I had a sweet tooth back then (still do) and so would order some dish I couldn’t or wouldn’t finish in order to save room for one of Boder’s delicious desserts. Among the highlights was schaum torte with strawberries.

If you’re from Wisconsin, you’re probably familiar with schaum torte, which is really a meringue shell. Pavlova is one variation. The best part of schaum torte is what you put inside it, like sweetened berries and whipped cream. Well, there’s also the fact that although it has sugar and it has no fat: my kind of dessert.

This year, my sister had some leftover egg whites (who knows why?) and I happened to have the insides of a pumpkin I’d carved. Clever sis got the clever idea of creating a Halloween version of a schaum torte that we could fill with fall fruit compote. Canned pumpkin works just as well and it makes a great alternative or addition to apple or pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving.

Don’t be afraid of the vinegar in the recipe; it actually makes the meringue a bit chewier, as opposed to dry and brittle.

Schaum Torte/Meringues

Yield: About a dozen

Unfilled shells may be frozen.

“I said, ‘use my energy,’” Groff says, his tone now professorial, “and then all of a sudden your energy was drawn from your body at the exact moment. And then — at the same time — I heard that weeeird voice.”

Bagans struggles to lift his head. “It’s using my energy,” he whimpers.

“Exactly!”

Bagans and Groff are hosts of “Ghost Adventures,” one of the most popular programs on the Travel Channel — and one of about a dozen similar reality TV ghost-hunting shows on television today. Over the past decade the ghost-hunting genre as a whole, led by series like “Paranormal State,” “Ghost Hunters” and “Psychic Kids: Paranormal Children,” has become a virtual fixture on cable television. The shows follow a basic formula: Everyday Joes — sometimes aided by a psychic, sometimes not — travel to supposedly haunted locations, wait for the sun to go down, and spend the night freaking each other out. It may seem hilariously contrived, but it’s some of the most popular stuff on TV today.

Since they hit the air, these shows have raised the profile of paranormal investigation, turning series investigators into minor celebrities, and spurring a growing interest in hauntings around the country. But they’ve also made some unexpected enemies: real-life paranormal researchers.

Granted, it’s never been easy for those who choose to seriously study ghostly or psychic phenomena. Mainstream science views them with deep suspicion — a contempt fueled by what many see as a gaping lack of evidence. No definitive proof of otherworldly phenomena has ever been found. Yet parapsychologists — a handful with Ph.D.s and fortunate enough to have found a home at an academic institution, the vast majority self-taught but equally dedicated — continue to search for evidence that paranormal phenomena really do exist.

They’ve been at it for some time now, in fact. In the late 1800s men like Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James risked their reputations by studying oddities such as “crisis apparitions,” prescient events where final farewells or messages from a friend or loved one are claimed to be received in dream form before it is known they are dead. In the early-to-mid-1900s, Joseph Banks Rhine helped to pioneer the study of ESP by founding a (now-defunct) parapsychology lab at Duke University. Today, laboratory-controlled random number generator tests — experiments where a subject sits in front of a number generator and tries to “will” one number over another — seem to suggest that the mind has an unknown ability to affect reality.

Parapsychology, its adherents say, is a little like alchemy before chemistry came along. Don’t squash it. Interviews with multiple parapsychologists, however, suggest that reality TV ghost-hunting shows are doing just that by exacerbating the woes that have historically plagued their field.

Many parapsychologists derive a healthy part of their income, and research funds, from speaking engagements, but now those are beginning to dry up. Loyd Auerbach, a field investigator with a quarter-century of experience who has appeared on “Larry King Live,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and “Late Night With David Letterman,” is one of a number of parapsychologists who have felt the squeeze from the reality TV ghost-hunting shows. In 2006 he took part in and was paid for 14 events in the Halloween season alone. The next full year, that number dropped to five. The year after that, to two. And then, in 2009, to one. This is the new reality for Auerbach, a man once dominant in his field. So far in 2010 only one paying gig has come his way. “I was making a good part of my living lecturing and doing events. Now the TV stars are getting all the lectures,” he said. “It’s been difficult to pay my mortgage.”

