Welcome back to DEAD Time. Suffer a witch.

This month, I was very excited to dive into the new documentary from the team behind Hellier, what I consider one of the most important paranormal docuseries ever made. From the award-winning team at Planet Weird, The Unbinding (read my review) follows Executive Producers Greg and Dana Newkirk (Hellier, Discovery+ Kindred Spirits) as they investigate the origins of an unusual object that was sent to them, which they call The Crone. The Unbinding was directed by Karl Pfeiffer (Hellier) and co-produced by Connor Randall (Hellier).

Greg and Dana Newkirk regularly receive objects that people believe are haunted and are well-known for their traveling museum of haunted objects. Most of the time, they don’t experience anything from the objects they receive, but occasionally, they will get an object that displays paranormal phenomena. They first learned about The Crone from a Reddit post detailing a story about two hikers in the Catskill mountains who found a strange statue, with nails in its eyes and a noose around its neck, in a cave and decided to bring it home. One of the hikers began experiencing unusual and terrifying paranormal events and eventually had to go stay with his friend. The friend posted about the experiences on Reddit and asked the Newkirks for help. When they received the statue found in the Catskills, they decided to call it The Crone, and began an investigation into the origins of the effigy. During their investigation, the Newkirks themselves began having frightening experiences and felt compelled to find out not only the history of The Crone, but also to see if it would be possible to bring some sort of peace to the object.

Bloody Disgusting was thrilled to have the opportunity to chat with Greg and Dana Newkirk about the investigation surrounding The Crone, the scary, unexplained activity they experienced, and what it was like documenting the case for The Unbinding. Read on to find out about the unsettling events surrounding the Newkirk’s investigation of The Crone…

The Unbinding releases for purchase and rent exclusively on Amazon Prime on September 8th in the US and UK, and on Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube.

Bloody Disgusting: You initially found out about The Crone because of a Reddit post, and you told the hikers to take the statue back to the cave. The paranormal activity got a lot worse for them, so they decided to send the statue to you in 2016. Based on the timeline in The Unbinding, you were doing this investigation at the same time you were working on Hellier. What was that like for your team and how did you organize 2 in-depth investigations at the same time?

Dana Newkirk: That’s a great question! There were two very different things going on at the same time. Karl pointed out to us the other day when we were rewatching The Unbinding, that the Estes Method session that takes place in the hotel room actually took place a month after we had filmed the first season of Hellier. It was the second time we had done it and there was a lot of crossover there.

Greg Newkirk: I think that’s the fun part about the stuff that we do, you don’t necessarily see everything we’re working on. For us, The Crone was our main focus and Hellier was a weird outlier. We’re ghost people, so Hellier was very out of the norm for us. Hellier was the detour, so we’ve learned a lot since then. The Crone and haunted objects were our main focus, which clearly has shifted. It’s changed a lot; I think you see that in the documentary. The ability to do a bunch of things at once only really comes with patience and time, which is something we have an abundance of because we make our own stuff. We don’t have a production schedule we have to stick to. The story comes as it comes.

Dana Newkirk: We’re really lucky that way, we have our very small group of people and we’re friends and we’re very ragtag. It’s wonderful because we’ve kind of created this scenario where we can take our time and we can really give it the time and attention we think it deserves. Because there’s so much crossover there, it’s kind of fun; it feels very much like the way we live our lives every day. We live and breathe paranormal things, so it makes sense that there would be crossover documenting weird experiences that we go through.

Greg Newkirk: There’s a scene in The Unbinding, that if people are paying close enough attention to, they will see that it was shot at the same exact time as a scene in Hellier. The thing we have to stress to people all the time is that the reason there is crossover is because this is really happening [laughs]! This is our real life.

BD: Can you talk a little bit about the unusual activity you experienced after you received The Crone?

GN: As I say in the documentary, nine times out of ten, people send us stuff and I trust them and I believe them when they say they’re experiencing things around it, but most things people send us never do anything strange for us. It’s very rare cases when it does. I think that’s because a lot of the time we’re taking something someone has attached strong emotions to, usually fear, but sometimes sadness, or sometimes trauma, associations with bad memories, they’re putting them into an item, and then we just take those from them and put them on a shelf. Sometimes if there is a good story attached that doesn’t feel exploitative, we like to share that story. That’s a big part of what we do. But with this one, it was almost immediately, “Oh, there’s something unsettling and weird about this.”

