“Paranormal Investigator:” behind the scenes of a TV shoot.

The adventure began on Thanksgiving Day.

Kicking back with my wife, father-in-law, a houseful of rescued cats, my stinky-but-oh-so-adorable dog Greta, and a half-devoured turkey, the message that landed in my Inbox presented me with both an opportunity and one heck of a problem.

It was the TV production company that I had been casually talking to about the possibility of appearing in their newest show.  They really liked the four cases that I had presented to them, an associate producer told me, and could I possibly be on a plane the following weekend…to Canada?

Sure, was my answer. Which presented me with an administrative nightmare, because I had rather stupidly allowed my passport to expire back in August.

The struggle to get a passport renewed in under a week was a daunting one. Renewing a passport the ordinary, non-hurried way is no cakewalk; filling out the forms in triplicate, getting the photos taken in precisely the right way, to the government’s exacting standards, can be a proper pain in the arse. Getting it done in under a week…what were the chances?

My wife likes to call the answer to such problems a stupidity tax. “Stupidity should be painful,” she has told me on more than one occasion. And so it turned out to be. I dropped several hundred dollars on getting the process expedited with a company named rushmypassport.com. I was nervous about them actually getting the job done in time for me to fly the following Friday, but after a phone conversation with one of their case managers, I felt convinced enough to pull the trigger with them. I’m glad that I did. They delivered on time, getting the passport back into my hands (with the ink practically still wet) the day before I flew. Although my advice to anybody who’ll listen is never be dumb enough to let your passport expire, if you find yourself in that particular situation, I would highly recommend these guys to get the job done.

I spent Thursday night working on the fire engine, and left for Denver International Airport at zero-dark-hundred the following morning. Everything was fine until I got to Chicago to make my connection. The plan was that I would arrive in Toronto just after noon, be picked up by a production assistant who would shuttle me to the location, and then we’d start shooting.

Yeah, about that…

It seems that the good people at United Airlines had different ideas. They were terribly sorry, of course, but somehow they had…mislaid the crew for my connecting flight to Toronto. Oh, not to worry, they said: a new crew was on the way.

From Omaha, Nebraska.

Sit and wait. It shouldn’t be more than a couple of hours. Three, tops. Well, maybe four.

Text after text after text pinged into my phone from the United servers, each one revising the departure and arrival time backward and forward. I stayed in contact with the production company via email, who took the fact that we were essentially wasting an afternoon’s filming time with remarkable calmness. If only the scheduling office at United Airlines was as professional as these guys, there would have been no problem in the first place. Instead, United continue to issue up BS flight updates, to the point that even their own gate attendant was getting annoyed.

It was getting dark when I finally landed into Toronto. One thing that surprised me – and maybe shouldn’t, given events of late – was that everybody in the Canadian Immigration services was wearing a Kevlar vest. And I do mean everyone, from the officers at the front to those typing away behind the scenes. What a sad commentary on the current state of affairs. I was chosen for the special “be interviewed by a customs officer of your very own” experience, which tacked on another half hour. This turned out to be because, when asked why I was visiting Canada, I answered “To film a TV show.” This apparently qualifies me as an actor, and means that I needed to have a work permit…which of course, I didn’t have.

After a lengthy chat, we finally got it sorted out. The customs officer was very nice and friendly. When assured that I would be interviewed rather than actually acting, he cut me some slack and allowed me through.

Canada, here I come!

It took the better part of an hour to drive to our filming location, an old abandoned school in the middle of a quiet neighborhood. In the relative warmth of the early morning in Denver, I had debated with myself the merits of taking a heavy jacket or not. Now I was glad that I had come down on the side of bringing one. I’m not saying that it was cold, but we passed a couple of penguins that were crying their eyes out. The school was as dark and foreboding as any similar building would have been at night. A huge hose snaked into the building, which was feeding air to the portable heating units that the film crew was using to try and take the icy chill out of the air.

I met the director, who was polite enough not to mention my disheveled state, and we went over the contents of my suitcase (which would serve as the wardrobe department). The instructions from the associate producer had been very specific.

Please bring at least 6-7 business casual outfit options. For shirts, please avoid the following: 

• solid black
• solid white
• solid red (or any really bright colors)
• patterns or thin stripes
• logos or designs

That rules out about ninety percent of my wardrobe. The director settled upon tan pants and a somewhat matching brown sweater with a blue T-shirt underneath. There was a little setting-up still to be done, so I took the opportunity to wander the hallways and some of the vacant classrooms up on the second floor, where we’d be filming. An intensely bright light was shining through the glass doors into the corridor where the film crew had set up, providing an ethereal, supernaturally-themed backdrop to the interviews I would be doing. It’s amazing how much more atmospheric those deserted, echoing hallways were once the lights were expertly adjusted by the lighting guy.

 

 

 

The film crew had arranged their camera, mikes, and other production equipment with great care, all of it aiming toward a solitary stool on which I would sit and be fired questions at by the editor. Our first segment involved what has become my favorite case of all, the haunting of the old community hospital in Tooele, Utah, just outside Salt Lake City. It is now a Halloween haunted house-type attraction known as Asylum 49. A large family (and they really are a family, if not one that is bound by blood) headed by Dusty Kingston and Kimm and Cami Andersen takes great pains to craft Utah’s most frightening haunted house experience each year. They are aided and abetted by an number of real ghosts, and I was fortunate enough to move into the Asylum for a week earlier this year in order to investigate its mysteries for myself. I had covered the haunting for my forthcoming book “The World’s Most Haunted Hospitals,” and was sufficiently impressed that I’m now working on a full-length account of the case for its own book, written in conjunction with Cami Andersen.