Dr. Barry Taff, an investigator who has consulted for the CIA and took part in a now defunct parapsychology lab at UCLA, has likewise seen a drop in the number of cases referred to him. “Since these shows littered the landscape, calls coming in for investigations have almost disappeared,” he said. “We used to get 20 to 30 a year. And then it just dropped dead. Last year, literally, we did not go on one single case. Not one. It’s depressing!”

But the effect of the shows may reach farther than the preexisting parapsychological industry. Dr. Andrew Nichols, a leading expert in poltergeists who researched the phenomenon for the U.S. Army and who co-received the only grant ever awarded to study alleged hauntings, believes that they also push questionable science on the TV-watching public. Nichols pointed out a laundry list of what he calls bad science in the series: Investigations always take place at night (Why would ghosts come out only then? How can you be a good observer in the dark?); investigators use unproven, “scientific seeming” instruments like magnetometers, which have ultimately failed to produce replicable results; they suggest that every odd sound, every “cold spot” and every “orb” (which have been explained away as side effects of digital cameras) are signs of ghosts. More generally, as Nichols put it, “they just run around like little girls.”

Not surprisingly, the shows have also been accused of fakery. Perhaps the biggest pratfall in paranormal TV history belongs to the perpetually possessed psychic medium Derek Acorah, of the British show “Most Haunted,” who was disgraced after a cast member tricked him into communing with fictionalized ghosts. Critics took aim at the genre’s most popular series, “Ghost Hunters,” after a 2008 Halloween special in which a ghost purportedly tugged an investigator’s collar; many believed a trick string was employed. The incident prompted Buffalo resident Ron Tebo to found Scifake.com, a website that polices paranormal TV. “You had 5 or 6 million people glued to the TV and SyFy decides that they’re going to pull a number on all of us,” he said.

Furthermore, says Benjamin Radford, managing editor of the Skeptical Inquirer and a researcher who performs his own science-based investigations into supposed hauntings, the shows give people a template for inventing hauntings in their own house. Radford, who thinks most parapsychologists do shoddy research, has been able to find rational explanations for each haunting he’s investigated. “I deal with people who are convinced their houses are haunted,” he said. “They’re ordinary people who for whatever reason believe that their home is haunted. And when I talk to them and when I do investigations, one of the things I ask is, ‘Why are you interpreting what you’re experiencing as a ghost?’ Invariably the answer is, ‘I watch “Ghost Hunters.”‘”

Parapsychology has always been hampered by a lack of funding and a shortage of academic departments dealing with parapsychological phenomenon. In the past there have been stabs at such programs in the United States, but they’ve had much more success in Europe, where there are at least a few, like the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh. In the ’80s, for example, a short-lived parapsychology master’s program existed at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, Calif.

Without a strong body of degreed parapsychologists to speak for the field, parapsychologists worry that the shows further promote an image of the researchers as bumbling amateurs rather than rigorous professionals. “We get painted with the same brush,” said John Palmer, a Ph.D. who runs the Rhine Institute, formerly affiliated with Duke University and one of the only parapsychological institutes in the country. It is the bumbling amateur image of the field that skeptics and mainstream scientists dig into. For some, the stigma is so strong as to dissuade any study in the field whatsoever.

Indeed, parapsychologists name the professional stigma associated with their field as one of the reasons it hasn’t taken off (there are likely other reasons, of course). Without the support of academia, they say, young, serious-minded researchers interested in parapsychology struggle to receive grants, attain academic positions and achieve tenure. Harris Friedman, a professor at the University of Florida’s psychology department, experienced the opprobrium associated with psychic study firsthand. He fell victim to what he calls the “reverse file drawer problem.” “Many skeptics of parapsychology use the excuse that there’s a ‘file drawer problem’ where all the negative findings get buried and only the findings that support parapsychology actually make it toward publication,” he said.

