Exposure therapy is a practice psychologists use to help people confront their fears. It’s also the approach producers of Paranormal Evidence: You Can’t Deny It took when they shared the testimonies of witnesses on the new series.
Premiering during T+E Creep Week, Paranormal Evidence explores six notoriously haunted locations across North America. Executive producers Carly Spencer (Blue Ant Studios) and Tony Tackaberry (Station 6 Productions) and their team brought witnesses, experts and employees back to the very sites that made them question their sanity.
In each episode’s denouement, those witnesses gather in one spot to share their stories and, in the process, validate one another’s experiences.
“It was something else to walk through these locations with people who have had these experiences,” Spencer said during a September phone conversation. “It was so much more real. You watch them point to the very place where they’ve had these moments that have basically changed their lives forever.”
Spencer and company visited the sites with that personable approach in mind. The spots included Pennhurst State School and Hospital in Spring City, Pennsylvania; the Gettysburg Children’s Orphanage, also in Pennsylvania; the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City; the Olde Angel Inn in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario; the Poncan Theatre in Ponca City, Oklahoma and Pythian Castle in Springfield, Missouri.
For the only Canadian landmark featured, the Olde Angel Inn, the team spoke with couple Chelsey Lacelle and Lomar Mendz, as well as Melissa Martin and Leanne Pluthero.
Erin Goodpipe and Angel Morgan provided the expert perspective for that episode. During Morgan’s audition for the show, she experienced something coming through. She classifies herself as a psychic medium and clairvoyant.
Angel Morgan appears in all six episodes of Paranormal Evidence.
“I’m one of those readers who finds real joy in the validation,” Morgan said during a September Zoom call. “I believe that the minute you’re not surprised, the minute things aren’t spontaneous for you, that’s when you should walk away. For me, I love digging so deeply, and that means I have to trust.”
She shared her thoughts across multiple episodes, including those on the Missouri State Penitentiary and the Gettysburg orphanage.
“Everyone’s telling me to go to Gettysburg,” she said. “After doing this with Paranormal Evidence, I think it’s time for me to go and experience that firsthand.”
As for the Olde Angel Inn, it was built on the ashes of the Harmonious Coach House. Within those walls during the War of 1812, British soldier Captain Colin Swayze met a grim end. He was smitten with the innkeeper’s daughter, Euretta.
American troops had seen him enter the building — hard to miss in his red coat — and surrounded the coach house. According to Maria Da Silva and Andrew Hind’s book Ghosts of Niagara-on-the-Lake, he decided against cutting a path through the Americans and hid instead.
He allegedly hid in a barrel in the basement, where an American bayonet found him. Euretta fought her way through the troops to cradle her love one last time.
It is suspected that Swayze haunts the basement, and that’s where Hamiltonian Pluthero had her first experience at age 12. She heard the heavy footfalls of a phantom presence while she was in a bathroom stall. They stopped in front of the door and stayed there until she heard them walk away. The door never moved. She returned in 2011 to prove to herself that what she experienced was real.
“I adore and hate that building all in one,” she said during a September phone call. “I absolutely love going there, but I will make sure I use the bathroom somewhere else before and after. I will not go down to the bathroom.”
The group meeting at the end of the episode let her learn she wasn’t alone in her brush with the afterlife.
Melissa Martin, left, Leanne Pluthero, Chelsey Lacelle and Lomar Mendz meet to share their brushes with the paranormal at the Olde Angel Inn.
“We didn’t know each other’s stories,” she said of sitting down with Lacelle, Martin and Mendz. “That was really cool, sitting down and then hearing their stories. I was like, ‘Wow, the same thing happened to me.’”
That element of bringing witnesses together at the end of each episode is what Station 6 Productions CEO and Executive Producer for the series, Tony Tackaberry, felt most confident about.
“When we saw those scenes of the people coming together, and not only exchanging their own personal stories — it’s the sense of validation, a sense of I’ve been sitting here on my little proverbial island with my own story, with my own experience, maybe having the odd doubt here or there, but then come together with other people … Seeing how that hit the eyewitnesses has that added impact to me as the viewer.”
Tackaberry said he especially enjoyed the Missouri State Penitentiary, where tour guides, security staff and even a former inmate returned to one of the most infamous institutions south of the border.
“There’s so much to these stories, especially when you put them together like this,” he said. “We’re not setting out to convert people to believers or anything like that, but I think it’s such an interesting way to approach paranormal stories.”
T+E Creep Week airs from October 9 to 18. Paranormal Evidence kicks off the nine-day event. Other shows airing include Goodpipe’s investigation into the Conjuring House in Rhode Island, Bathsheba: Search for Evil and Beyond the Haunting’s Destination Haunted: Leap Castle.