Many fresh ideas are brewed at the Tim Hortons in New Minas, Nova Scotia.
It’s where Maritime Haunting producer, director and jack of all trades Jeff DeEll does his best work, especially when it comes to all things paranormal.
During the filming of the King’s Theatre episode of Maritime Haunting in Annapolis Royal, DeEll had an epiphany. He called up paranormal investigator Adam Myles and shared his new series idea, Paranormal Contact, with him.
“Whenever Jeff has an idea for stuff, we’re going to meet at Tim Hortons, sit down, have coffee and shoot the shit,” Myles said during a Zoom call with teammates DeEll and Kelly Klassen. “Hopefully not too many people think we’re weird when they’re listening to the conversation.”
Klassen, an intuitive medium originally from Vineland, Ontario, was recruited for the new project after connecting with Myles during the Maritime Haunting shoot.
“She’s game, let’s bring her on and bring her around to all the different locations with us,” Myles recalled. “He had already talked to her, gotten her buy-in before he came to me.”
DeEll worked diligently to get the green light to investigate locations like the Garrison House Inn and Fort Anne in Annapolis Royal, the Randall House Museum in Wolfville and Port Royal.
Klassen admitted she’s been amazed by the depth of the project and the history of Nova Scotia since moving to the province three years ago.
“Coming here and doing this is fun and it’s super exciting,” Klassen said, “because I get to learn things, but through my skills and abilities, which is more interesting than just reading it in a history book.”
Both Myles and DeEll were surprised by the connections Klassen made with the locations they investigated. There were several points where the team, which investigated the buildings on their own, sensed the same things.
“Kelly’s been very humble about a lot of this,” Myles said. “I can’t wait for people to start seeing what she hits on. And the stuff that actually came out in these episodes?
“In a world full of influencers, fakery and everything else, you wonder sometimes how real some of it is,” he added. “That’s part of what we do in the paranormal field. We’re searching for the truth behind things.”
Klassen also pointed out Myles’ subtle intuitiveness, especially when the duo did separate walkthroughs of the Garrison House Inn.
“You don’t give yourself enough credit either,” she said. “You are extremely intuitive as well, and I’ve told you this from the get-go.”
Another medium Myles and DeEll have worked with, Kim Moser, also pointed out Myles’ latent ability, which might explain why Myles is so hesitant to know more about a location before they visit it.
“I personally don’t like to know anything about where I’m going,” Myles said. “The reason for that being—and a lot of people don’t think about this—is that if I don’t know anything about where I’m going, I can’t be influenced.”
The challenge, of course, is that many of the locations across the province are just known throughout the culture.
“It was so much different than Maritime Haunting because even though I still tried to not know much about the locations, there are stories that are ingrained in Maritime history, so you couldn’t help it.”
Still, not knowing all the information about a location proved fruitful, especially during the investigation of Fort Anne. DeEll found out a detail about the site that neither Myles nor Klassen knew. As the night unfolded, data collected through various experiments fed into the story DeEll was putting together in his mind.
“There was more than one occasion where there were parts of the story, or an actual story, that I didn’t know about until we got there,” DeEll said. “It was pretty cool to see that happen in real time.”
The first episode premiered July 14 on Paraflixx, Plex and Sling.