Interviews
‘Haunted Discoveries’ Paranormal Investigators Talk Historical Hauntings in Kentucky [Interview]
Kentucky is rich in folklore and stories of hauntings all across the state. On the evening of August 21, 1955, five adults and seven children went to the Hopkinsville, Kentucky, police station and told a strange story that is now famously known as the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter. The group claimed they witnessed a flying saucer land near the farmhouse where they were staying, and that several “little men,” later referred to as goblins, surrounded the house, looking in the windows at the frightened witnesses, until they were scared off by one of the men in the house with a shotgun.
The former tuberculosis hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, known as Wavery Hills Sanatorium, is considered one of the most haunted locations in the country.
Brandon Alvis, who starred in the reboot of the popular paranormal series Ghost Hunters, has always been fascinated by history. In 2006, Alvis founded the American Paranormal Research Association, or APRA, and was searching for a location for APRA to call home. He asked his former Ghost Hunters co-star, Mustafa Gatollari, to help him find a location, and the two traveled to Kentucky, which some consider America’s most haunted state. After the two of them interviewed various business owners and residents about their paranormal experiences and possible historical connections, what started as a hunt for a home for APRA turned into a series called Haunted Discoveries, which airs on streaming services HauntTV and Xumo Play.
The show is unique in that it explores stories of paranormal activity from the perspective of historical hauntings in Kentucky, and there is now a spinoff series called Family Spirits that looks at familial hauntings. The Haunted Discoveries’ team consists of lead investigators Brandon Alvis and Mustafa Gatollari, historical researcher Craig Owens, field investigator Kevin Otte, and resident scientist Dr. Harry Kloor. Alvis eventually purchased the Dr. JJ Polk House in Perryville, Kentucky, which has a long history of hauntings, as the location for APRA.
‘Haunted Discoveries’ team
Recently, Bloody Disgusting had a compelling conversation with the Haunted Discoveries Team members Brandon Alvis, Mustafa Gatollari, and Kevin Otte about APRA and what they’ve discovered researching historical hauntings in Kentucky.
Bloody Disgusting: Brandon, you and Mustafa were part of the team on the reboot of Ghost Hunters. Was that your first experience as a paranormal investigator, and what was that like?
Mustafa Gatollari: Brandon and I met on Ghost Hunters, and it was amazing. It set us on a journey together.
Brandon Alvis: No, it wasn’t my first experience as a paranormal investigator. I actually founded the American Paranormal Research Association in 2006, and I had been actively investigating the paranormal from a scientific point of view since 2006. APRA was also featured on The Unexplained Files on Science Channel in 2013, and then I got onto Ghost Hunters in 2019. That’s where I met Mustafa.
BD: Brandon, can you tell me a little bit more about the American Paranormal Research Association and its purpose?
BA: I founded APRA in 2006 to solely investigate historical locations throughout the country. One of our biggest aspects of APRA is to reach out to third parties, professionals from various technical industries, medical doctors, scientists, people that can help us further understand what is natural versus something that is supernatural. The mission was to try and collect data, have that data analyzed by professionals from other industries, and hopefully provide answers to what is in the natural world and what is something we can’t quite understand.
BD: I understand that you and Mustafa Gatollari were looking for a location for the American Paranormal Research Association, and you went to Kentucky to interview people about various haunted locations and the history behind them. Your docuseries Haunted Discoveries documents those cases. Why did you choose Kentucky?
BA: After Mustafa and I did Ghost Hunters, we wrote our book Elements of a Haunting: Connecting History with Science to Uncover the Greatest Ghost Stories Ever Told. I’ve known Kevin for about fifteen years. He reached out, and he works for a production company based out of Kentucky, and they were looking to do a paranormal project. It was just the right place at the right time. So, Kevin reached out to us and started to develop this idea about how APRA has been trying to find a location, a facility, to have as a full-time research center. A place where people can come out and verify for themselves, to monitor 365 days a year. That’s when Kevin reached out, and that’s when the idea for Haunted Discoveries was born.
MG: I investigated the paranormal and had experiences from a young age. A lot of the people that I was working with were very pseudoscience-heavy; we would come across weird stuff. Once I saw Brandon’s methodology and the mission of the American Paranormal Research Association, I was very, very fortunate to join the group. It was like an “Aha” moment for me. I was like, “Oh, this is what it could be. This is what we could do,” and we ran with it. Brandon is heavily invested in the research center, the Polk House. When we started the series, we kind of just got into a world that we had no idea the type of anomalies we were going to come across over there, and just how deep it went. Kentucky has just been a bevy of paranormal evidence that we’ve come across, and it just seems that the more we dig, the more we find.
Kevin Otte
BD: What is your favorite haunted location you’ve investigated? Have you worked on a case that really scared you, and can you share that experience?
BA: I would take it a step further than just a location, I would say an entire town. I would have to say where the research facility is for APRA, which is the Dr. JJ Polk House in Perryville, Kentucky. This is a place that is steeped in history. Dr. JJ Polk himself wrote an autobiography, and he talked about how the entire town of Perryville, Kentucky, was baptized in blood. So, you have the first foundation of the westward expansion into the United States in Perryville at Harbison Station; you have the Battle of Perryville, which took place in October of 1862, where almost 9,000 men died in a six-hour span; and then you have the temperance wars that took place here as well. You know how sometimes you go into a place, and it has a haunted house feeling or a haunted house vibe? That’s exactly what the entire town of Perryville feels like. You could just be walking along the river or walking down a main street, and it feels like you’re inside a haunted house.
