"Dead -- I say? There is no death. Only a change of worlds."
-- attributed to Chief Seattle, in a speech to his people in 1854 (HistoryLink.org)

The participants in Mercedes Yaeger's Paranormal Pub Crawl looked around Pike Place Market Wednesday night and saw things differently.

We didn't notice crosswalks or street signs. No bus routes or rushing crowds. Just cold leaves, old buildings, the capes and makeup on our own bodies and the breezy, pensive stillness. We looked up and saw -- really saw -- the windows above the market. And unlocked by stories of listless ghosts, hotel murderers and bodies floating down the Sound, we pictured figures in those windows. We wondered who they were.

It was the drinking that did it. The orange-pink lights in the Zig Zag. Bumping into masked strangers in the cobwebbed caverns of the Can Can Cafe. It was the company, too. We spotted cowgirls and pirates. Hunter S. Thompson. Ronald Reagan. Dr. House. Dressing up made us aware of who we are. Hearing about the dead made us know we were alive.

But mostly it was the dazzling, playful electricity that can only come in a place as aged as the market, on a night as wild as Halloween.

We had changed worlds.

"Within the past couple of tours, I've started to have a tingling up the side," Carey Christie, our guide, told me. A friend of Yaeger's who worked on the controversial documentary "Zoo," she was dressed as a Lithuanian doll -- her red hair complemented by a red skirt and bright red earrings. She's been giving tours since September.

In front of the old Butterworth Mortuary on 1st Avenue -- considered by some to be among the most haunted places in Seattle -- she tells me it's no act. And it's not about the ghosts. It's about death. It's on her mind more and more, and sometimes she wishes it wasn't.

She apologized. She'd really rather not talk about it here.

"I feel I'm watched and listened to by the people I'm talking about."

Among the ghosts mentioned on the tour:

• At Kell's Irish Bar, some have reported seeing a little girl, about eight years old, with blond or red hair (here's more on the market's haunted restaurants).
• At the Alibi Room, three ghosts have been reported, included the ghost of a "kept woman" and a man who cleans up after the staff.
• At the Market Theater, performers have heard the laughter of children, believed to be the ghosts of orphans who once worked at the market and died in droves from disease.
• At an market hotel, murderer Linda Hazzard killed her "patients" by convincing them that starvation, among other crazy methods, was the best path to health. (HistoryLink.org)
• Princess Angeline, Chief Seattle's daughter, allegedly haunts the market, too (HistoryLink.org).

At Il Bistro, we got a gift -- a dark heavy bead on the end of a black string Yaeger said can be used to contact spirits and ask them questions. In the barely-lit bar, Yaeger handed them out and showed us how to use them. Watch the demonstration here:

Like everything else about the night, even those that didn't believe in ghosts and hauntings were open to the possibility that some supernatural power was at work. Minutes after the demonstration, many were still concentrating on those beads, dangling them in front of their faces.

After all, everyone likes a good story. Whether it's true or not only matters to the unimaginative. Jen Shin, 22, said she'd always had an interest in the paranormal. She'd already been on a ghost tour and felt things like this connected her to the city. Another woman, Tabitha Roemish, 24, said she doesn't like going to bars, but liked to hear about ghosts. "I thought it'd be cool to see one," she said.

At the Can Can, a woman named Kim sat by the wall dressed as a pirate. She doesn't believe in any of it, she said. "But I like a good yarn," she said. "Yarrrrrr."

P.S.: Read our 2005 story about Yaeger and the ghost tours by P-I reporter Kery Murakami.