Why Portals? And Why All the Screaming? [VIDEO]

Ever since the premiere of Destination America's Ghost Stalkers (Thursday nights at 10 pm EST), of which I serve as the writer and researcher, there have been many questions from viewers regarding the show's main theory that ghosts can utilize portals to enter from another dimension to our own. I'll try to address as much of those concerns as I can here, but any other questions can always be directed to me via email tim@spookysouthcoast.com or on Twitter.

While the paranormal has been part of television programming for decades, ghost hunting reality shows have been around about a decade now. Of course, Ghost Hunters started it all, but there have been numerous other programs that have pursued the paranormal, each with their own twist. But no matter how many ghost shows had come along in recent years, they all stuck to the same basic premise--trying to prove or disprove if there was legitimate paranormal phenomena taking place at a location.

It was time for someone to take that conversation to another level, and take paranormal investigating a step further.

That's the vision that Nick Groff, executive producer and one of the stars of Ghost Adventures, had in mind when he created Ghost Stalkers. The idea was to go to places that we already knew were haunted--previous reports would be enough to confirm that some type of phenomena was occurring--and start figuring out not if but why and how. As pointed out by John Tenney, one of the shows investigators, 50 billion people have lived and died on the earth. That should account for a high number of ghosts walking around--but where do they all go? That led to speculation that perhaps, in some severely haunted locations, ghosts weren't necessarily trapped but could move back and forth from wherever they go back to where we are through some type of portal or vortex. If those portals do indeed exist, and the dead can utilize them, perhaps the living never notice them because we aren't on the same wavelength, both literally and figuratively, as a spirit. John died of a heart attack when he was 17, albeit briefly, and was brought back by medical science. His fellow investigator Chad Lindberg was literally on death's door from Reye's Syndrome as a child, but somehow bounced back. These two could have transitioned to that wavelength, and might be our best chance at human perception of those portals.

If portals were the theory, there was only one man who could be brought in to come up with the technology to help discover and record them--David Rountree. David is an engineer who has been working for decades on his "wormhole detector," also known as an EMF quadralator, that can detect an emerging wormhole or portal. Dave explains in this video (as he does with all the tech following each episode):

If wormholes can be theorized to exist in space--and the new film Interstellar talks about just that, which Space.com does a great job of explaining--why can't they exist on Earth? If there is a singularity that forms in our dimension and one that forms in that of the spirits or other entities, can't there be an Einstein-Rosen Bridge connecting the two points? And if possible, couldn't such spirits traverse the bridge and come back into our world (and likewise, we into theirs)? Quantum mechanics are teaching us that the universe is actually a multiverse, comprised of many different universes constantly bumping against one another. So let's take a piece of plain white paper and think of that as encompassing all that is. Put a magnet on either side (on the attracting sides, not the repelling), and then rub them across the paper in different patterns. Eventually, they'll come close enough in contact to attract, creating that bond between the two. That bond is essentially the wormhole connecting two singularities (and Dave can correct me if my science is bad here. I'm just the writer, after all).

So if we need to figure out where the billions of ghosts have gone, portals make as good a theory as any. It could also be that their energy only stays in its humanesque form for a certain period of time before that energy (which, remember from The First Law of Thermodynamics, can't be created or destroyed--only changed) dissipates out into the ether to bond elsewhere, but even that would require thousands of not millions of ghosts to be circling around you as you read this. The portal theory will probably make it easier for you to go to sleep tonight (or use the bathroom, for that matter).

Any further explanation of portals might be out of my wheelhouse, but one thing I can address is the other concern many have voiced about the show, and that's the investigative differences between Chad and John and some of the other ghost show investigators. Some have criticized Chad in particular for the fear he displays going into the dark, desolate and abandoned locations that have a creep factor of about a thousand. Yes, he's afraid. Yes, he screams a lot. And yes, it's OK.

This show isn't Ghost Hunters--Chad and John are not going to these locations to help individuals find out if they have a paranormal problem or not. There's no need to conduct themselves in a "professional" manner, because they're not claiming a profession here. They're not offering a service. It's not Ghost Adventures, where the investigators are turning the tables by challenging the spirits and charging up the emotional atmosphere through testosterone. It's not Ghost Asylum, where the end result is attempting to capture a ghost and contain it. Chad and John are facing up to their own fears of the Other Side, based on their near-death experiences, and that fear is naturally going to manifest itself when they feel they're coming in contact with something that, in their eyes, proves the existence of life after death.

All the ghost shows, with their unique takes, add to the overall learning process about paranormal phenomena. There's no proven theories just yet, so there's no proven method. I've used the analogy before that there are 100 different cooking shows on television, each with their own hosts and recipes and techniques. It leads to a culinary journey toward reaching a different taste, consistency, appearance, what have you--but in the end, it's all still food. It doesn't make one chef right or wrong, one style correct or incorrect. Nobody is doing it better than someone else, they're all just doing it differently.

So in a way, Ghost Stalkers works two-fold: in one regard, you have the portal theory, and the equipment and experimentation to test that hypothesis. If portals can be documented, and spirits can walk freely through them, then there may be scientific proof at some point of the existence of these beings. But in the other regard, none of that matters, because the show at its core is also about the emotional and spiritual journey of these two men, and what happens when they're confronted with their greatest fear of all.

Jason Hawes and Zak Bagans will likely tell you that fear can work against you in an investigation, because it can cloud your perception of what is happening around you. That can be very true, and overcoming that fear has worked for them and led them to come up with some incredible work over the years. But John Tenney and Chad Lindberg can also tell you that if you can harness it, the fear can help feed into the phenomena, giving it energy to manifest. It can also sharpen your senses, putting you in that flight-or-fight mode that is ingrained in all of us and makes us hypersensitive to our surroundings. That fear would only be pointless and annoying if the two ran screaming from every location. But because they don't, because they press on through it and become stronger for it, it's about their own personal growth as much as finding ghosts and portals.

We've been conditioned by a decade's worth of ghost shows to expect them to be a certain way. From the beginning, Ghost Stalkers has been about stripping away those conventions and expectations and giving a gritty, honest, real experience for the viewer. Many have suggested that the show looks and feels like a horror movie, yet even scarier because it is real and true. Well of course--being alone for eight hours in a reportedly haunted location should be scary. That's one of the reasons why the other ghost shows haven't done it--because they can't or won't show that fear. Ghost Stalkers will. Do the approaches and theories work for everyone? No. And they shouldn't. Until we know what we're dealing with, we don't know exactly how or why. But at least Ghost Stalkers is striving toward that.

Oh yeah, and Chad and John just so happened to capture this amazing footage at an abandoned hospital:

Consider that clip to be my paranormal mic drop...

Tim Weisberg is the host of Spooky Southcoast, airing on AM 1420 WBSM Saturday nights at 10 pm EST.