Elizabeth Baron remembers it being the size of a golf ball. She lived in Tennessee back then and was certain cancer would kill her. She was 5.

"All these doctors said I was going to die in three months," she said.

At an Assembly of God church, people prayed over her. They laid hands on her.

"They said God was going to give me the gift of prophecy if I let Him remove it," Baron remembered. "The tumor kept going down and down."

As the days passed, Baron started to notice a chicken in the yard outside her room.

Each day her tumor subsided, the chicken's neck grew bigger and bigger. Finally, the chicken dropped dead.

Baron described it as one of her first experiences with the spirit world and one of the first indications she'd have the ability to predict future events. She's now 69, lives on James Island and is a nationally known psychic and exorcist.

Five days out of the week, she gives two readings per day. They cost $200 a pop.

Recently, she gave some free advice:

Be careful of Charleston's ghost tours.

"I was very concerned because I got all of these phone calls from people who said they were seeing spirits," she said. "They need to surround themselves with God's light."

Maybe you're thinking this is all phooey, just a bunch of hocus-pocus.

And I wouldn't blame you.

I get paid to be skeptical. But I also get paid to be curious, and since Baron has helped out on numerous police investigations, and since Charleston is considered one of the most haunted cities in the country, I figured this was worth checking out.

First stop, a ghost tour.

It began at Waterfront Park with a story about five people who died when their car plummeted from the Grace Bridge. Julian Buxton III, the founder of Tour Charleston, told the tale.

A frigate slammed into the bridge in 1946. Three cars were traveling over the portion that took the hit. One car that was filled with a family of five fell into the water.

No one survived, Buxton said.

In more recent years, a woman driving across the Grace saw what she described as an earlier-model car filled with deathly pale figures dressed in clothing from another era.

As Buxton retells it, the ghost car appeared to drive off into the fog.

After the tour, Buxton and I sat down and talked about whether there are risks associated with giving ghost tours. He's given the tours since the mid-1990s.

"I pray about it," said Buxton, a member of Grace Episcopal Church downtown. "But I feel safe if I continue to keep my sensitivity high."

He acknowledged that he doesn't know quite how to define ghosts but maintains that they make sense, that people's souls consist of energy and that from a scientific perspective, energy is never wasted.

To explain it, he takes a quote from Hamlet:

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

My second stop: another exorcist.

Some people have problems reconciling ghost stories with religious belief and philosophy. Sometimes that all depends on the definitions and terms. Brian Connor has no problem reconciling what he does with religion, but he doesn't use the word ghost.

He prefers demon because he says it's consistent with biblical cosmology.

If Connor's name sounds familiar, that's because his exorcisms have been broadcast on national television and have been the subject of numerous articles in this paper. But Connor hasn't spent his whole career performing exorcisms. Before that, he was a Baptist preacher.

And his pastoral experience has influenced his current work.

"Sometimes with people who are deeply troubled over a long period, it's not psychological and it's not chemical, it's spiritual," he said.

"Sometimes, there's an evil component to human suffering."

Some who care for the psychologically afflicted agree.

Psychiatric therapists now refer patients to him after they've had little luck with conventional medical techniques.

Christine Hamolia is an advanced practicing nurse at the Medical University Hospital and has referred patients to Connor.

"I've had patients that have been in therapy for years with people that are experts, and they've made little progress," she said.

"The first time I referred somebody to (Connor), they said they felt better."

She understands the skepticism from doctors and others in the medical field.

"A lot of scientists will say there's no data on it. That's just how scientists are," she said.

But from what she's seen, Hamolia thinks Connor's form of counseling works.

"If you're going to treat the whole person, if you treat the biology, if you treat the brain chemistry -- people have a spiritual side -- you can treat that as well," she said.

Michael Gartland can be contacted at 937-5902 or mgartland@ postandcourier.com.