I haven’t really been afraid, per se, but I will say that there are times when you get thrown off; there is something unnatural that happens that you can’t explain, so your brain kind of sends you on a wild goose chase in a way. I personally haven’t been terrified of a place, but I’ve definitely been curious, that’s for sure.
Kevin Otte: Location-wise, for me, would be one of several locations we’ve done down around Harlan County, Kentucky, down in the Appalachian mountains, down in coal country. We did everything from an old, abandoned coal mine to the courthouse there, which is still in operation, and a private property that used to be a former coal camp. We definitely documented some very interesting things there that are kind of beyond my explanation at the moment. If you’re outside by yourself at night, you don’t feel alone.
MG: I would have to agree with Brandon. When we first visited Perryville and went to the Karrick-Parks House, we were faced with very, very intriguing, inexplicable phenomena. Every time we went to different places in Perryville and delved into that history, and became more familiarized with it, it really gave us a bevy of phenomena that we couldn’t explain, and we were scratching our heads trying to figure out when we were analyzing it. It kind of reshaped our understanding of paranormal phenomena. The more we go back there and the more we familiarize ourselves with the people who live there, and Brandon has personal ties to the area, a familial connection, and the more we work there, it almost seems like the more you put in, the more you get back, if that makes sense. The last series of cases for me was pretty emotional going in there because we’ve been working so hard on this, we’ve been dedicating so much of our lives to this, you sense this kind of unity or something; some kind of communal feeling, that of something larger than yourself when you’re there. I can’t put my finger on it, but I really can’t wait to get back to Perryville, and that’s the feeling every time.
BA: To build on that, we just wrapped up our fifth season of Haunted Discoveries, we just shot and we’re in post on that now. We went back to the Karrick-Parks House, as well as the Dr. JJ Polk House, which I now own, and they are right next to each other. We actually brought in a geophysicist with us, and she experienced something that completely shattered her belief in science, and she was physically affected, which is really interesting. We have a resident scientist on the team, Dr. Harry Kloor. He’s the first person in history to receive two PhDs simultaneously; he’s someone who has worked with APRA for well over a decade; and someone who is our go-to when it comes to scientific methods and scientific protocol. But to bring in another person who has such credentials, to come in and experience what she did, just took our entire exploration, not only of the Kentucky anomaly, but of Perryville, to a completely different level.
KO: Perryville is one of the places where I believe that we have done the most in-depth research by bringing in professionals from different areas. Like Brandon said, we had a geophysicist, we have Dr. Harry Kloor, and we brought in a geologist from Western Kentucky University. He came in and did some work with us there. So, Perryville is a location where we actually dug in, have done the research, and collected a lot of data.
BA: You could dedicate your entire career to Perryville and still not get to the bottom of it, honestly.
Brandon Alves
BD: I’ve watched Haunted Discoveries, as well as Family Spirits, and your team genuinely seems to want to help people, not just prove whether or not a location is actually haunted. What is the most rewarding part of your job?
BA: The most rewarding thing is to walk away from a case seeing someone who has had their view changed. I mean that from a lifestyle point of view. With Family Spirits, for instance, you have people who have dealt with, sometimes, generational trauma or grief that they have never really faced or dealt with. Then when they come in and we go through the genealogical side of their family history and the experiences they had, they walk away with almost a fresh slate in a sense where they kind of have to go through that grieving process throughout the case, and at the end of it, it’s just amazing to see how people come out the other side with a more positive mindset. That’s been incredible.
MG: Yeah, especially with the latest seasons three and four of Family Spirits. Filming that was extremely rewarding from a research perspective to have them share their stories and then to see phenomena occur as they’re sharing them, or while we’re conducting an ancillary investigation, is very amazing. But also, during Haunted Discoveries, these reports do lead to tangible, real-world finds. At Portal 31, Brandon and Kevin remember that there were murmurs of a mass grave that was hidden in a forest somewhere out in the woods. We were able to get a ground-penetrating radar operator out there, and it was pretty much confirmed. To see the emotions kind of overcome people. We were like, “Oh my God, we found these mass graves of these people, who not only built this town, but were instrumental to the World War II war effort to provide raw materials.” That was very, very rewarding.
BA: Now that we found this mass grave, they’re going to be putting up a historical marker because all the people who knew that grave site was there have all died out in that generation. Now that we have scientifically proven where it is, they’re actually going to put up a historical marker there, so we changed the historical look of that town. So, now people can go and visit their loved ones who they didn’t know where they were buried. It was really a truly incredible experience, not only for us, but for the town.
KO: We have an episode coming up in season five, which is kind of similar, where we kind of uncovered an unknown history for a whole town. I can’t get into much about that yet, but season five is definitely one to keep an eye out for because there are some really groundbreaking discoveries in that episode.
BA: Also, we shot twenty more episodes of Family Spirits that will be coming out either later this year or next year, and we changed the show a little bit by not only having people come in to tell their stories of familial hauntings, but we added an investigative element around it as well. We’re actually at Waverly Hills Sanatorium for 28 days, and we brought in people to Waverly Hills, and they came in and talked about their familial stories, and then we tested the possibility of these people changing the environment within Waverly Hills. So, we did a whole long-form case study, probably the longest case that’s been done at Waverly Hills, by bringing in these subjects to tell their familial ghost stories and to see how that actually changes the environment. That will be in season three and season four of Family Spirits.
For more information on Haunted Discoveries, please visit their website https://www.haunteddiscoveries.com/.
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.
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