A boom mic was lowered down carefully until it rested about four inches above the top of my head, presumably just out of shot.

“Paranormal Investigator Doc, Story #26, Richard Estep. Take One.” The young chap who snapped the clapperboard (I’ve always wanted to see that!) looked like a young George Lucas, and he laughed when I told him so.

“How many billions do I get?” he quipped, resetting the B camera.

And we were rolling.

“What was the most terrifying experience you had there?” the director asked, sitting out of shot sandwiched between the A-camera lens and a tall bright set light that was half-blinding me on my right side. “Put yourself back in that place. How did you feel? How did you react?”

I could talk about the Asylum all night. The director was superb at her job, and made it look effortless for her to coax the pertinent facts out with her questioning, and craft what was for me a series of experiential anecdotes into a coherent narrative that will hopefully entertain TV viewers. The show is called “Paranormal Investigator” for a good reason. It will focus primarily on the experiences of we investigators, on some of our more memorable (and in some instances, disturbing) cases. They will shoot reenactments to accompany our interviews, and also interview others who are involved with the cases in order to get a secondary perspective.

 

 

T

I was falling asleep on the drive back to my hotel, which was co-located with Toronto’s main airport. After checking in, I settled down to enjoy a late-night cheeseburger and a pint of the local beer in the hotel bar, and then staggered off to bed to snatch some much-needed sleep.

Shooting began again the next morning at 9. The production assistant had very kindly arranged for a Starbucks breakfast (thank heavens for hot chocolate). We had changed out our sound and camera guys, but the director and director of photography remained the same. They were all awesome people and a real pleasure to work with, always willing to teach me some of the concepts of TV production as they went cheerfully but professionally about their duties (it’s here that I first learned about “room tone,” where they record ordinary background noise that can be dubbed over chair squeaks, errant farts, and other noises that shouldn’t appear in the finished product).

Once I was miked up, the director told me that I had a few minutes to kill while they finished the camera setup, so I elected to spend them exploring the school a little further. I was the last paranormal investigator to be interviewed for the series, and one of those who had visited previously had written on the chalkboard that there was a spirit of a young girl haunting the school. Perhaps she’ll say hello, I thought as I idly wandered the hallways, classrooms, and the basement.

There is a little child spirit here, one of them had written on the chalkboard in the classroom that we were using as a base location, what is your name please? 

I can only assume that she wasn’t the one who had drawn a penis directly underneath that question, or the slightly more disconcerting all will soon suffer. 

As I wandered the classrooms and corridors, I was sent back almost forty years to my own school days. This place wasn’t so different to the place where I had first learned how to read and write, all the way down to the sink with its notification: we wash our hands here! 

 

 

 

 

The ghostly young girl, if indeed she ever existed at all, did not put in an appearance. I sat down to record three long blocks of interviews that Saturday. Investigations covered were the Callahan House in Longmont (a case that I’d written about in In Search of the Paranormal); the Cripple Creek Jail; and my favorite haunted restaurant, Wholly Stromboli in Fort Lupton. I had a lot of fun taking this stroll down memory lane and talking about some of the intense paranormal activity which my team and I encountered in those locations, with the director expertly weaving each story into a coherent whole.

It was getting steadily colder inside the school – nothing paranormal, simply a function of the old and poorly-insulated building letting in the December weather. The portable heaters worked valiantly but in vain to try and offset the chill. Pretty soon, my eyes were actually watering with how cold it was. After a quick break for lunch, we wrapped up the fourth and final case late that afternoon, and as night descended, I was informed that we would be doing the hero shots.

“Hero shots?” I struck a Superman-like hands-on-hips pose. “What are those?”

“The polar opposite of that,” the director of photography said drily, without missing a beat.

“Hero shots are where we film insert scenes of you, walking the corridors,” explained the director. “Try to look authoritarian and commanding,” she advised. 

For the better part of the next hour, I was filmed entering the set from behind the brightly-lit double doors (“don’t linger there, Richard – it looks too hesitant”) and striding confidently down the long corridor, before taking my seat and turning my head to stare straight into the camera lens.

In my head, I was going for Daniel Craig as James Bond 007 from Casino Royale.

In actuality, I suspect we achieved Baloo from The Jungle Book. 

We did a few more shots of me sitting and turning my head slowly to face the camera, and then, just as my hands began to quite literally shake with the cold, was told we’d finish up with the light-bulb shot.

“What’s that?” I asked, intrigued.

“It’s where we stand you in front of a light-bulb that’s swinging from a rope,” the DP explained, fiddling with a tall pendulum in order to set up his shot. “We shoot it at a super high frame rate. When we play it back, the light plays across your face from left to right.”

Now I understood. I’d seen it done on another paranormal TV show (I think it was Ghost Adventures: Aftershocks) and though the light burned the crap out of my retinas as it swung across my face, I had to admit when they showed me the playback that it did indeed look pretty cool.

 

   

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was a wrap. I helped the crew load their equipment into the van and off we all went our separate ways. It had been a fascinating experience, and one that I won’t soon forget. The people involved were wonderful, proving that Canadians are every bit as warm and friendly as their reputation would have us believe. As for the finished product, I’m told that it will be airing sometime around late January or early February.

Keep an eye out for “Paranormal Investigator” and let me know what you think 🙂