The town of Strathroy is stuck in a paranormal time loop.
The southern Ontario community, located 35 kilometres west of London, and its resident spirits are featured in the new T+E series “My Haunted Hometown”.
The show dives deep into Strathroy’s eerie folklore, along Frank Street and into its checkered past of fires, train derailments (Boxing Day disaster of 1902) and serial killers (Christian Magee). Instead of the anecdotal stories and dramatizations, the show goes beyond the typical ghost stories in a small town to reveal the chilling experiences the community has experienced for generations. The producers take viewers into the haunted locations through a hyper-local lens.
The two main residents interviewed are Karl Olsen and Barb Dexter. They shared their paranormal experiences with producers, detailing their brushes with apparitions inside their homes.
Dexter, who also runs a ghost tour through the streets of downtown Strathroy, witnessed multiple entities in her home, including that of an angry farmer. She first moved to the town with her husband Terry Easton in 2001 so he could be closer to work. But the 60-year-old sensitive didn’t realize the Pandora’s box that was awaiting her.
“I seem to be like a ghost magnet,” she said, during an August phone conversation. I’ve had lots of experiences and for a long time, I didn’t understand why. And as I’ve aged, I’ve kind of figured it out.”
The first entity suspected was an older man. She said she suspected the spirit was responsible for a spontaneous fire in her kitchen.
Dexter, an admitted clairsentient, added that she suspects it allows her to be more open to spirit communication. Her witnessing the spirit of an angry farmer in her house prompted her to investigate further, and she uncovered that the land her home is on belonged to a farmer and his wife who were forced to sell off their property due to urban sprawl.
Both Dexter and her husband installed cameras in their home and connected them to their smartphones so they would be alerted by any activity.
The second entity that she witnessed in her home was at the foot of her bed. She awoke in the middle of the night to a man standing there. She immediately yelled at the person to get out of her house. It stepped back and faded away.
However, it left a digital footprint as each camera in their house sent an alert to her phone back to the garage. Although she has not seen that entity since she said she suspects the garage might be an entry point.
“I swear it’s a portal,” she said, adding most of the activity is centralized in the garage. “It’s like an airport out there.”
Entity Seeker paranormal investigator Morgan Knudsen appears on the show as a subject matter expert and even she said she was shocked by the level of inexplicable events that surround Strathroy.
“It’s wild. It’s really, really wild,” she said about the activity in Strathroy. “There’s so much that goes on in a lot of these places, but this one was …”
Knudsen, Fanshawe College history professor Chris Monteith and Los Angeles-based investigator Tawney Lewis provide historical and parapsychological insight into the hauntings affecting residents. Knudsen, who also co-hosts the Supernatural Circumstances podcast, was first contacted by producers Matthew Hornburg, Mark J.W. Bishop and Donna Luke with the pitch.
“The producers called me and actually wanted to know whether or not I thought it was a viable idea,” she recalled. “I told them I thought it was a really great idea and it was completely different.”
What intrigued her was the show’s format, which relied less on re-enactments and more on real-time, “boots on the ground” investigations. The approach reminded her of the early 1990s show “Sightings”, known for its investigative journalism style. Sightings aired for five seasons on Fox and Sci-Fi from 1991 to 1997.
Knudsen just hopes the audience gets to experience these locations through the eyes of the experiencers.
“The magic of this show is that you get to experience the place from the perspective of the people who live there,” she said. “In other shows, you’re looking at investigators that are coming in and are new; maybe they’ve never been there before, but these people, they live in this all the time and the locals, as a researcher, are the people I want to talk to first.”
Other towns featured during the show’s eight-episode run are Ridgetown, just east of Chatham, Ontario, as well as Windsor. “My Haunted Hometown” premieres Friday, September 6 at 10 p.m. on T+E.
Photo courtesy Andrew Curr