It was appropriately cold and blustery the night I met Chrissy Koplenik in Centro Ybor to talk about the paranormal goings-on in one of Florida's oldest and most infamous neighborhoods.

Chrissy owns Ghost Party Paranormal, a company that has been offering guided tours of Ybor's most haunted areas since 1996. Her customized tours range from historically informative vanilla to recording-ghost-voices-in-a-dark-cellar scary.

Because I was feeling more adventurous than I actually am (I regularly keep myself awake in terror from reading horror movie synopses on Wikipedia), I asked for the full treatment. So, with a set of investigative tools and Chrissy's expert knowledge of the area, she took me around and let me in on some of the area's creepy little secrets.

What follows are my three absolute favorites. If you want more, you'll have to call Chrissy yourself, and have her or one of her expertly trained guides take you around on a dark, windy night of your own.

This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2010.