As a doctorate student teaching in Fort Myers, Fla., Friedman conducted a study on psychic capacity in grade-school children — a study that he says yielded compelling results: Children who claimed they liked each other had a better-than-odds chance of guessing cards than children who said they did not like each other. But he was grounded when he showed his findings to his dissertation professor. “He said ‘Look, if you publish this forget having any sort of an academic career.’ So I buried the data.” Even so, Friedman, who has since gone on to have a fruitful academic career in alternative psychology, can see some benefits to the otherwise noisome ghost-hunting shows.

“They’re tapping into a feeling of awe, a feeling people have that the world is not just mechanical,” he said. “They open people up to deeper possibilities, and in this regard they have a good and bad relationship to parapsychology.”

Awe is indeed what makes these shows tick, what keeps eyes glued to the screen: Ghosts are humankind’s most popular and storied supernatural belief. We want to be scared, we want to suspend our skepticism; some among us even use the shows to make the leap into belief, and in this sense the shows possess an almost religious quality. The same ideas drive the field of parapsychology. For a number of reasons, the scientific hunt for the world beyond has remained a backwater discipline, and for a field of study strange enough as it is, parapsychology today finds itself in a strange position, stuck in between a set of uniquely American extremes: belief cheapened to the point of farce and a rigid, almost inhuman refusal to see anything beyond the material world. It’s an odd thing. Or is it?

Vinnie Rotondaro is a writer living in Brooklyn and a reporter for the New York Daily News.

Just how did we come to possess the remains of Felix?

My grandfather was a young boy when his father was thrown from a horse-drawn wagon after a practical joker startled the horse. He suffered a traumatic head injury that kept him from meaningful employment for the rest of his life. Coming from a family in which industriousness was the paramount virtue, my grandfather studied hard and eventually borrowed money and played semi-pro football in order to attend Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia. Around 1925 in a gross anatomy seminar, he and his classmates were issued human skeletons to use as study aides.

Felix’s body had already been tidied up by the time my grandfather received him. Sinew had been stripped from the bone; his skull had been horizontally sawed so that the skull cap could be removed; his jawbone was fitted with a spring to keep it from falling off; and a nice clean hole was drilled into the top of his head so that his wired frame could be hung from a rack.

What’s not so nice to observe about Felix’s skeleton are the small Greek letters of Pi Upsilon Rho — one of the oldest national medical fraternities — painted on the front of his skull cap, and a few small dark smudge marks on the inside of the skull that very well may have meant that Felix’s head was once used as an ashtray.

Don’t be too quick to judge, friends who are doctors tell me. In today’s era in which medical schools hold tasteful ceremonies where students recite poetry and offer flowers to the memories of the cadavers they dissect, using a human skull to extinguish cigarettes is inexcusably offensive. But as anyone who’s seen “M*A*S*H” knows, the stress associated with first and intimate encounters with human remains takes its toll and often comes out in the form of gallows humor. Imagine what it must have been like in the emotionally sterile medical schools of the early 1900s.

My grandfather established his medical practice in the depths of the Great Depression, and Felix, who was apparently never expected to be returned to the school, found a home in his office. In those days my grandfather accepted barters of food in exchange for medical services. In contrast to where he had come from, he would say of the Depression, “I’d never had more in my life.”

In 1954 my father became the second George in our family to graduate from medical school. With the department of surgery award for highest grades in hand, he chose to add six years to his training to become a neurosurgeon. Felix came faithfully along, once again lending his body as a teaching aide.

Right up until his retirement, my father kept Felix’s skull on his desk and rehearsed complicated brain surgeries before entering the operating room. While the top of the skull resembles a smooth tortoise shell, the lower section is a landscape of ridges and valleys. An empty cranium, without the presence of a pulsing human brain, is an invaluable three-dimensional tool, he told me.

As a child I would sometimes sit in my father’s swiveling desk chair, putting my fingers into Felix’s eye sockets and wiggling his few remaining teeth. I’d wonder for hours what he had been like while he was alive. Did he have brothers and sisters? How sad they must have been when he died, I imagined.

