The success of Paranormal Profilers has surprised even seasoned investigator Peter Sacco.
“Honestly, I just put this up for fun,” he said during a September Zoom call. “My wife said you’re getting bored, being semi-retired.”
He lets out a good-natured laugh and adds that he is only teaching a handful of anger-management classes since retiring from criminal psychology. So he picked up a new hobby: film editing.
“I didn’t realize that the show was doing as well as it was until I found out this is week number four,” he said. “It’s still in the No. 1 spot as the No. 1 paranormal show. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, that’s kind of cool.’”
Sacco’s modest, but the accolades suggest the popularity is earned. On Sept. 12, the Kitchener-Waterloo International Film Festival named Niagara’s 13 Ghosts its winner for best short film.
For Paranormal Profilers, which streams on the supernatural niche platform Paraflixx, Sacco has reunited with colleagues Michelle Desrochers, Susan Carter, Dennis Carroll, Cameron Bagg and Emily Waterson. They revisited past locations including Bertie Hall, the Olde Angel Inn, Willowbank and the Laura Secord school in Queenston, Ont. The Laura Secord school was built in 1914 and served students until it closed in 2010.
“I’ve always been — I don’t want to say embarrassed or sheepish — about saying I’m a filmmaker, I’m this, I’m that,” Sacco said. “But when I see the success of the Profilers that’s out there, it blows the doors off me because when I had Niagara’s Most Haunted, which was a local TV series, we were married to local television.”
His primary job before semi-retirement was criminal psychologist. He worked with police to help put offenders behind bars and taught future generations of criminal psychologists. He has also written fiction novels and directed music videos for close friends and Canadian new-wave rockers, the Spoons.
His passion project was television about the Niagara Region’s uncanny history and ghost stories. The scope was limited because the series only aired in southern Ontario. The turning point came at a comic convention, when The Walking Dead actor David Morrissey and The Vampire Diaries actor Ian Somerhalder asked where they could watch his work. That made him wonder: what if?
“I flipped it over and called it Paranormal Profilers because we separated from the TV,” Sacco said. “That’s how I was able to start showing it.”
He tested the show with audiences on YouTube for a couple of years and noticed about 250,000 hits. He still maintains it was always a hobby — on par with a bunch of friends hanging out, like the gang on The Big Bang Theory.
Then he connected with Natalie Jones of Paraflixx, though he questioned whether the content was good enough.
“I can always find a fault with my work,” he admitted, adding he did some of his research using ChatGPT. He started talking with Jones in late spring. By July, the show was airing on the streaming service.
New friends have also joined investigations, including The Dead Files investigator Steve DiSchiavi and Rita Carrey, who died in 2024.
“The reason why I brought Paranormal Profilers back was now, was that I could really clean these up, sweeten the sound, add AI to it, get more faces into it, and then I could pay tribute to all of these folks that came out,” he said.
The most recent episode is Laura Secord’s Haunted School. Paranormal Profilers is streaming on Paraflixx.
Photo courtesy of Peter Sacco