Have you ever seen a ghost, heard a mysterious noise in the attic, or had furniture move when you weren’t looking?

Maybe your home, office or church is experiencing paranormal activity.

It may seem far-fetched, but for some people it’s a reality — a reality that Scott Sessoms of Richmond County and Heather Norton of Scotland County are ready to explore.

Sessoms and Norton started East Koast Illusions, a paranormal investigation company, in January.

Both have day jobs and are full-time spouses and parents. They are doing this on the side and free-of-charge to obtain scientific research about the paranormal.

Both got involved because they’d had personal experiences in their past with paranormal activity.

Sessoms said he tried to start a team dedicated to paranormal research five years ago, but couldn’t find anyone serious about it to join him.

Norton is Sessoms’ best friend’s wife and it turned out she had great interest in the topic as well, so the two set off on creating a team of paranormal investigators to look into curious activity reported by individuals.

To get the equipment to perform the research, they held raffles for gift baskets from local vendors and raised enough to purchase equipment including an infrared thermometer, electromagnetic field detector, digital voice and video recorders and a night vision camera.

“We’re not ghost busters,” Sessoms said. “That’s not what we do. We take a scientific approach and explain the activity. We’re not looking for ghosts. People are experiencing activity they can’t understand, so we take the scientific approach to help them know what’s going on.”

Both Norton and Sessoms said a lot of people are afraid to admit experiencing paranormal activity because they’re afraid of sounding crazy.

“We’re not here to judge,” Sessoms said. “Because we’ve had these experiences, too.”

Because they both have full-time professional or school obligations, the East Koast Illusions team reserves its investigations for the weekends. They visit residences, old abandoned buildings and other structures at the request of residents and owners. All locations are kept confidential.

“If we document that there is something going on in the house that we can’t explain, we’ll call it paranormal activity, but we won’t call it haunted unless it’s threatening activity,” Sessoms said. “You can have spirits attached to homes and objects and if they decide to stay in our realm, they’re just trying to make contact. Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s not threatening.”

Sessoms and Norton said this is a passion and a hobby that they take very seriously.

“We just want to help people,” Sessoms said. “They’re afraid of what they’ve seen or of what’s happened and we just want to help.”

Both say response to their efforts, for the most part, has been positive, and they’re booked through April.

The team, which includes three other members, and is adding new ones for bigger jobs, stresses that this is all for scientific research. They are not capable of, or in the business of, ridding spirits from properties. And most importantly, they are not in it to make money.

“When we go into a place we’re trying to disprove it,” Sessoms said. “It could be a case of just light reflecting funny or air in the pipes.”

“Our biggest thing is we just want to research the field of the paranormal and help people overcome their fears,” Norton said. “This is not a business and it’s not a game, we take it very seriously.”

Each case the team works on is documented and filed away for future reference.

To get the community involved in its efforts, East Koast Illusions is working on a workshop with one of the hosts of the SyFy Channel’s “Ghost Hunters,” Kristyn Gartland. They’re also conducting a raffle to investigate the North Carolina Battleship in Wilmington with host of SyFy Channel’s “Ghost Hunters International” Dustin Pari in April.

To find out more about East Koast Illusions, their upcoming workshops and how to get them to come investigate, visit www.eastkoastillusions.webs.com or e-mail them at eastkoastillusions@yahoo.com.