Local haunts excite entrepeneurial spirit

Starting last January, the Daytona Beach woman began parlaying her certified ghost hunting credentials into a weekend-night walking ghost tour around the Main Street area. Every Friday and Saturday there's an audience, she gives a running talk that mixes Daytona Beach's history with some hair-raising fun. The formula has proven successful enough that, this May, she plans to add the Haunted Halifax River Cruise. If things go well with that, she'll begin taking tourists on a Riverfront Park Ghost Walk to meet with famed apparitions like Brownie, the town dog. Smith, 39, ardently believes that this area could have its own group similar to the 400,000 people each year who take one of St. Augustine's myriad ghost tours -- a business that didn't exist there a decade ago. And, even though the founding of North America's oldest city predates Daytona Beach's incorporation by 307 years, restless spirits from those early days -- pirates, martyred French Huguenots and Native Americans -- are afoot in this area too, Smith says. "If the Spanish were coming as far south as Daytona to kill Huguenots, we have a hell of a lot of history around here," she says, pointing out that Old King's Road that eventually leads into St. Augustine.Smith's story begins in Long Island, N.Y., and, even in her early days, she had a fascination with the departed. "I always collected skulls and bones and things," says Smith, looking around her cozy home, jam-packed with wrought iron, various renderings of dragons and stuffed birds. "I used to talk to my grandfather who had passed away. When I would report what he said, people would tell me, You're sleeping, you're dreaming . . .' "

Initially, she imagined a career as a marine biologist, moving to this area to be near her mother after her father died. "I didn't want to be like Jacques Cousteau," she says. "I wanted to be Jacques Cousteau." The weekend after meeting her idol in St. Petersburg, though, Smith suffered a fractured skull in a diving accident. That ended her underwater aspirations. Work in the veterinary field, nursing, auto repair and hairdressing followed, as Smith, who has been divorced twice, raised her son Kyle, now 14. The search for a career fit ended when she went on a Halloween ghost tour in St. Augustine in 1998. The guy she was dating then convinced her to bring along a digital camera for the event. The results got her hooked on the other-worldly -- pictures she took that night showed 186 floating balls of transparent light unseen by the human eye that she's come to know as orbs. Pretty soon Smith was doing a home study program to get certified in ghost hunting offered by the International Ghost Hunters Society in Oregon. She's invested about $20,000 in equipment to record phenomena that the everyday senses might miss, like changes in the electromagnetic field that coincides with the moment something ususual is photographed. Full-body apparitions, a dog being petted by a nearly unseen presence and orbs galore are among the images she's captured in the last four years. "Doris seems to have an ability to see them and photograph them," says Karen Harvey, one of the original ghost tour guides of St. Augustine, explaining why Smith also offers her tour participants the opportunity to get photographed with a ghost. The founder of the Daytona Beach Paranormal Research Group says she doesn't waste her time on people who don't believe in ghosts. But even the unbelievers leave her tours with something they can bet on. The McCoys of the saying, "the real McCoy," for example, were rum runners in this area -- one of many facts she discloses as she leads the way around Daytona Beach's haunts. "My tours are chock-full of Daytona history," she says.

The Daytona Ghost Walk is conducted nearly every Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the corner of Main Street and Penninsula Drive; or call (386) 253-6034. Tickets are $8; children younger than 6 free.