Did you ever hear your teeth clatter? That’s how frigid it was early on the morning of March 15 as I drove to Central Street in downtown Bangor to finally tell the story of the infamous Brady Gang to a national television audience.

Feeling like a 5-foot-7-inch Michelin Man in thermal underwear, jacket, sweater, knit cap, gloves and two pairs of socks, it was a miracle I could even move. But it was all in the name of history, or should I say, The History Channel, which phoned a couple weeks before with an offer I couldn’t refuse: Bring your 25 years of research of the outlaw trio, who were routed by the FBI in 1937, and we’ll let you explain their blood stained saga.

Produced by Greystone Communications in Hollywood, “Haunted Maine” airs at 10 p.m. today on The History Channel. The program is part of the “Haunted History” series.

“Here’s what we have planned,” said Tom Jennings, writer-director for Greystone, which produces the weekly series. “We’ll show you where to stand, what to talk about, and we’ll clip a wireless mike onto your collar. Greg Ouedens [the affable sound technician] can hear everything you’re saying, so even when you’re off camera, if you feel like calling him a jerk, don’t.”

Did he say jerk? Maybe that was how I looked as I bobbed and wove my way around the busy street while cameraman Ned Miller filmed away.

Jennings and associate producer Andrew Nock had a window of four hours in which Central Street, where the actual 40-second Columbus Day gun battle was blazed into local history, served as their very own movie set. When they barked “Stop traffic!” two patrolmen did just that. Then they’d march me into the street where the thugs actually fell, hit by a combined total of more than 50 bullets, and I’d chatter away about how the gang returned to pick up a submachine gun and instead drove into an FBI trap. My mother had been downtown that morning and raised me on the ghoulish story.

The frequent delays seemed more to puzzle than anger motorists, who sped by the carnage as actors Jason D. Roberts, Tim Gato and Michael Jay Shaw re-enacted the exploits of Indiana bad boys Al Brady, Clarence Lee Shaffer Jr. and James Dalhover. After Lucia Williams-Young, the woman overseeing the actors’ makeup and costumes, and production assistant Amy Quirke splattered fake blood onto Roberts and Gato (the real Dalhover was captured inside Shep Hurd’s Dakin’s Sporting Goods and later executed), squeamish motorists pretended not to notice the bizarre spectacle.

The morning shoot was not without comic relief. At one point Nock and Don Henckler, a local actor who portrayed one of the G-men who shot the Brady Gang, climbed onto the roof of a nearby building, only to find two-foot-deep snow. While Miller filmed Henckler from the street below, the men on the roof wheeled around and saw a gaggle of Penobscot County Jail inmates staring up at them, wondering why a man wearing a fedora and gripping a tommy gun was glaring down at them.

After lunch, I led the film crew on a trek into Al Brady’s gravesite at Mount Hope Cemetery. Trudging one-eighth mile through snow up to our knees, we finally made it to the unmarked plot, where two local children, Jason Cooke and Nick Violette, were filmed planting a cross of sticks on the grave and I was interviewed once again.

Thank heaven for Hollywood editors. In the completed program, which I previewed earlier this week, I was relieved that they snipped out my strange comment that I have long felt a spiritual bond with Brady, but left intact the more accurate comment that I feel as though I’m treading on his corpse every time I visit Central Street.

The “Ghost of Al Brady” segment is the fifth and final one of a show that also features interviews with historian Ryan King, and Norma Towne and Carolyn Rodick of the Bangor Historical Society, who discuss the ghostly presence of Samuel Dale. The disgraced mayor died in his home at 159 Union St. in 1871, an apparent suicide. The building now houses the historical society collection.

Volunteers at the Bucksport Historical Society chronicle the deaths of town founder Jonathan Buck and also Sarah Ware, and striking aerial shots show the “haunted” lighthouse at Seguin Island off Popham Beach.

Author Stephen King declined an interview, but his presence is felt throughout the program. His Bangor mansion is shown, along with a 1982 Bangor Daily News photo showing him mugging for the camera by his classic spider web gate. Ryan King (no relation) relates a story about the author’s hungry years, when he worked at New Franklin Laundry and often shot the breeze with a character named Johnny Walker. When the often despondent King asked Walker if there was hope, Walker would reply, “There’s always Mount Hope.” (A gravedigger is portrayed in the program by Richard Peek.)

“Haunted Maine” may be a Hollywoodized view of the Pine Tree State, with a surfeit of stock comments about this “foreboding land of mystery and wonder” that “spirits choose to call … home.” But it should prove to be great fun for believers in the paranormal and the enduring mystique of an outlaw trio who died in a hail of bullets in 1937.