The ghost tour is kicking off, with 20 or so boarding the half-bus on East 9th, but the homeless guy with the thick coat and mangy 'fro wants to go into Erie Street Cemetery, its long shadows and unearthly glow at late dusk pronounced by the lights at the Jake and those creepy iron gates at the head and tail. He says he's got a ghost story, something about boozing it up with squatters one night not too long ago and getting shoved back out the door of a crypt he tried to snuggle up inside. It sounds like either an entity or somebody staking a claim. His eyes are wide as he's cut off. The bus is leaving. He shakes his head, says he's not shittin'.

Psychic Sonya Horstman of Oberlin, our black-clad guide and clairvoyant host this Thursday evening before Halloween, promises that this will be the final stop of the four-hour jaunt, right back here when it's getting late at Cleveland's second oldest cemetery, home to early settlers and Native Americans. She teases a final talk about a possible "Cleveland Curse" being cast upon the city with the interment of a great Indian chief, and then she says we'll end with a crime so recent, so ungodly that it was covered up to protect the interests of an orderly society. We'll have to warm up our mojo. All along the trip, Horstman says, we will learn to become more attuned to our ethereal sensor.

That's what makes this tour different than that other ghost tour by the same name, she says, the one whose proprietor, Cleveland Police Officer Chuck Gove, haunts her more than any ghost ever could. She's a trained seer, a radio personality, long educated in the realm of the otherworldly. He wouldn't see a ghost, she says, if it were wearing a white sheet and screaming Ooooooo.

The two were partners once, she says, for their first year in this cutthroat business back in 2001, but over the last five years, these two have built quite the wall between their two businesses - even though they share a name, a slogan and a marketplace. She accuses him of bad-mouthing her to advertisers, telling them that she's using his name, Haunted Cleveland, and slogan, "Business Is Dead," that she came up with. He accuses her of stealing that name and slogan from him, with running roughshod over the facts of local history, and being a bit off-kilter. It's a source of constant frustration - at least for Horstman, whose business isn't seeing the best of days.

"I'm a single mother, trying to make a living here and he's coming after me," the middle-aged Horstman says in an earlier interview. "And the funny thing is, I'm the real deal here. I'm the psychic here. He's just a cop."

Along Horstman's tour, set to the haunting music of Midnight Syndicate, she urges her junior ghost hunters to tap into the nether regions, examine their photos for orbs of light in random places. Send them to her and she'll add them to her voluminous scrapbook of Strange Pictures with Weird Lights in Them. It's a common occurrence this night, but Horstman's two assistants keep pointing their flashlights at everything, so skepticism lives.

She starts slow. At the first stop, the Hermit Club, a private playground to many in the local pantheon of arts and theater elite, a fat rat set in bronze pokes out of the cornerstone near the door. Nearly a century ago, as the tale goes, a cook immortalized his recently poisoned rat friend when the club moved to its current digs. And yes, it's said to still be haunting the place with its incessant scratching and cheesy thievery.

A stately couple leaving the club interrupts Horstman's tale. "Oh, you're here for the ghost," the man says, looking at his watch. "It's not going to be here for another two, three hours."

Many of the stops on the tour are Disneyesque like this. Inside the peppermint-colored county archive building, with all of its scary former uses like a detention center and a girls' home, Horstman asks her guests to note the friendly nature of the spiritual residue, even though county security guard James Bond (that's the name he gave), when you take him aside, swears up and down that he's had two encounters here. The first time, shortly after he started a year ago, he heard rattling in the walls, sequenced almost like Morse code. He tapped back, and it responded.

"I told it, 'I'm not afraid of you,'" he remembers. "I told it, 'I'm more afraid of things in the real world.'"

Not long after that, he claims, one of the microfiche machines just came on one night. Granted, a late-shift security guard tells a story and people tend to stay longer to chat, so skepticism lives.

Other stops, like the Agora Theater, illicit more foreboding tales. On the stage, she talks about a big bouncer getting pushed in the basement by an unseen apparition, about strange figures in the nosebleed seats, and a man in a yellow raincoat. This is where Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor lived for a year in their pre-fame days, she continues. Down in the basement, she stands where she says a woman was strangled with a scarf. Then she points to a side room, crammed tight with old chairs, tables and a dank smell. This is where she feels something terrible happened to little boys. "Can you feel it?" she asks a few of the more attuned in the group. They nod in agreement. She lifts a brow and a few people visibly shiver.