One Halloween my brothers and I carried Felix’s full frame out of the closet, sat him in a chair by the front door, and told jokes to trick-or-treaters:

Why was the skeleton afraid to cross the road?

Because it didn’t have the guts.

and …

What did the skeleton say to the bartender?

I’ll have two beers and a mop.

In the dim light of our hallway that night Felix seemed to smile ever so slightly, as if he were enjoying the festivities, too.

While it was my brother (yes, another George) who became the next in our family to graduate from medical school and to offer his home as a resting place for Felix, I — who dropped out of pre-med classes my first week of college — came to appreciate the skeleton in a different way.

I chose to study social sciences and ended up working in human rights, where skeletons are assessed for evidence of torture and genocide. In my travels throughout Asia I became attracted to Buddhism, with its emphasis on impermanence and nonattachment. Depictions of ancient charnel grounds in the sacred art of India and Tibet — with bones scattered about and vultures pecking at decomposing bodies — just never seemed that frightening to me, probably because Felix made our home a graveyard of sorts for decades.

What becomes of Felix next is not clear to us. With each passing year, his bones turn more brittle. His paper-thin temples are cracking; the tips of his fingers shed off bits of grainy dust. Even the rusting wires that hold his bones together look like they could snap with age.

Today you can order a standard anatomical skeleton made of unbreakable plastic for $250 online, free shipping included. One company even names its skeletons — Leo, Max, Bucky. Should we somehow dispose of Felix and trade him in for the newest model to pass down to the fourth generation?

I’m afraid we’re just too attached to Felix — his physicality and the family lore that’s developed around him. In a sense, he outlives us all. Get rid of Felix? Maybe we simply don’t have the guts.

Barbara Becker works in human rights and foreign policy. She writes the Open Salon blog Here’s the Thing.

“There was a boy over there! He was standing right there.”

“No one else is here but us,” he told me. “You were dreaming.”

But I wasn’t. The shock and fear left me shaking, but most disturbing was the physical sensation. I hadn’t just seen this ghost boy; I had felt him. Sorrow, loss, loneliness. It was as if he was saying, I’m lost. Help me. I need to be seen.

I kept the bathroom light on all night for a month, maybe more, my eyes trained on that doorway. If I was going up the stairs in the dark, I would climb quickly, two steps at a time, as if someone, or something, was chasing me.

Growing up, a gory Halloween costume or haunted house could scare the daylights out of me, but I’d always been skeptical about ghosts and spirits. When I was 20, a hardened realist — and an atheist, to boot — broadened my mind. At the epicenter of the Bay Area punk scene in the ’80s and ’90s was a guy named Tim Yohannon. A product of the ’60s counterculture’s angry edge, he was punk rock’s own paterfamilias, a graying, squatty Azerbaijani Humphrey Bogart. He taunted vegetarians. He smoked about 8,000 Benson and Hedges a day. Like much of my peace-punk cohort, I loved and looked up to Tim. He was generous, and in the midst of the crazy punk scene, he radiated sanity. Once, when we were driving along a winding Marin County road on the way back from a day at Stinson Beach, our hair sticky with sea salt, he told me that once, when staying at a nearby bed and breakfast, he’d seen a ghost. He was jolted awake by a strange voice hissing “TIM!” He opened his eyes to see a mean-looking disembodied head, floating there. He and his girlfriend dropped the key at the front desk and fled. I thought, if a realist — a non-believer no less — could encounter the supernatural, then maybe there was something to it.

In 1998, Tim died after a lengthy battle with lymphoma. While it is painful to lose a friend in any capacity, the loss of a role model is particularly acute. A sharp pain as the light draws down on a certain phase of your life — the end of an era, indeed. But slowly, he faded from memory, supplanted by more immediate losses — my father, a grandmother. Then last year, I went through a bout of insomnia. Work, as usual, was keeping me up at night, worse than ever.

