BANGOR – When the man in the black tricorn hat, green wool weskit and buff knee breeches lit the candle in the lantern, the nine people assembled at the waterfront knew it was the signal for a walk back in time.

The guide for the Bangor Museum and Center for History’s weekly Ghost Lamp Tour of the waterfront and downtown said he thinks of himself as an anonymous merchant from the late 1700s, just a regular 18th century guy eager to tell a few stories – some are tales and some are true.

In his 21st century incarnation, however, he is Ryan King, 32, of Bangor, a 10-year veteran volunteer with the historical society and winner of their 1997 Volunteer of the Year award.

“I think of the tours as building social capital,” King said. “I bring history out of the Thomas Hill House and into the community in hopes that others will understand their surroundings in a more informed way.”

Lapsing into his 18th century self, King began the tour by reading from “Voices of Kenduskeag,” a slim volume of essays written anonymously by prominent Bangor residents and published in 1848.

The tour took us along the Penobscot River and by the place under the Joshua Chamberlain Bridge where ill-fated American Revolutionary privateers were forced to scuttle their ships July 25, 1779, to avoid capture by British forces in what became known as the Penobscot Expedition.

Paul Revere was one of the fledgling Americans who fled the British, King said, and he walked all the way back to Boston.Tour co-guide Carolyn Rodick, 43, of Bangor has volunteered at the historical society for three years. She told the tale of Bangor Mayor Samuel Dale. Dale died at the museum’s Thomas Hill House, in the bathtub, under mysterious circumstances that involved a sum of missing money raised to aid the residents of Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871.

Dale’s spirit, Rodick said, is believed to inhabit the Thomas Hill House. She has witnessed doorknobs turning by themselves and phone extension lights going on when only she is in the building. She said an expert in paranormal incidents confirmed in 2001 that the house is inhabited by a restless soul that may well be that of Mayor Dale.

Farther along the tour trail, we paused at the monument commemorating the arrival in 1575 of Portuguese navigator Estevan Gomez, who was in the Penobscot region in service to the King of Spain. His quest was Norumbega, the fabled city of gold.

The monument’s mosaic mariner’s compass, which looks like a many-pointed star, made me think of the reference Henry David Thoreau made to Bangor in 1846, “a star on the edge of night.”

With night dropping down fast, our guides lit our way to the Kenduskeag River to the place once known as the Devil’s Half-Acre, a disreputable section of the city where seamen of all nationalities mingled with lumbermen known as the Bangor Tigers, who drank and brawled on many a balmy evening.

Then it was on to Norumbega Park and the statue of Hannibal Hamlin, who served as vice president to Abraham Lincoln. The last stop was the spot on Central Street where Al Brady’s desire for a tommy gun was foiled by FBI agents in a dramatic shootout, which left the gangster dead, on Columbus Day 1937.

“I’m glad I did this,” one woman said at the end of the tour. “I read about it in The Weekly and just had to be here.”

The Ghost Lamp Tour takes place 8-9 p.m. Thursdays, July 4, 11, 18 and 25. The cost is $5. For information, call the Bangor Museum and Center for History at 942-5766.