She asked the owner and her Realtor if there was anything funny with the house. "They shook their heads and said, 'Not at all!' " Kermeen recalls with a laugh. "I found out later that they'd instructed the staff not to say anything."

The big secret? The Myrtles Plantation, built in 1796 in St. Francisville, La., has seen 10 violent deaths throughout its history and was built atop a Native American burial ground. Since then, it's been named "the most haunted house in America," and Kermeen says she's seen the apparitions of the murder victims herself. They're the fodder for the second book she's written on the subject, The Myrtles Plantation: The True Story of America's Most Haunted House, which will be released by the Time Warner Book Group on Feb. 1.

"Everything is 100-percent true," she says. "My editors kept telling me to juice it up, but after I wrote just one sentence that wasn't true, I had to take it out. It would destroy the integrity of the book."

Kermeen makes her living as a technical writer; she is currently contracted with Applied Materials in Santa Clara. It's the same kind of job she had in 1980, when she and her then-husband went on vacation to Jamaica.

They were looking to get into the hospitality business, and heard about a place available in St. Francisville, about 30 miles north of Baton Rouge. Kermeen and her husband stopped by on the way back to California, and decided to open an inn on the property despite the dubious welcome.

Almost immediately, unexplained phenomena started happening. "Shortly after we moved in, I walked into this room, and all the doors and windows suddenly locked," Kermeen says. "I was frantic and screaming, especially because there were no locks on the doors." On another occasion, Kermeen awoke to find the figure of a woman hovering above her bed. She stuck her hand out to find it went right through the woman's image.

The incidents concerned her because, as she says, "those houses of horror were not popular in the '80s." But enough guests stayed at the Myrtles to witness the supposedly supernatural. "We got a lot of skeptical people, and people who had lost someone and wanted to feel closer to them," Kermeen says. "It was mostly the really macho guys who would get scared and leave."

The Myrtles did attract a fair amount of attention--Kermeen appeared on many television programs, such as The Today Show and Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, and The National Enquirer made a trip to St. Francisville to report on the haunted house. But to convince Kermeen to cooperate for their story, the Enquirer posed as a German magazine. "Talk about journalistic integrity," Kermeen quips. "But at least their story was accurate. The one in The Wall Street Journal got a lot of things wrong," she says.

An editor from Random House told Kermeen that she should write up her adventures at the Myrtles in a book, which Kermeen didn't consider until after she'd sold the inn and returned to Sunnyvale after being away for 10 years. "The average inn burnout is six years, and I was just ready to move on," she says. She resumed her career in technical writing, but did research on haunted hotels on the side, eventually crafting her book Ghostly Encounters: True Stories of America's Haunted Inns and Hotels, which was published two years ago.

"It took seven years to find a publisher," she says. Over the years, a number of people have expressed their skepticism about Kermeen's claims, which she understands. She says she was never into ghost stories before finding them in her own home. "The ghost thing is not a driving force," says Kermeen, who received a degree in journalism from San José State University. "I'm not trying to convince anyone. Once you're confronted, you know for sure. For me, it means that there's a God and something else out there."

The forces in effect at the Myrtles, which is now operated by another couple, seem to have followed Kermeen to California. She says that when she's written her books, she's been plagued by a number of strange circumstances, including papers that would mysteriously fly off tables and an unusual number of computer glitches. Her publisher even experienced strange technical difficulties.

But in any case, the ghosts of the Myrtles Plantation have changed a great deal in Kermeen's life. She is a spokeswoman for UNICEF, has film companies looking at her book for a possible screen adaptation and has traveled to haunted hotels throughout the United States despite her initial lackluster interest. Her trips have included a return to the place that started it all.

"On March 3, 2003, we went back to the Myrtles with a psychic," she said. "That was an interesting night."