Interviews
“Portals to Hell” Star Katrina Weidman Talks Paranormal Activity and Hunting Ghosts on Television [Interview]
The world of the paranormal on film and television has long been a boy’s club of hyperbolic acting and extreme personalities. As such, it’s been refreshing over the years to slowly watch women hold their own in this industry of the undead, in particular 14 year veteran Katrina Weidman.
After growing up surrounded by the unexplained in Bucks County, PA, Katrina went on to be one of the members of one of the first paranormal investigation series to purposefully have more of a scientific bent, A&E’s Paranormal State. Now, She partners with Jack Osbourne on the Travel Channel’s Portals to Hell, where the duo investigates alleged hauntings in historic locations ranging from the Shanghai Tunnels of Portland Oregon, to a terrifying rural mansion in Texas.
Katrina was kind enough to take some time to speak to us on her career, favorite ghost stories, and the struggles of being a woman in one of the most rapidly growing paranormal fields in popular media.
You grew up experiencing a series of hauntings. What’s an event that stands out to you the most?
There was one day that my mom left her keys on the counter. She had the wallet style with individual keys and she turned around and they were gone. She grilled me and my sister on it for ages asking where they were but we didn’t know because we didn’t take them. Then a while later they just reappeared. Back on the counter.
Now that she’s alone they happen with more frequency.
What did you study when you were at Penn State, and how did you become involved with the paranormal community there?
So I double majored. My first major is technically integrative arts. Um, you basically make up your own major. And then my second major is in theater with an emphasis on performance and my minor is music technology. And then I got involved in the club. I transferred to Penn state and at the time these shows started coming out and I’d always had this really deep passion for it. And my aunt was like, “Oh, you should see if they have a club up there!”
So, lo and behold they had a club and I went to the meeting and I actually dropped out after that first meeting, because there was a lot of weird stuff that happened when I first transferred. I got a horrible sinus infection for like three weeks. I remember I was walking on campus and I just fell over. It was like my first month there and I’m in front of all these other students, and I fell over because my balance was so off. And then I sprained my ankle really bad. It was almost a break and I was on crutches forever. And then my house got broken into.
Oh my God.
Yeah. It was just like boom, boom, boom. And it was like, all right, maybe I should just focus on, you know, having a normal life up here and doing my studies and then I’ll go back to the club. And so I went back to the club when everything had settled down and they had a training course and it had an over 50% dropout rate. I was one of three people that graduated from that course. And at the same time they had just secured [Paranormal State] as a TV show with A&E and they were basically like anybody can “audition.” It wasn’t really an audition, it was more like can you stand in front of a camera and articulate your thoughts, you know? And so I went to that and then it just sort of happened. So it’s kind of snowballed from there.
Do you still talk to any of the people you helped during Paranormal State?
I keep in touch with some people from Paranormal State, strictly on a friendly basis. Some are doing very well, some have passed away, some still just want someone to talk to. I think some are worried about stopping contact because they’re afraid it’ll [the haunting] come back.
How did you get from that to Portals to Hell with Jack?
Yeah, so it’s funny, Jack and I knew of each other. I mean obviously you can’t be an American and not know who the Osbournes are. So I knew of Jack and he knew me actually because he used to watch Paranormal State. He was always sent to the supernatural. So when this project came about he reached out to me and we met up in person and had breakfast together and we talked for a really long time. Our views on the supernatural were very similar; what it is, what it isn’t, and what we wanted to see evolve in the field and wanted to do with this project. It kind of just made sense to work together.
What is it like working with only one other person directly versus the whole team you were with on Paranormal State?
It’s a toss up because they’re very different. With more people you have more help for things like interviews and research, but there’s also a lot of energies and personalities at play and watching for stepping on people’s toes (sometimes literally) and things that can affect shooting and working. Working with one other person smooths that out since it’s just you and someone else, but it also does take longer sometimes to do things.
What kind of spots do you like investigating the most? Houses, ruins, historical places?
I like working in spots with people so houses and such. Like the finale episode of season one was an actual haunted house that they also run as a haunted house during the Halloween season and it was great interacting with them.
Paranormal studies and media have long been such a boy’s club. At times it feels like I grew up watching women on these shows play this part of the scared, fragile, small woman. Have you ever felt like you were being told to play a role or change yourself in some way in this industry?
Oh definitely. So I have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome which is a hormonal disorder, and it does affect your body weight, and I know that in the background sometimes on sets my appearance and weight were being discussed as a problem. Not ever to my face, but in whispers behind the scenes. Meanwhile my male colleagues who aren’t exactly models, just regular people, never had that problem. They always just got to be themselves and act like themselves.
There have also been plenty of people who wanted me to just be the damsel in distress, or play a character, or run out of the room screaming and that’s just not me. Sometimes I’ve done that when I was genuinely scared because it’s a natural reaction, but I was always very clear I was never going to play that character. I will only be myself.
Is there a haunted place, either real or imaginary that you would want to investigate and why?
Imaginary, Ooh, man. Well, if we’re doing imaginary, I would have to pick Hill House. There’s activity and ghosts and things everywhere. I mean you have to.
As far as real places, some of the problems when you’re trying to book a location are that some places just don’t want your show to be there. They don’t want the association, or they don’t want their customers to get freaked out. So there’s a lot of places I would love to go but they’re just not interested. Jack Osbourne can make dreams come true apparently since for a very long time, my dream was to go to the LaLaurie Mansion. I was trying to get in there for like 10 years. Every single time I’d get the runaround. But Jack knows the owner and so when he asked they were like, sure come on in! So that was definitely a real bucket list item that was happily checked off my list.
I know you said that sometimes the filming schedule blends together a bit, but is there an episode of the new season that’s coming out that you’re either the most proud of, the most excited for other people to see, or that you had the best experience doing?
Hmm. Well, I think people should see all of them, but yeah, actually I think it’s funny… it’s hard to pick just one. I think they’re all so unique in their own way. Like, some of them are really special in their history like Fort William Henry in New York, some of them are really special in their story, like Old Paulding Jail, and some of them are really special because they have really weird stuff going on like the Haunted Hill House in Texas. So I think all of them offer something unique and different from each other, so it’s kinda hard to pick one. It’s like picking your favorite child, you know?
What is your favorite ghost story?
I wonder if my sister told it to me. I don’t know the origin, but the story was that this woman would dream often of this location, it was something like a grandiose state house or castle, and she would walk through it all the time. Then she and her husband took a vacation somewhere overseas and when she was walking through the hall of where they were staying, one of the staff members freaked out when they saw her because they recognized her as their resident ghost. And so as the story goes, she was basically astral projecting in her sleep, but they believed they had a ghost and that it was her. I have no idea if that story is true. I tried to look it up before and I thought I found it like 15 years ago. But you know, now thinking about it, I wonder if it was just people retelling the same thing. I don’t know if it has any basis or not, but it is a dang good ghost story.
Freddy or Jason?
Haha! Well, honestly I’m going to have to pick Freddy. I feel like I know Freddy, you know? Jason doesn’t really ever talk at all so you don’t really know much about him. Freddy talks, you know what he thinks. So yeah, Freddy.
“Portals to Hell” airs Friday nights on the Travel Channel.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
You must be logged in to post a comment.