With Halloween right around the corner, many of us are looking for spooky stories to get us in the spirit of the season, but for Ghost Nation stars Steve Gonsalves and Dave Tango, their entire year is tied up in things that might frighten others, as they travel the country with co-star Jason Hawes to uncover things that go bump in the night. New episodes of the Travel Channel series launched earlier this month, with Ghost Nation‘s upcoming Halloween event, Ghost Nation: Reunion in Hell, seeing the stars reunite with former Ghost Hunters collaborators Amy Bruni and Adam Berry for an enlightening investigation. ComicBook.com caught up with the pair for a conversation about the series, which you can watch in full above. Ghost Nation: Reunion in Hell airs Saturday, October 31st at 8 p.m. ET on the Travel Channel.
The investigations the pair embark upon might frighten viewers, but encountering the supernatural is cause for excitement for the stars. Despite their experience, they still have intense reactions to unexpected events.
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“Unsettled, I’ll use that word. It was in Halifax, Virginia,” Tango shared when discussing the last time he had an intense emotional encounter. “This was Ghost Nation from Season One, and during research, we were able to find a list of names of people who passed on the property. We systematically went through each name until we got to a name, I believe, ‘Emma,’ and Steve was with me. We were in one of the bedrooms of this house. And I asked, ‘Emma, are you here?’ And we both, within five seconds, hear a female voice. Couldn’t make out what it said. That already was like, ‘Wow, my God. That just doesn’t happen, a disembodied voice like that responding to us.’ And then, five seconds after that, the room got cold.”
He continued, “Everybody’s heard of cold spots before. I’d heard of them. I’ve never actually experienced a legitimate cold spot before that, that case in Ghost Nation Season One. I’m going to tell you, I had no idea that there was a physical property to it. You just think it’s just the absence of heat, right? No, I put my hand in this invisible thing, this ball, and it felt very gelatinous. It’s a weird word, but, and it’s hard to explain, it felt like something swarming around my hands, and Steve always says, he puts it in a way which is also very, very similar. He put his hand in it, and it feels almost like putting it in a static TV. It’s hard to explain it, and my body and my brain didn’t know how to process it. That’s when you know you’re experiencing a legitimate experience, you’re having something happen to you that the brain cannot comprehend. So I started to tear up. I didn’t know how to react. It’s just all these different arrays of emotions happening. So yeah, I started to cry, and Steve put his hand in there. He started to tear up. You never know what it’s really like until you do it yourself, and it really, to this day, it’s always going to stick with me forever.”
Gonsalves went on to note that, while there are things that happen that might be unexpected, experiencing these things with peers you trust prevents them from becoming as frightened as those unfamiliar with such events might feel.
“It’s pretty intense, but, scared? You’re right, we don’t get scared. We get startled, for sure,” the investigator explained. “There is scary phenomena, things that we should be afraid of a bit, I think, but being there for a certain purpose, and having people that you trust and can count on helps take away some of that fear, and allows us to be able to tackle what we need to do. There have been times we’ve had to sort of pep talk each other like, ‘All right. You’re ready to get up there. You ready to go in there?’ ‘Yeah, I think so.’ ‘All right, because this just happened and this just happened.’ You got to pull yourself together and come up with an attack plan, and there has been some darker stuff this season.”
He added, “There is a time where we had to get a Reverend involved, and I did see a tangible difference before his arrival and after, and there was a wedge in the family, in this couple that was created by the phenomena. And once he came and did his thing, the phenomena ended. The wedge in between the couple ended, and it was really nice to see. One of those times where you really sit back and realize, ‘Wow, I know we’re making a TV show here, but we are really helping people. We really have a mission here, and it is working, and it’s quite awesome.’ It makes us feel really, really good. There are times we just think about it and say, ‘I can’t believe this. Like, we are literally changing people’s lives for the better.’”
This isn’t the only difference between the realities of ghost hunting and what audiences might expect, as another trope often seen in horror stories, about activity being more prominent at specific times of night, is another phenomenon that isn’t entirely rooted in reality.
“I personally don’t put too much stock into it myself,” Tango admitted of this concept. “If it has intelligence, it’s not gonna be, like, ‘Oh, well it’s 3:15. Time to haunt everybody.’ Things happen all the time during the day, at night. There are those theories. People have theories. There’s gonna be theories, always, but I personally don’t think it’s anything. That specific time that, ‘Okay, this is the time to talk to the spirits.’ No.”
Rather than merely be a redundant trope, Gonsalves pointed out that this concept, specifically related to events happening around 3 a.m., are rooted in early beliefs of the otherworldly.
“Most investigators that I know, and most that you might be familiar with, they don’t really put too much stock into that as well,” Gonsalves confessed. “That’s stemmed from early spiritualism, the early witch movements, that sort of thing. Three being the denial of Trinity. 3 a.m. A lot of that comes from that. Ed and Lorraine Warren used to talk about that quite a bit. That 3 a.m., on the scientific side of it, you can think at night, the cloud levels, the moisture barrier is at a certain level. They do culminate at around 3 a.m. being the lowest to the Earth.”
He added, “So if you have your moisture barrier really close to the Earth’s crust, you’re trapping energy within that moisture barrier and the Earth’s crust in a much more concentrated fashion than it would be at other times of the day. That’s the only thing I can think of, in terms of an actual correlation there, but we don’t see any data or any case study that supports that there is a tremendous spike at 3 a.m. That sort of thing, it stems from early spiritualism and witchcraft.
Tune in to Ghost Nation: Reunion in Hell on Saturday, October 30th at 8 p.m. ET on the Travel Channel.
Will you be checking out the special? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!
