A map of Rhode Island hangs on the wall in the PBS office of the Haunted RI team. So far, three locations have been written onto the map – three haunted locations that is.

Sometime in the near future, the men who make up the Haunted RI investigative team hope to fill the map with the names of haunted sites they’ve visited. And according to experts, there are plenty of spots in the state for them to go. Why? Because Rhode Island is the most haunted state in the union.

“Haunted RI” is the name of a new documentary premiering on PBS this week. Originally, the show was supposed to be a Halloween special, but PBS wanted it sooner, and now it’s more of a pilot.

Jason Mayoh, a Cranston native and Warwick resident, approached PBS with the idea to create a new Halloween special in the spring. PBS' old special, a documentary on ghost and vampire legends, had run for years, and Mayoh thought it was getting stale.

Mayoh, a RIC graduate, did his college internship at PBS, and knew some of the staff at the station. They liked his pitch, and asked if he could have a show ready by the end of August. When Irene came blowing up the coast and knocked out PBS’ power, she postponed their deadline to the first week of September, cutting it close to the live premiere of the show on Sept. 8.

Mayoh and PBS’ initial idea was a single, hour-long documentary focusing on some of Rhode Island’s most haunted spots. It would be called, simply, “Haunted RI.” But soon after, PBS and the Haunted RI team realized how many purportedly “haunted” spots there were in the state. Now the first episode, which PBS is calling a pilot, will only explore two spots in Rhode Island.

When Mayoh took on the project, he knew he couldn’t do it all alone. He got in touch with two other Rhode Island natives, Brian Harnois and Christian White. Once formed, the trio set to work on the pilot in June, which gave them the entirety of the summer to research cases, interview experts and go on the actual ghost hunts.

Brian Harnois, a Warwick resident, is perhaps best known for his time on SyFy Channel’s “Ghost Hunters” and “Ghost Hunters International.”

“Brian was on ‘Ghost Hunters’ so it will be cool to reintroduce him back in his home state, working on local legends,” said Mayoh.

But “Haunted RI” will not be a copy “Ghost Hunters.”

“We’re not just looking for ghosts,” said Mayoh. “We’re looking at how the stories originated, what’re the truths and what’re the facts?”

Because of the abundance of myths and legends in the state, the Haunted RI team have gathered experts in the field to combine their actual “hunts” with an educational component.

“We’re trying to take urban legends and show the history of why they’re there,” said Harnois, who said it’s not about the evidence he does or doesn’t get; it’s about the story behind why the phenomenon would be there. "We’re getting the answers to the legends, which has never been done before. There’s [usually] no closure; we’re giving closure to things.”

Because of it’s popularity, the team’s pilot episode devotes about a third of their time to the Mercy Brown legend, and the other two-thirds of the episode to the haunting at Ramtail Mill in Foster.

“The Mercy Brown vampire superstition evolved into, ‘Oh, she’s haunting this place,’” explained Mayoh.

Legend has it that Mercy Brown, buried in a cemetery in Exeter, was a vampire. Now her spirit is said to haunt the burial grounds.

“She died of consumption,” said Harnois, who told the story of her untimely demise in 1892 when she was only 19 years old.

Harnois said that because Mercy died in January, the ground was frozen solid, and so the gravediggers kept her body in an above-ground tomb until the ground was soft enough to break. When they went to bury the body some months later, they noticed Mercy looked almost alive: her hair and fingernails had grown longer (which is typical in corpses) and her body was not decomposed. The villagers believed it was because she was a vampire.

The true reason behind her physical state was, according to Harnois, her extremely low body temperature.

“Her body was frozen,” said Harnois, which explained her preserved state. “People were very superstitious back then, they were very weird times. She’s not a vampire.”

The other portion of the pilot took the crew to the old site of the Ramtail Mill in Foster.

The legend at Ramtail Mill goes something like this: the two co-owners of the mill, which burned down in 1880, got into a disagreement in which one man, Peleg Walker, told the other he would have to “remove the keys to the mill from the pocket of a dead man.”

Walker, whose debts were, at the time, substantial, was assigned to be the night watchman as a way to repay what he owed to the mill. The day after the owners’ disagreement, Walker was found hanging from the rope to the bell in the tower, his keys dangling from his pocket.

