its own it shot off the entire roll, each time with a flash. It shocked the shit out of me!"
    Sgt. Liebeck, a lumbering gentle giant of a man, apologised for his crude language. A far cry from the tough cop of caricature, he is a soft-spoken romantic who has been reading ghost stories since childhood and finds in adulthood that he is driven by a quest to demonstrate that life retains a sense of wonder. "I have a fondness for the Loch Ness monster: the idea of a strange undiscovered animal existing, when science thinks it knows everything, I find fascinating. I haven't seen a ghost yet, but I will say that I hope ghosts exist because it would be sad if they didn't. If all the mysteries of the world could be solved overnight the world would become a very boring place."
    Sgt. Liebeck's dream is to accumulate enough money to buy a special video camera, new in the ghostbuster's market, which has an infra-red attachment that allows you to capture the image of unusual heat patterns. In common with most American ghostbusters, he regards his British

counterparts with great reverence. The London-based Society for Psychical Research, of which he is a member, has been operating since the last century. "They are the pre-eminent organization working at this kind of thing in the world. There are far fewer people who investigate ghosts here than in the United Kingdom, but the difference - and where we possibly have the edge now - is that they're still more into the use of psychics and evidence from eyewitnesses, that sort of thing. "What we're seeing now is the technology drifting from here (America) to there. There's been an explosion of technological investigative aids in recent years and I feel we're coming close to a breakthrough. The important thing is that soon we'll be able not just to say we saw a ghost, we'll show that we saw it."
    What would he do the day he actually came face-to-face with one? "I don't know how I'd react. I might jump out of a window. I might shoot it. I might give up the whole endeavour and go off to Loch Ness in search of a new adventure. But I'd like to think I'd compose myself, relax, and engage it in conversation."