At the end of the night, back at the Erie Street Cemetery, the bus is gone and the group is huddled around the broken grave of Hauk Chief Joc-O-Sot, who sustained a gunshot wound in the Black Hawk wars that later killed him after he'd become something of a figure for reconciliation between Indians and settlers. His shattered tombstone and subsequent curse were the result of his anger, legend has it, at not having been buried in his native Minnesota.

Then Horstman tells her final tale, one that cuts through the firmament with the stench of pure bullshit: Just a few years ago, when they kept the gates closed at night, a girl was lured in, bludgeoned, strung up in a tree and sexually mutilated. Her blood and gore were used to desecrate every grave.

One guest asks the obvious question: "How come that was never in the papers?" Horstman says nobody would come downtown if the city just went ahead and told them everything. A few people roll their eyes.

The tour disperses in the moonlight. Some throw cigarettes and change onto the Indians' graves. Everyone is dispatched with a complimentary baggie of sea salt to wash away the webs.

Sonya Horstman met Chuck Gove in 1999 at Playhouse Square. He worked security with an amiable nature and quick smile. She gave tours, her makeup-less face and eccentric background as a psychic, Tarot reader and spiritual advisor a counterpoint made for TV drama.

Horstman claims they formed the partnership that two years later would create Haunted Cleveland. She'd run the story side; he'd do the books, similar to his current job in the police department. It lasted one year.

"He dumped me because I wanted an accounting on how much money was being spent," Horstman says. "That was the problem. He saw how much money could be made and wanted me out. He dumped me and I kept doing the tours, but he continued to use the name."

Both continued leading tours under the same name. In October 2002, Horstman registered with the Ohio Secretary of State's office as "Haunted Cleveland" and "Haunted Cleveland Tours." She figured that'd be the end of it. But Chuck continued to use the name. He registered as "Haunted Cleveland Ghost Tours" in 2006. Then, recently, Horstman got wind that Gove was contacting local publications and Web sites, claiming that Horstman was using his name and slogan.

"It's silly, really," says David Stack, pluggedincleveland.com's creator. "The energy he's focused on boxing her out could be spent on marketing his own business. You're always going to have competition."

Of course, you don't often see a Burger King across the street from another Burger King.

"He's saying to [a newspaper] that he's the original Haunted Cleveland," Horstman says. "I don't think a Cleveland cop should be able to do that. He's harassing me. He's fucking with me. And the result is, there's confusion in Cleveland about having two Haunted Clevelands. But you go to Google and type in 'Cleveland' and 'ghost tour' and it's his Web site that comes up first. You see? But there was never anything in writing. It was a handshake and my word. Shame on him."

(Chuck denies bad-mouthing his rival: "Honestly, I don't think of her that much," he says.)

Horstman says she can't afford to hire an attorney to push a judge to work all this out. Gove says he can't either, and shouldn't have to.

"What do you do when a crazy person is acting nuts on the corner?" he asks rhetorically when asked how he'd like to respond to Horstman's allegations.

The West Park resident says he came up with the idea for the tours after going on one hosted by North Coast Ghost Tours in 1997. It isn't cheap putting kids through Catholic school. Besides, he says, "I love history and I've always been interested in this stuff. [North Coast Ghost Tours] turned away 50 people that night. I thought, I can do this."

A few years later, he hired Horstman, he says, and started small - just a handful of tours that first year. Then he says he started noticing that Horstman was flubbing the facts a little when her memory failed her. "I'm more factual," he says. "If Playhouse Square was built in 1921, you gotta say that. You can't just make up the date."

Then, near the end of that first year, Gove says he started hearing that Horstman would touch guests on the shoulder as they entered the bus, and tell about three or four in every tour that they had spirits attached to them - spirits that she could remove for $300.

"I got a call from a lady and she was crying hysterically and she said, 'Could you please get Sonya to remove this spirit for $200?' I just apologized to her. I was like, 'I don't run a company like that. I'm a police officer and I wouldn't pay money for that. I don't believe you have a spirit on you, ma'am.' That was one of the final straws with me."

Gove denies trying to push Horstman out of business. There should be enough customers for them both, is how he sees it. And he might be right.

According to the National Retail Federation, there was a 9 percent increase in Halloween sales between 2005 and 2006, with about 18.7 percent of the US public going to at least one haunted attraction each year. With an estimated $5.4 billion spent last year, and a Greater Cleveland population of more than 2 million people, that's roughly 400,000 people with money and time to kill on getting scared for fun.

