Ghost-hunting teams from Travel Channel’s “Ghost Nation” and “Kindred Spirits” cross over into one paranormal super event on Halloween night: Investigators from both shows will work together again for the first time in seven years for “Ghost Nation: Reunion in Hell.”
Jason Hawes, Steve Gonsalves and Dave Tango from “Ghost Nation” call on their paranormal buddies Amy Bruni and Adam Berry of “Kindred Spirits,” with whom they used to investigate on “Ghost Hunters.” This time around, they reopen a case involving restless spirits at Seaview Terrace, the 40,000-square-foot, 54-room Rhode Island mansion famous for being featured on the Gothic vampire soap opera of the late ’60s, “Dark Shadows.”
The home’s long and twisted history began in 1907 when it was built in Washington, D.C., by the whiskey tycoon Edson Bradley and his wife, Julia. For health reasons, they later moved the entire structure to Rhode Island. The local government took it over in World War II and used it as officers’ housing. After the war ended, it became a boys’ school and then a school for girls and a dormitory for 36 years.
Through the years, inhabitants have heard Mrs. Bradley, who died in 1929, playing the organ and seen her apparition wandering about. The current owner has felt fingers on the back of his neck and head “like I was being touched by a thousand people at the same time.”
“Dark Shadows” fans visit the site a few times during the year, and one such visitor is thought to have brought something truly dark to the home. The man, who had a passion for the show, was a self-proclaimed warlock and had performed a séance in one of the rooms, unleashing menacing forces in the house, who made themselves known.
“This place is wild,” Bruni said, recalling a weird sensation she felt when she has investigated the mansion in the past. The basement, in particular, creeped her out. “I remember distinctly because it was so scary, the feeling – I thought that the floor was crumbling over me. It felt like dirt was — and I was, like, ‘What is happening?’ But there was nothing there.”
Shadow figures, electric voice phenomena and doors moving on their own — and other truly creepy stuff — aside, the reunion was a memorable one for the team.
“It was just such a treat to be able to actually investigate together again because working with them is kind of how it all started for us,” Bruni said of herself and Berry, who became a paranormal investigator when he won a competition on “Ghost Hunters Academy” in 2010. “We are all like family.”
All the investigators on hand have a similar style — they try to talk with the spirits and not to them, more or less creating a conversation, not a confrontation. As Bruni put it, they try to “humanize” the spirits.
“When you first start [investigating], there is a fun novelty there where you’re trying to get scared,” she said, adding that then she tries to talk with them like she would want someone to talk with her. “We really started focusing on kind of entering the situation, like we’re walking into a party and we don’t know anybody and we’re trying to make friends, you know? And it seems to work.”
You can catch “Ghost Nation: Reunion in Hell” Halloween night on the Travel Channel at 8 p.m. ET/PT.