ONE HAUNTING MEMORY I have seen a ghost. This is a story I usually tell while parked on a dark road at night, before trying to make out with a girl for the first time. But I'm serious about it. I saw a ghost once, just like on "Scooby Doo." Yes, I happen to be nuts, but that has nothing to do with what I saw. And it has taken me a long time to admit the truth to myself. It was the summer of 1986, and I was interning for the state legislature in New York's capital and cultural armpit, Albany, where I went to college. Legislative interns performed research upon which bills were actually drafted. Lest it be thought that I was actually qualified to perform this research, I only ever took one political science course and had to recall the "I'm Just A Bill" song whenever someone asked me a question. But, like anything else in life, it was all about who I knew. The guy who hired me admired one of the people who wrote me a recommendation. It feels good to purge myself of this lie here, since that internship was on the resume that got me my job at RAVE! Anyway, I met my co-workers before the summer began. They were brilliant snots working on government degrees and plotting runs for office once they graduated with honors from Harvard or Yale. There was nothing I knew about anything that could impress, much less help, them. So I sought alternative knowledge. I took a tour of the capitol, to at least be able to provide trivia about the building we all worked in. New York's capitol was built between 1880 and 1900, and its centerpiece is a mammoth stairwell connecting three 20-foot floors. Ornately carved into its clay-colored retaining walls are hundreds of human faces, all apparently different. The tour guide told us that some were famous people, some were friends and relatives of the artist. "A ghost haunts the stairwell," she then offered matter-of-factly. "Hundreds of sightings have been reported." Flash ahead to late August and my final day of pretending to be an intern. I did what I always did when the library on the second floor closed at 3 p.m. I carefully scanned the capitol's stairs from the bottom up, hoping for my "In Search Of" moment. I began at the ground floor, no ghost. Up to the second floor, no ghost. Between the second and third floors, there was a man, but no ghost. Up to the third floor, no ghost. Back down to the second floor, and the man standing in the middle of the stairs was gone. He hadn't been transparent or covered in a white sheet with cutout eyes. He wasn't shaking a chain or making a moaning noise. He was just a bald dude with white hair on the sides. He wore a blue button- down shirt, like those Guess denim numbers that were big in the '80s. But people who aren't ghosts don't tend to vanish before one's eyes. There were about 25 stairs for this man to either ascend or descend in the 2.5 seconds before I checked back on him. The mind will go to irrational extremes to avoid reaching an unwanted conclusion. In order to sleep for the next several months, I tried convincing myself that what I'd seen was an elaborate optical illusion. I had animated one of the faces from the stairwell, then dressed it in a blue shirt because of a nearby lighting fixture, which provided the appropriate negative retinal color image. It was either that or the "Scooby-Doo" explanation: that a sinister carnival owner was attempting to scare meddling kids off his property in order to secretly run a counterfeiting ring. Before I graduated a year later, something gave me the nerve to return to that tour guide. "Oh, you've seen George!" she said, her eyes illuminating. "You're so lucky! My friends have all seen him, but not me." George is generally a helpful ghost, I was told, finding lost keys and mopping the occasional floor. Nevertheless, custodians tended to request transfers after encountering him. "What does George look like?" I asked but didn't really want to hear. "Most people say he's an old man, balding with white hair," came the answer. In my head, I heard Shaggy's voice screaming, "ZOINKS!" If George was real, what was to stop him from following me home? Were dead people all around me? Were they really in my bedroom closet when I was six years old and my father reassured me that they weren't? This called for a new and more potent set of rationalizations. I read up on the subject and concluded that ghosts didn't have to be disembodied dead people. There were possible scientific explanations for what I saw. The stairs could have provided a portal into the fourth dimension, Einstein's mathematically proven fantasyland where time is not linear and past, present and future occur simultaneously. Or the sheer energy of thousands of people staring at the same area for 100 years, all hoping to see a ghost, could have willed one into existence. After 14 years of not seeing any of George's friends, I don't feel as threatened. My world view has not changed to conform to my sighting. I haven't bought pyramids for my rearview mirror, crystals or "Dianetics." I've chosen to accept my sighting as pretty much just an unexplainable experience that's useful to recall on a date. Recently I flipped through a book called "Haunted Places: The National Directory." Published last year, it contains a reference to George and even explains who he is. According to author Dennis William Hauck, he's the spirit of a night watchman, Samuel Abbott, who died in a fire in the capitol in 1911. I don't know how accurate this information is, though, since the book lists Hollywood's Runyon Canyon as home to the Manson family. (It never was.) It also misspells several street names and mentions Marineland in its directions to the Point Vicente Lighthouse. (Marineland closed more than 10 years ago.) I must admit, there are times -- usually when I'm alone late at night -- when I still pretend it was all an optical illusion.