DN: It was funny because I think in a lot of ways it defied what we thought was going to happen because it is a very scary story. What we find often is with the objects we receive that have these like absolutely fantastical stories, we kind of go into those stories expecting, “Oh, maybe we won’t have the same type of experiences.” And The Crone was one of those objects that really did the absolute opposite of what we expected it to do. It was very active right out of the gate. So, we had to think about what our game plan for it was in a very different way than we were really not expecting to have to.

GN: We had to accept it, too [laughs]. I think it might be surprising to people that we’re pretty skeptical.

DN: We like to be able to have actual evidence and to sort of put things through their paces. So, it was like a brand-new game plan.

GN: When there were things that looked like wet footprints showing up on the back of the couch, or we were hearing strange noises, or Dana has this horrifying encounter with something that looks like it’s slinking out the closet at night—that’s hard to ignore [laughs].

DN: It was pretty relentless. We caught things on a trail cam; we captured movement; it was very relentless right out of the gate.

BD: In The Unbinding, Dana talks about how witchcraft is still often perceived as being evil. You believe The Crone is related to some sort of witchcraft. Dana, can you talk a little bit about how this case relates to witchcraft and how you’ve used your experience as a witch in this investigation?

DN: I think right out of the gate, I was tweaked in terms of thinking that there was some connection to witchcraft, based mainly on the fact that the object seemed to have some form of sympathetic magic done to it. So, the nails and the noose being very magickly symbolic for someone sending an intention and the intention, again we can only guess but it’s pretty obvious that it’s not good. And the nails being meant to blind someone, or stop them from seeing something, and the noose was possibly to silence someone, or worse case scenario even to kill someone. It was pretty obvious that there was a lot of ritual architecture around this object. It was very much a magical thing. I was actually sort of relieved by that because I have such an extensive history as a witch.

I’ve been practicing magic in some way shape or form since the nineties, so I felt like it was in my wheelhouse a little bit. And I was able to really utilize the knowledge that I had in a lot of spaces. So, it was oddly comforting to me, as weird as that sounds. But I think the greatest part about it is that it really challenged my magical practice, and I think, really forced me to grow and learn that even my own practice needed updating. Initially, when we first received The Crone and the activity was really happening around it, it was a lot of cleansing, a lot of trying to figure out how to make our cohabitation a little bit more comfortable for everyone. So, I was utilizing a lot of magic at that point to try to figure out how to make our space safe and her space her space. So, it was wonderful in that regard. It really did make me a better witch, I think, for sure.

BD: I’ve been fascinated by the Estes Method since the first time I watched Hellier. In The Unbinding, Dana does an intense Estes Method session with The Crone. Can you both talk a little bit about what that experience was like and the results you got from the session?

GN: I can say for me, I hate ghost boxes. I mean, I’ll be very honest, I think most ghost hunting tools are junk. It’s just fancy blinking lights to make it look good on TV.

DN: There’s a lot of room for confirmation bias there for sure.

GN: Even if you believe how it’s allegedly working, being in a room with a radio that’s going [makes swooshing noise], it’s aggressive, it kills the vibe, it just feels unnecessarily chaotic. So, when I saw what Karl and Connor had started doing with them, turning it into a form of mediumship, I was astounded. Especially seeing two-way conversations happening between people who couldn’t hear or see each other. It’s one of those things where I’m like, “Oh, shit, this is real.” Because there’s always an element of doing what we do for a living where you’re afraid you’re LARPing [laughs]. You’re afraid that these devices don’t really do anything and you’re just playing dress up. But when I see that conversation happen, it’s undeniable to me and I think it’s undeniable to anybody who is actually sitting there experiencing it. Either people are having some form of ESP or there is something talking through them; it’s mediumship.

So, when I saw Karl and Connor doing this, it blew my mind and I immediately was like, “Well, we’ve got to try this.” So, the second time we ever did it was in that hotel room, scanning The Crone. I didn’t expect it to be as good as it was. It’s still one of the best sessions we’ve ever had. But the way that Dana was rattling off immediate answers to people was shocking. It’s hard to comprehend and we’ve been hooked on it ever since. It’s been bizarre to watch it grow, and other people adapt it and use it. I really think it works.