For the next few nights, the bell would toll, even when no one was ringing it. Finally, the mill owner removed the bell. But the next day, workers heard the machines in the mill running by themselves. Thoroughly disturbed, workers refused to return to the mill, and it soon shut its doors, where it lay abandoned until it burned down.

In 1885, the United States Census declared the site “haunted.” It’s the only “officially” haunted site in the state.

The Haunted RI crew visited the Ramtail site a few months ago while filming. All that remains of the factory are pieces of the foundation.

“It’s not deep in the woods, but it’s out there,” said Mayoh.

The team was lead to the site by Tom D’Agostino, a local expert on paranormal activity and author of the book “Haunted Rhode Island.”

“I caught more evidence [of a haunting] at Ramtail than anywhere else,” said Harnois. “I recorded more EVP [electronic voice phenomena] at Ramtail than in the whole first season of ‘Ghost Hunters.’”

No records of the mill’s existence are left, outside of a single photo of three women standing before the burned remains of the factory. The city hall that housed records pertaining to the mill also burned down, taking all the evidence with it in the fire.

If the pilot gets picked up, the Haunted RI team is hoping to explore many other sites in Rhode Island.

One of the sites they want to explore next is the Elder Balou Lane Cemetary, which is supposed to be haunted by the ghost of “Freddy Fingernails.”

The story of “Freddy Fingernails” is what Harnois believes is the true inspiration for the Freddy Krueger “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies. He said the legend of both men, fictional or factual, is eerily similar. Harnois also said he will not go to Elder Balou Lane Cemetary alone.

“I’ve been ghost hunting for 19 years, and I won’t go there by myself.”

Harnois said safety is a major component of ghost hunting, especially in light of the recent tragedy involving two Warwick girls who were reportedly heading for Mercy Brown’s grave when their car rolled over.

“Please, for your sake and your friends' sake, try not to go to cemeteries at night,” he said, “no matter what time of year it is. If you are a paranormal investigator… going to these gravesites at night for years, it is sometimes illegal to be there, and it is definitely dangerous. Not only because it is dark, but because there are people that sometimes sleep and hang out in cemeteries and can cause you bodily harm. So to avoid being troubled by the law or being harmed in someway, do everyone a favor and visit during the day. Just because it is the daytime, doesn't mean that the spirits won't come out to say hello.”

Harnois is familiar with spirits saying “hello.” He got the inspiration for his nearly 20-year career as a ghost hunter when he was 11, living in Woonsocket. He recalls a night when he was sleeping over a friend’s house when an apparition walked through the room.

“What did I just see?” was Harnois’ reaction. He decided at that point to begin researching paranormal activity.

“I photocopied ghost reference books from the library,” he said, “and I spent time in cemeteries.”

Then in 1999, he contacted TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society) in Warwick, and began training with them. It was through TAPS that he landed the spot on the “Ghost Hunters” television series on SyFy.

TAPS also led him to his fellow Haunted RI members. Mayoh drew comics for the TAPS magazines, and White was a long-time friend of Mayoh’s.

The trio is aiming to do something different than what’s been seen on television before, and have included lots of history and expert interviews in their show. Harnois admits he’s using techniques he learned from “Ghost Hunters” but is doing things differently this time.

“People like raw investigations,” said Harnois, who said nothing will be re-staged for Haunted RI. “You can’t ‘re-take’ ghosts.”

The Haunted RI team is adamant about making it less about ramping up expectations, and more about exploring the legends.

“It’s a show steeped in oral tradition,” said White. “This show is about storytelling. Ghosts live and die in stories. People should expect storytelling; we’re not catering to whims of expectation.”

Despite their focus on the back-stories, the team did manage to unearth some convincing evidence at one of the sites they visited: Ramtail Mill.

“That place is haunted,” said White. “It’s one of the scariest places I’ve been in my life.”

The evidence collected by the team will be showcased in the pilot episode, which will premiere on PBS on Sept. 8 at 9 p.m.

But don’t expect to see the “Scooby Doo imagery” of a phantom standing behind a gravestone, warns White.

Their evidence comes in the form of EVPs, strange objects in photos and curious experiences.

The guys from Haunted RI know that Rhode Island is steeped with legends and ghost stories, and hope their show opens people’s eyes to the rich, albeit unusual, history in the state.

“You walk down the street and nine out of ten people have a [ghost] story,” said White. “It’s something about Rhode Island.”