We want to know why he’s so nasty,” he said. “We are planning to go up there again in the springtime to see what we can find out.”

Up the street from Meadow Cemetery in the heart of Littleton is the town’s opera house, once home to the town offices, police department and jail, and fire station that was built in about 1894.

The building on its basement floor houses the museum of the Littleton Area Historical Society, whose curator is Dick Alberini.

Alberini, who has spent many hours alone in the opera house, said he has not experienced any spectral activity in that building or elsewhere, but knows many area residents who swore they have had such experiences in the opera house.

“Some say there are three spirits in here,” said Alberini.

Some claim to have seen the apparition of a little girl in white who appeared at the double doors and ran toward the stage into which she disappeared, he said.

Others have reported glimpsing a man with no face wearing a black Victorian suit and bowler hat on the balcony.

The third spirit seen is a woman in white, who Alberini said is reputed to hang out near the balcony.

Also spending many hours in the opera house working alone, sometimes at night, is George Mitchell, member of the Littleton Opera House Commission, who also mentioned the little girl in white.

“I’ve never seen her, but felt the presence and felt people moving around,” said Mitchell.

Mitchell said he also felt something near the area of the old jail cell.

“There’s something going on,” he said.

During times alone, Mitchell described a general feeling of “somebody’s there, watching.”

Perry said he investigated the Littleton Opera House with a friend about five years ago and counted four spirits that night.

“The Littleton Opera House has its own unique feel,” he said. “There is nothing evil about it at all. The spirits there are very outgoing and welcoming.”

He believes two of them were singers and one possibly a stagehand.

“We never got any names,” said Perry. “That was the weird thing about it. We tried every name in the book we could think of.”

A stone’s throw from the opera house, in the hustle and bustle of Main Street, is the Thayers Inn, a town landmark established in 1843.

In June 2010, before he retired as a social studies teacher at Daisy Bronson Middle School, Alberini led a group of students to the historic inn as part of the school’s town project.

“It was my last time doing this and we would go to the top floor, near the cupola,” said Alberini. “That’s where I would tell my ghost story of Thayers Inn in this type of ghost voice. That particular day was hotter than the hinges of Hades.”

One student, in the eighth grade, suddenly said he had to get of there and came back to school white as a sheet, said Alberini.

“He said he looked over and in the other chair was a woman who looked at him, smiled, got up and walked through the wall,” said Alberini.

The student drew a picture of what he saw and the depiction was similar to a photograph of a woman in a 1905 history of Littleton.

“It was the same style of clothing that would bring us back to the late 1850s or 1860s when that photograph was taken,” said Alberini.

Another student, who Alberini said did not speak with the first, reported seeing a shadow move from the chair into the wall at about the same time the first reported the sighting of the woman, he said.

Thayers Inn staff have also reported weird goings on, including a chamber maid who placed folded towels on a bed only to come back moments later to find them unfolded and a guest who reported her husband got out of bed in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom then felt him get right back beside her, only to discover he was still in the bathroom, said Alberini.

For his part, Perry said he’s heard mixed things about Thayers Inn from paranormal teams investigating it and is not convinced it’s haunted.

Thayers innkeeper David Gold said he is not aware of any specific paranormal tales at the inn.

“There are no stories of murder or mayhem,” he said. “Some people get disappointed … We were actually going to get T-shirts made that say, ‘Thayers Inn – not haunted.’”

That said, because of its age, there are creaks, shifts and slanted floors that give Thayers a distinctive character and its age of 170-odd years give it a soul of its own, said Gold.

And one day Gold was up on the fourth floor, which is known for being particularly creaky, when a light at the cupola went on then suddenly off, without anyone flicking the switch.

“I’ve never seen that before,” said Gold. “However, we could see that it is hard-wired in, so it wasn’t necessarily a ghost.”

One hotel Perry said he’s confirmed a spirit in is at the granddaddy of all New Hampshire hotels – the Mt. Washington.

Perry said he investigated what is called the Princess Room, number 314, that some believe is haunted by Carolyn Stickney, wife of Joseph Stickney, a wealthy man who had the hotel built in 1902. The room, apparently, was Carolyn’s favorite, tailored just for her as a private apartment. She died in 1936.

Room 314 was investigated by the duo that headed up the popular “Ghost Hunters ” TV series, with the conclusion it is likely haunted or has within it some unexplained phenomena. Perry, taking video and audio equipment into it for his own investigation, said a female spirit is there.

“She actually converses with you,” said Perry. “Make sure you run a recorder, I would suggest a digital recorder, because she will answer questions.”

On his bucket list to investigate is another place some say is also home to spirits – The Beal House Inn on Littleton’s West Main Street.

Perry, who became interested in the paranormal when he was a teenager and grave digger at a cemetery, has been an investigator for 10 years and said he has looked into more than 1,000 cases in New England and as far south as West Virginia, all at no charge to the client.

Tools of the trade include a DVR camera system, shadow detectors that pick up movement, an REM POD device that detects nearby fluctuations of energy, digital recorders, full-spectrum cameras, and K2 meters that detect spikes in electro-magnetic energy.

Before investigating, he issues a 40-point questionnaire to callers believing their house or building is haunted to ascertain if it’s a hoax by someone trying to get attention.

He said about 50 percent of cases he’s looked into appear to have genuine paranormal occurrences.

“A lot of people think spirits are negative and nasty, “said Perry. “They are not. They are just trying to communicate. You have to be open and mindful to what they are trying to communicate. We want to give the person who has a home or business the piece of mind they are not out to harm you.”