DN: It’s cool to see innovation when it comes to investigations, because I think that the paranormal community and paranormal investigations in a lot of ways can get very, very stagnant. You see a lot of people using the same kinds of tools, and I think it starts to create a bit of a box where people are almost uncomfortable going outside of. So, I think what Karl and Connor really did was, they created a moment of great innovation for paranormal research and they’re utilizing a tool in a way that is much different than it has previously been used. So, it was very cool. I think from my perspective, I’m usually the one doing the Estes Method, so one of the things I always say is, I only really get half of the conversation. When you’re on the box and you have the headphones on, you’re only really privy to half of what’s going on and most of the time you really don’t have any idea what’s happening [laughs]. You’re just sort of the mouthpiece and you’re just relaying what you’re hearing. So, I think it’s a very different experience from the people who are outside. I think that one in the hotel was almost four hours long, so it’s an interesting thing spending four hours pretty isolated from what’s going on outside of you. But, it’s also kind of interesting because you do sort of get in touch with your own intuition in a lot of ways.

GN: It’s frightening.

DN: It’s a little creepy [laughs]!

GN: The implications of it are crazy.

DN: It’s fascinating.

BD: In The Unbinding, you say that you look at haunted objects differently since your experience with The Crone and that there were too many things that happened for the case to just be based on coincidences. Can you tell me some of the ways that this case changed you both and why?

GN: Oh man, I’m going to choose my words carefully here. I think if people hear what I want to say out of context here, it might be shocking to them. But I think I can say the best way it has changed my view on haunted objects and the paranormal in general is how the complexities of this works are so much more apparent to me. Where the idea of believing that dead people are confused, and just like need help is very difficult for me to swallow anymore, because it feels so reductive. The idea that something is a good happy Casper ghost; or it’s a demon that needs an exorcist. I can’t live in that world anymore. My world is fully a gray middle world, and frankly I think that is the reality of the situation with everything. The thing that I know now is, and the thing that I find so frustrating is almost that there is a part of me who wishes that I didn’t know this.

DN: It’s opening Pandora’s Box.

GN: The thing that is frustrating to see and informs our work in this field now, is that if you truly do believe, if you’re not just pulling a fun haunted house grift. But if you truly believe that there are entities out there that can influence people, places and things, and you believe that they’re intelligent, we really do have a duty to treat them that way. And not put them on a shelf with a ring of salt around them, not to try and make them do tricks, and not to grandstand in front of them like you’re the only person who can cast this monster out. We should be looking at these things with compassion because these are the experiences that have informed the spirituality of people since people had it. And the way that we’ve been interacting with these stories, I think it’s deeply unhealthy for our spirituality.

BD: I totally agree with that.

GN: It feels like, you know, yeah, we’re paranormal researchers, but the way most people see us is as storytellers. Because that’s really where that spirituality hides in these things, through story. Our lives are dictated by stories, how we navigate our linear world. So, to see the way we have relegated the supernatural and the paranormal as being things that are just scary, and are defeated by white, western, male dominated opinions. It feels like we are doing a disservice to an initiatory experience that will help us understand our place in the world and it becomes very frustrating to not see that reflected in other places now.

DN: Yeah, I think you said it perfectly. I think that the only thing that I would add is for me personally is that I think that this case, specifically, this case and what’s great to me about it is ironically it taught me that I know a lot less about this. I have less answers for my questions now, but I think if anything, I feel a sense of excitement because it means that I now have new avenues that I need to learn. I think again we were talking about earlier; I think that it’s very easy for spaces to become very stagnant. Like when Karl and Connor do something they create this very innovative technique that changes things. People are now able to investigate the paranormal in a different way with a different aspect of their consciousness.

GN: Not even investigate it but engage it.

DN: Engage it! Exactly!

GN: Which I think is probably the healthier way to approach these things.

DN: I think for me, I’ve walked away from this case having learned that I have a lot more to learn. And I actually really love that because it means that I’m going to have the opportunity to expand my way of thinking into many new categories and I think that’s something that is often overlooked when it comes to the state of paranormal investigation. It gets very easy for people to get stuck using the same tools, thinking about things the same way, listening to the same people and if anything I think that we’re at this sort of really interesting moment here where there are new avenues for observing this phenomenon and I am fascinated.

GN: If you’re brave enough and curious enough to approach things that way.

DN: Exactly, that is the initiation it feels like. If you feel that curiosity and feel drawn to that then you pass that initiation. I think that is a fascinating thing and more than anything is what I walked away from this investigation carrying.

You can watch Hellier and find out what weird things the Newkirks and their team are working on at https://www.planetweird.tv/. And don’t miss The Unbinding, available September 8.

Until the next DEAD Time, I hope you’ll leave a light on for me…