As I stared at the laptop screen, the glow of the blank page insulting my eyes, I kept hearing Tim’s voice in my head: “Be punk rock about it!” It bedeviled me. Not the sentiment; I got what it meant: Be bold. Leave a blistering mark. But the voice’s persistence. Why now? I hadn’t thought about him in, honestly, years. Yet, if the voice in my head was to be believed, it was as if he never left. Fully inhabited by the idea of him, I went downstairs to the kitchen for a drink of water. Then I drifted to the back door and opened it. I stood on the creaking old wood porch, dry-rotted wood on the door sill flaking under my feet, and tilted back my chin. The night was perfectly clear, no moon, the October air acutely sharp.

I looked up into the center of the starry sky and held out my arms, “OK, fine, Tim. If you’re really there, then prove it.” At that moment, a small but brilliant meteor streaked brightly across midheaven. The hairs at the base of my neck got all tickly and tears sprung up in my eyes. I felt as if I’d risen from my body, weightless. My breath whooshed out of me. “Cool,” I said, to no one.

Lit up inside, I went back into the house, and powered through my assignment. There was something inspiring about what seemed like a paranormal visitation from an avowed atheist. Maybe it was his way of saying, “Hey, I was wrong. There’s more.” And a command performance in the sky: There was a wit to it. I know some people will insist that meteor was a coincidence, but I insist that it wasn’t. And unlike my first brush with the Otherworld, I felt no fear whatsoever. Though the living Tim would have hated this particular expression, I felt blessed.

I’ve shared these experiences with people from time to time, and I’ve found that by admitting supernatural experience, a floodgate opens: A friend who swears he smells his grandfather’s pipe whenever he’s in danger — a car about to serve in front of his bike, a branch overhead threatening to break, when he’s hiking alone. A widow who is sure her husband tells her where she’s put misplaced objects. These stories are often shared in the dead of night, when conversation veers off-grid, toward the realm of the unexpected. Maybe such topics are more welcome in the safety of darkness. I am only too happy to miss sleep to hear them. We’re so rarely invited into each other’s interior lives, and if you tell me that a departed loved one makes his or her presence known, I don’t think you’re crazy. I think you’re lucky.

Do ghosts and spirits really exist? Sometimes, I still take that question into my backyard. With the fragile faith of the near-converted, I stare at the night sky, waiting, thinking about the ghosts in my life. How much of their vaporous presence is genuine, and how much is a trick of the mind, a fondest wish or worst fear manifest? It’s hard to say. While I’m far from a state of certainty, there are a couple of things I believe in my heart: that there are more possibilities out there than we could ever fully imagine. And I’m no longer afraid of the dark.

Lily Burana is the author of three books, most recently “I Love a Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles.”

There were the usual women’s history nominees: Rosie the Riveter, Frida Kahlo, Bella Abzug, Marie Curie and Amelia Earhart. All nice suggestions, but a tad too earnest. I was hoping more for smart concept costumes. One friend wrote, “Power suit + heels + briefcase … and you’re costumed as Affordable Childcare?” A guy friend brilliantly, although impractically, suggested:

How about you dress as 10,000 years of agrarian culture where the indeterminacy of paternity (as opposed to the certainty of maternity) combined with the inheritance of possessions through direct lineage has caused the continued, often draconian oppression of female sexuality? It’s amazing what you can do with a bit of paper-mache –

… and perhaps some interpretive dance. Anna Holmes, formerly of Jezebel, hilariously tweeted: “Fish riding bicycle.” In a similar vein, Planned Parenthood NYC solicited ideas last year for pro-choice costumes and comic Katie Halper suggested, “Wear galoshes and carry an oar: You’re Roe v Wade” and “walk around with a bunch of babies: You’re ‘abstinence only’ sex education.” I’m also partial to one pal’s punny solutions: “Cap’n bell hooks, Susan Bee Anthony, Pair a’dimes. Or just cover yourself in red tape and say you’re a bureaucracy.”

You can check out some other suggestions under the Twitter hashtag I started: #feministhalloween. At the moment, I’m leaning toward the idea of a, shall we say, subversively “sexy” costume — but maybe “Sexy Tampon” is taking things too far?