Tag Archives: TV

265 – Ghost Nation: Back On The Hunt With Jason Hawes

We’ve interviewed plenty of television ghost hunters on the show before, but it’s not every day you get to talk to the original. When Ghost Hunters premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel in 2004 (even before they’d changed the name for corporate trademark purposes to SyFy), there were talk shows with psychic mediums, there were shows that used the Night Vision camera like MTV’s Fear, but there was nothing that showed the modern ghost hunting experience. Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson founded the core of the team and Jason stayed with the show through all 232 episodes.

Those are some serious-looking Ghostbusters

In 1990 after having his own paranormal experience, Jason Hawes formed the group that would become The Atlantic Paranormal Society. The acronym T.A.P.S. would launch a thousand paranormal teams across the country, but it was a 2002 New York Times article that would eventually lead to their deal with Pilgrim Films and turn a Rhode Island paranormal investigation team into international celebrities and create the phenomenon that would become “paranormal reality television”.

Ghost Hunters ended after 11 seasons in 2016 (with a new revival on A&E with Grant Wilson starting this season), but Jason Hawes has returned to television with Ghost Nation, starring longtime TAPS members, Dave Tango and Steve Gonsalves. Ghost Nation is centered around what Jason feels is the most important part of paranormal investigation and that’s working in private residences with families who are having haunted experiences that they need help with.

Dave Tango, Jason Hawes, and Steve Gonsalves

Jason has his own radio show, Beyond Reality and he spent 11 years on television, so he’s a great talker and our discussion is wonderfully candid. He’s got a really disarming manner and even if I hadn’t seen him hunt ghosts so many times, it felt like I’d known him for years. You can see how people who’ve never met him can open up about their paranormal experiences. If he brings that kind of easy charisma to Ghost Nation, it will be a fun season indeed. Here are some of the topics that we cover:

  • Why Jason decided to get back into TV ghost hunting after several years off
  • Tips for a new ghost hunting team
  • The difference between an intelligent haunting and a “recording”
  • Why Jason misses some of the real-life drama that fueled the first few seasons of Ghost Hunters
  • What’s the difference between ghost hunting in the 90s and today
  • Is there some kind of feud between him and Grant Wilson now that they have competing shows?

Ghost Nation premieres on Travel Channel October 11th, 2019 at 9pm Central/10pm Eastern and Pacific Time!

So much of life is dedicated to pondering its brevity. In fact, the Roman Stoics used to carry Momento Moris around, which were little reminders that they were going to die. The idea is that its supposed to urge you into action realizing that you have a finite time on this earth, so make the most of it. My conversation with Jason Hawes who has been to so many haunted sites and has seen so many things that he cannot explain made me posit just the opposite. What if we had all the time in the world?

That immediately made me think of Andrew Marvell’s lovely poem “To His Coy Mistress” which famously starts “Had we but world enough and time”, the idea being that life is short so let’s get to the fun parts (in the poem, the speaker is trying to get his girlfriend to make some sweet love, as was another Seventeenth Century poem inspiration for one of our earlier songs.) But this song is just the opposite, it’s about how love never dies and when faced with the possibility that our spirits are eternal, instead of a one-night stand, it just might be “The Long Game”.

It’s the lines on my face
and the dark around your eyes
when infatuation fades
we’re left with these old lives

what if we knew forever
was more than just fantasy
what if we knew forever
could be our reality

we’ve got world enough and time
an eternity remains
we’ve got world enough and time
love is a long game

Though the clock is ticking
we’re more than these old bones
there’s no stroke of midnight
when you’re dancing on gravestones

what if we knew forever
was more than just fantasy
what if we knew forever
could be our reality

we’ve got world enough and time
an eternity remains
we’ve got world enough and time
love is a long game

91 – Paranoia: The Strange Case of Christopher Saint Booth

Quick update on some fun things this week, Wendy and I will be at the Paradigm Symposium paranormal convention in Minneapolis this weekend, so look out for us and let’s hang out if you’re there!

Also in more fun haunting news, I just launched St. Paul Ghost Walks which is the first haunted history walking tour of downtown St. Paul, Minnesota (I like to call it the Evil Twin) and that launches this Friday the 13th! 

And there’s still time to vote for our band, Sunspot, in the Madison Area Music Awards – if you voted in the first round, it doesn’t cost anything to vote for us in the FINAL round (ends May 19th). If you haven’t voted, it’s five tax-deductible dollars and every penny goes to helping out music education in Madison area schools. It’s a cause we believe in deeply and are proud to have been supporting this charity since the beginning.

This week, I got to take some time to talk to a creator after my own heart, Christopher Saint Booth. As a musician, film producer, and paranormal investigator with a superb sense of style, he and his brother Philip bring glam chic and a distinct sophistication to the world of the weird.

christopher saint booth
Christopher Saint Booth at the Chicago Paranormal Convention

I met Christopher at the Chicago Ghost Conference (Episode 61 of the podcast has our haunted wrap up) when Allison from Milwaukee Ghosts  grabbed a copy of his book, The Exorcist Diary: The True Storywhich is an adaptation of the original journal kept by the priest who was performing an exorcism on a boy named Roland Doe, and that was the real-life story that would eventually inspire William Peter Blatty to write the pea-soup barfing, crucifix-humping movie that we all know and love, The Exorcist.

In our conversation, we start with his career as a musician on the Sunset Strip in the late 70s and early 80s and his move into art director on various films (hey man, he got to work on Dreamscape, the film where people could travel into each other’s dreams and we’ve talked about it on this podcast a bunch of times!)

In addition to some fun Hollywood stories, Christopher shares with us some of his real life paranormal experiences that he’s also documented in an autobiographical book called PARANOIA – The Strange Case of Ghosts, Demons, and Aliens.

While he’s always been into horror movies, what I think is interesting is how the brothers stumbled upon becoming paranormal filmmakers. They were filming a movie called Death Tunnel at Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky, a legendarily haunted hospital that has been closed for decades. In the script, they used the real legends of the sanatarium for inspiration.

But the real show was what was happening behind the scenes. They got so much footage of weird stuff occurring while they were filming that they were able to make a documentary, SPOOKED – The Ghosts of Waverly Hills Sanatorium with weird footage, EVPs, and haunted history of the famous building.

And that documentary led them into a brand new direction, being able to create fictional movies based on the historical legends and then going in depth on the truth behind them, a real mix of the paranormal and pop culture. This was a fun interview full of anecdotes, paranormal tidbits, and a discussion on following your passion, whether it’s musician or filmmaker or gourmet hamburger artist (or a veggie burger artist for me!)

It’s that discussion of living your life with passion that inspired this week’s song, “The Wilderness of Almost Was and Never Were”. Everyone has their own definition of “selling out”, so the trick is to make sure you understand it or someone else will define it for you.

What happened to the kids who got lost in the blur,
The wilderness of almost was and never were.
You used to plan, you used to scheme,
We used to curse the old regime,
What did you surrender. for legal tender,
Was your price more than your dreams?

When they come to you to sell out,
Just promise to put up a fight,
And realize you’ll never be so close as you are tonight.

Drowning in your memory, and you’ll drown right in your hurt,
The wilderness of almost was and never were.
We used to fight and get worked up,
We said up.
What do you remember about your surrender?
Did you get your damn closeup?

When they come to you to sell out,
Just promise to put up a fight,
And realize you’ll never be so close as you are tonight.
When they come to you to sell out,
Just promise to put up a fight,
And realize you’ll never be so close as you are tonight.