What if?

That’s the question that plagues you when you think about the paranormal. Ghosts aren’t real. They can’t be. That shadow out of the corner of your eye is a trick of the light. Those unexplained noises are the house shifting. Right?

But what if?

You can drive yourself crazy wondering. Or you can do something about it and try to prove the unprovable.

That’s where the Montana Paranormal Research Society (MTPRS) comes in. For two decades the group has searched for specters — and the evidence they may or may not have left behind — in and around Montana. They are this state’s foremost experts in the paranormal.

The group’s numbers have fluctuated over the years, but there are three core members of MTPRS. Dustin is the organization’s founder and erstwhile leader. Married couple Lora and Curtis are sort of the ying and the yang of this whole organization. She has boundless enthusiasm, his favorite moments are when he can prove some piece of evidence they’ve gathered has a rational explanation. (The trio requested that their full names and photos not be used for this story).

In the late 1990s, Dustin was a computer tech at Bozeman Public Schools. The district’s headquarters are in Willson School, on West Main in downtown Bozeman. The former high school was completed in 1937 but sections of it were built starting in 1902.

Dustin and a friend would stay late after hours to play “World of Warcraft,” since the school district had a better internet connection than their home did.

“I was locking up one night and every other light in the hallway was on, and there was someone down at the very end of the hallway,” he remembered. “It looked like a kid.”

By the time he had the door unlocked and went down the hallway to investigate, the figure was gone. So he pushed it aside, until a month or so later. Someone put up an exhibit with photos of students who had attended the school. They were wearing identical uniforms to the figure Dustin saw in the hallway.

“That got me started on the whole concept of what’s going on out there,” he said. He started playing around with photography, trying to capture some evidence of what he’d seen. For years, he just captured dust balls floating around.

But after a move back to Billings in 2001, Dustin got a job at the old Carmike 7 movie theater on Overland Avenue. Theaters, which are big wide-open buildings kept artificially dark, are spooky places, and Dustin started hearing stories. So to investigate more, he started carrying a video camera around while working.

One day, the district manager came by, furiously asserting that someone at the theater had been pirating movies. Coming clean about the whole thing didn’t really help.

“He was jumping up and down yelling at me saying, ‘I am not calling corporate offices and saying that you were hunting for ghosts,’” Dustin said. “It would have been better if I’d said I was pirating movies.”

Dustin got to keep this job, but he figured he should probably get a group together to add some legitimacy to this whole thing, and the Montana Paranormal Research Society was born. At first they were just friends from the movie theater, but they started growing. Lora and Curtis joined around 2008, after hearing the group being interviewed on the radio.

The group investigate historic hauntings, but their bread and butter is working with average folks who have something happening to them that they can’t explain. MTPRS members are all volunteers, and they’ve never accepted anything more than gas money from folks who’ve asked them to investigate.

“We try to help people,” Dustin explained. They might not be able to solve what’s going on, but they can at least try to capture it, to validate the activity. Most people learn to live with the activity, treating it as a sort of quirk of their house.

For years, they took on every case that walked through the door. Dustin has seen a lot, and there are a few instances that still rattle him. He’s been tapped on the shoulder at the Moss Mansion, and on an investigation in Pryor he was confronted by a seven-foot-tall black mass.

But for the most part, they’ve gotten in more trouble with the people they’re working with, not the spirits.

MTPRS are affiliated with TAPS (the Atlantic Paranormal Society), the group featured on the wildly popular and long-running Travel Channel show “Ghost Hunters,” but their investigations don’t really look like anything you’ll see on TV. There’s no shouting at or taunting of spirits. Rather, they try to be respectful or even helpful, hoping to draw more spectral flies with honey rather than vinegar.

Their rules are simple. Number one is safety. Number two, Dustin joked, is to not break anything in the Moss Mansion.

The approach seems to have worked. MTPRS have a mountain of evidence from their two decades of work. There are a few photos — one that shows a unexplained figure at the Dude Rancher Lodge in Billings — and some videos, but the cameras are mostly to keep track of the investigators. The bulk of their material comes in the form of electronic voice phenomenon.

EVPs, as they’re known in the ghost hunting world, are disembodied voices mysteriously caught on electronic recorders. Often the investigator handing the recorders don’t even know they’ve got something until they listen back.

MTPRS have a few of note. One was captured on the eighth floor of the Yellowstone County Courthouse, which used to be the county’s jail. It features a worried, British accented voice saying, “Here comes Mr. Becker.” Per legend, that was the name of a former guard.

Later on in the clip, which is available on YouTube, Lora did something she never does: talked back.

“Do you know that you’re dead and you don’t have to stay here anymore,” she asked.

“(Expletive) you!” a voice shot back.

Listening to it now, it almost sounds fun, like a call and response from beyond the grave. But this stuff isn’t easy. Investigations can get monotonous and boring, and that’s only the beginning. Once you’re done, you’ve got hours of videos and audio recordings to listen to. In the group’s early days, Dustin would hold evidence parties, where everyone would try to comb through all the material over pizza. They’ve had members quit once they realize how much work is involved.

They’ve investigated buildings all over, many they can’t even speak about. The locations they can reveal are a cavalcade of historic Montana places. The group has always been based in Billings, so their usual haunts are the Moss Mansion, the Dude Rancher and the old Parmly Billings Library building (now the Western Heritage Center).

They investigated the Mammoth Hot Springs General Store in Yellowstone. That building, which was built in 1895 as part of Fort Yellowstone, had so much activity going on that employees reached out to MTPRS specifically. As far as Dustin knows, they’re the only group who have hunted for ghosts in a national park.

They’ve been all over, from the aptly named Ghost Rails Inn in Alberton to the Miles City Elks Lodge.

It was at the Elks that MTPRS captured what Dustin thinks is the best piece of evidence they’ve found. On a night in September 2010, they captured what sounds like a woman screaming. She can be heard from different microphones all around the building, and none of the investigators heard a sound.

Is there a natural explanation, or is this a call from the other side? Nobody can say for sure. The clip is on YouTube, so you can judge for yourself . There are no answers here, just mysteries that prompt more and more mysteries.

Maybe that’s why Dustin takes such a pragmatic view on the paranormal. He doesn’t even like the word “haunted.” He can’t say for sure what any of this activity is, but he can’t explain it.

“When it gets down to it, we just don’t know what it is,” he said. “Is it dead Aunt Marge who’s talking to you? Or is it a manifestation of your brain?”

When Jesus walks on water in the Book of Matthew, the disciples initially cower in fear, believing him to be a ghost. For pretty much always, people have been using the paranormal to explain the unexplainable.

As far as Dustin has seen, there’s nothing truly evil out there. Just things you can’t quite understand. And maybe they’re looking back at us, also searching for connection.

“It’s a noble thing to help out where we can,” Dustin said. “Even if we can’t find what’s out there.”