Of those, perhaps half might belong to the 40 to 50 percent of the population that believes in ghosts, according to recent CBS News and AP/Ipsos polls, and presumably would love nothing more than to fork over hard cash for an evening of spirit spotting.

Horstman and Gove both charge $50 a head for their tours. Horstman sticks to a single Cleveland tour on Thursday and Fridays during the pre-Halloween busy season, with a haunted cemetery tour of Medina County on Saturday. For her, business has been better. On Thursday, she had to downgrade from a full bus to a half-bus due to low turnout.

But Gove, who also does true-crime tours, was running two full busses on Friday night, with Q104 DJ Rebecca Wilde as one of two guides. He didn't even have to advertise this season. He was sold out as of October 1.

"I had to turn away at least 200 people this year," Gove says. "You'd think that'd be good for somebody else's business too."

Leonard Pickel, editor of Haunted Attractions magazine, an industry trade publication, says if neither of the Haunted Clevelands wants to hire an attorney, then they deserve what they get.

"We run into this with the haunted-house industry a lot," he says. "There's only so many 'Nightmare on 13th Streets' that you can have. There's a lot of competition, but usually people end up getting trademarked to prove first use and then people usually move on. But I hear from people who do ghost tours that it's worse. If you're trying to go with 'true' ghost stories, there's only so many to go around, so you have to get in that space and be the only ones who do. That can get cutthroat after awhile."

Take Franklin Castle, one of Cleveland's most notoriously haunted locales in Ohio City. Take your pick of the legendarily scary things that've happened here. A rich German immigrant is suspected of having killed his wife, mother, and several children there. A later owner found some of the many secret portals, and reportedly a pile of bones. Mary Ann Winkowski, the inspiration for the series Ghost Whisperer, is said to have tried to exorcise a boy ghost here and admitted defeat. It needs a good psychic cleansing, Horstman says, but caretaker Charles Milsap won't even let her in the door.

"Chuck [Gove] is bad-mouthing me all over town," Horstman says later. "He's telling them not to cooperate with my tours."

But Milsap says Gove has nothing to do with his disdain for Horstman, who he calls "Psycho Sonya." A few years back, Milsap says, he was on his way home from out of town - he lives in a building out back - when he got a weird feeling. Upon arriving, he found Horstman there with a tour group, and learned that she'd bribed her way past the security guard. Milsap turned her away.

"It's funny: She's supposedly the psychic, but I know more about what she was up to when I wasn't around than she did about what I was up to," he says. "She's done some pretty backhanded things through the years to get in. She's not an honest person and that's why she's not allowed in. I'm proud to say that she's probably the only person in Cleveland who's not allowed to come in here."

A manager at the Agora is upset with how Horstman characterizes their "ghosts" as malevolent and the county archives' "inhabitants" as friendly. "It's not fair," the manager says. "They get the friendly spirits and we've got ones that knock people over and rape kids." (For the record, Manson and Reznor never lived there, just practiced in the office area for a while.)

Gove admits that his tour is more of the touristy thing. His current lineup, which he changes every year, focuses on lakefront destinations: the USS Mather and Cod, Squires Castle, the Willowick shore where 800 bodies washed up after a passenger boat capsized. The only crossover on Horstman and Gove's tours is Franklin Castle. His groups are allowed inside.

Gove's host, Beth Richards, who replaced Horstman when she left to form her own tour, also encourages her guests to examine all their photos for orbs, tells them stories to try to make their spines chill. But she couches everything as legend.

On Gove's Friday tour, 15-year-old Morgan McMahon of Cleveland is exhilarated by all the orbs she's getting in her digital photos. Then her batteries die. She looks downright sad coming out of Franklin Castle with no pictures to inspect.

"You see anything?" she is asked. "No," she replies with a pouty lip. But she's a believer. "It's like with God. If you have faith, then you might have a better chance of seeing him."

Richards doesn't claim to know any ghosts personally. Neither does Gove.

"I don't know what to think," he says while his guests return to the bus from a jaunt up to the dark woods around Squires Castle in the Willoughby section of the Metroparks. "But I do know I've seen a big Hispanic guy who thought he was touched by something. Looking at him, I don't think he was lying about anything he thought he saw."

And what's this about a girl in Erie Street Cemetery, torn apart and used as paint to stain the dead? Gove shakes his head.

"Well, I work in the homicide department," he says. "But maybe this thing was covered up so well that even the homicide department didn't hear about it. Scary world."

Skepticism? Alive and well.