Ghosts and ghouls are rumored to walk during October, and some people hope to meet up with them.

A Massena author is teaming up with WPBS this month, hoping to scare north country residents out of their wits. A bus tour of five haunted sites in Jefferson County begins this weekend and will go until the weekend before Halloween.

The group will visit the Jefferson County Historical Society, Watertown; the Burrville Cider Mill; the John Hoover Inn, Evans Mills; O'Brien's Pub, Clayton, and the Sackets Harbor Battlefield State Historic Site.

The event is a fundraiser for WPBS, which made a documentary of the five sites and is running the tour to accompany it.

Though the tour will visit haunted houses — the Burrville Cider Mill and the battlefield are supposed to be especially active — no one is sure if any ghosts will come out to play.

"There are some places where you walk in and get a feeling, but it's fleeting, even for people who have lived there for years," said author Cheri L. Farnsworth, who publishes her "Haunted" series under the name Cheri Revai. "It would be really fun if something happened, of course."

The first tour will begin at 5 p.m. today. All six tours, each open to approximately 30 people, are sold out.

"Ghost tours and haunted tours are getting popular all over," said Mrs. Farnsworth, who has written nine books about haunted locations and is working on two more.

It is the first time WPBS has hosted an event like this. For the past 25 years, WPBS's fall fundraiser has been an art auction, featuring local artists. This year, the station decided to mix things up and do something different.

"Twenty-five years is a long time to do something so we thought we'd go in a different direction," said Julie A. Weston, WPBS event manager. The station has been working on this project since June.

WPBS spent the summer with Mrs. Farnsworth and several members of the Shadow Chasers, Potsdam, touring the five sites to create the 30-minute film, which will air three times this month.

In the future, the station hopes to expand the program and visit different sites in the region.

During filming, Mrs. Farnsworth said, she and the crew had at least one run-in with a member of the spirit world. At the Burrville Cider Mill, they were filming outside and a motion detector light went off, when nothing was close enough to have triggered it.

Mrs. Farnsworth, who works during the day as a secretary at the New York Power Authority, began writing about ghost stories when her sister asked her to write one about a house they lived in growing up. From there, her interest in ghost stories and researching them grew. She wrote a book, got it published and kept on going. She has published three books about Northern New York, as well as books about the Hudson Valley, New York City, New York state, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

"When I started writing and researching the very first book, there were a lot of people who doubted that I would ever get enough to fill even one book, and look where I am now, 11 books later," she said.

Though she has been visiting haunted sites for her books for more than eight years, she has had few ghostly encounters herself. She does not doubt that ghosts exist.

"If you've spoken to as many people as I have and you hear the same things ... it would be hard for me to dismiss that," Mrs. Farnsworth said.

Historical information about each site will be presented during the tour and visitors will be able to make up their own minds about what they see, or feel.

"We're not really sure (what's going to happen). It's kind of open to interpretation," Mrs. Weston said. "We wanted an event that would promote local interest and local historical places of Jefferson County."