The BIO Channel returns to its famous faces-meets-spectral places format this June with series returns of and The Haunting of ... Celebrity Ghost Stories
The first-person narrative and reenactment show Celebrity Ghost Stories kicks off its fifth season June 1 at 9 p.m. ET and includes appearances by George Wendt (Cheers); Vegas performer, Wayne Newton; and Ace Frehley, former lead guitarist for the band KISS.
Wendt relives a terrifying night in a cottage haunted by Native Americans and bootleggers; Newton gets paid a visit by his buddy Elvis; and Frehley’s estate is inhabited by a vengeful spirit who puts the female residents in peril.
Ghost makes Flack's hair stand on end? Courtesy Sugarscape
X marks the spectral spot for Caroline Flack, the host of the British show, The Xtra Factor. According to The List, skeptic says her butt was goosed by a ghost recently at the show's judge residence.
Flack says she felt something brush past her that also touched her butt. She then reported seeing something in the mirror that resembled an arm.
Supposedly, say The Sun, the same house also has cold, creepy spots and moans are frequently heard throughout.
Based on a new Syfy show, college students across the country are receiving a grade "G" for ghosts.
The series School Spirits continues the network’s love affair with the paranormal, but instead of being an investigation show in the vein of Ghost Hunters, the hourlong docu-series tells ghost stories from colleges and universities across the country through interviews and reenactments.
Produced by Seth Jarrett and Julie Insogna Jarrett of Jarrett Creative Group – the same production company behind Celebrity Ghost Stories, which heavily influences the look and tone here – and Mark Burnett (The Voice, Survivor), the six-episode School Spirits premieres tonight, June 20, at 10 p.m. after John Zaffis' Haunted Collector.
In the debut episode, the show follows a group of sorority sisters at the University of Michigan. When the women move into a new house off-campus, they almost-immediately begin experiencing unexplained phenomena. Intense fights suddenly break out between them, odd illnesses plague them and they encounter more than one force stalking their halls.
Jarrett and Insogna Jarrett joined Paranormal Pop Culture and a group of other journalists via phone to answer a few questions about School Spirits …(after the jump)
If you're not watching Hulk Hogan's Micro Championship Wrestling on truTV (Weds at 10 p.m. ET), you're missing out on seeing the wrestling icon provide advice and guidance to "little wrestlers" on the new reality show.
Of course, you're also missing out on seeing Hogan do his Hulkster thing. Started by former wrestler Johnny Greene, the Micro Championship Wrestling (MCW) league is meant to be a serious pursuit but member infighting and conflict has been getting in the way. That's where Hogan comes in; he intends to rebuild the league from scratch by offering training and taking the wrestlers on a six-state tour under his banner.
Although the show's tagline promises "half the size, twice the violence" (a claim that doesn't disappoint), Hogan says the show is not an exploitative "jackass"-style program. Instead of taking cheap shots at the "little wrestlers," Micro Championship Wrestling focuses on the drama of real people with actual problems and a dream to wrestle professionally.
In the audio interview (embedded below) with Aaron Sagers, Hogan talks about how the show goes beyond circus sideshow antics, and opens up about how the wrestlers not only inspired him, but brought up memories of his own successes in failures. Finally, Hogan discusses his own paranormal beliefs and recounts a touching tale that involved his dead father.
Celebrity Ghost Stories isn't just a cheesy fun show on the Bio channel, it's also an entire subgenre of paranormal pop culture. We love the idea of celebrity so much that you don't even need to, y'know, do anything to be considered one.
So of course it makes sense we wouldn't want to just know what they say about life, but also about the afterlife. As a quick and easy guide, we here at ParanormalPopCulture.com are compiling a list of famous faces have had to put up with paranormal paparazzi.
By no means is this extensive (yet). We've tried to limit celebrities stories to those that can be tracked down to their source to eliminate the potential for hearsay or misquoting. Also, when possible, we've included entire direct quotes from the celebrities to counteract urban legends and inaccuracies.
We will be adding more to the mix soon. And if you know of super (and not-so-super) stars with supernatural experiences who aren't included here, please contact us.
Anna Nicole Smith
In 2004, in response to a question about the kinkiest sex she'd ever had, Smith told FHM: "Well…a ghost would crawl up my leg and have sex with me at an apartment a long time ago in Texas. I used to think it was my boyfriend, and one day I woke up and it wasn’t. It was, like, a spirit and it — woo! [miming a ghost flying from under her sheets] — went up! I was freaked out about it, but then I was like, 'Well, you know what? He’s never hurt me and he just gave me some amazing sex so I have no problem' ... It was not a dream because it was happening every night. One night at almost daylight — and that was the time my boyfriend went to work — I had woken up ‘cause I felt it comin’ up my leg and I saw it. I told my boyfriend and he didn’t believe me. Of course — men."
The former Dawson's Creek star allegedly spoke to friends about seeing the ghost of her husband, Heath Ledger, shortly after the actor's accidental overdose. According to reports, she saw him twice. "The first time, she was woken at night after hearing furniture move. In another 'visitation', she said he apologised to her for not being there to help raise their two-year-old daughter, Matilda."
James Van Praagh, a psychic/medium who worked on Ghost Whisperer, added that he was also visited by Ledger's ghost. Van Praagh says Ledger was restless and told him, "I screwed up." The medium also claimed he was performing a reading for Williams about it.
Nicolas Cage
Before he lost it in foreclosure in 2009, the eccentric actor who played the spirit of vengeance in Ghost Rider, once owned the Lalaurie House in New Orleans - considered one of the most haunted buildings in America. Cage spoke about the mad doctor house in Sept. 2008 onThe Late Show With David Letterman, where he said, "Some people have beach-front property, I have ghost-front property."
Cage also spoke extensively about the house with Contactmusic.com where he revealed he won't sleep in the building.
(It's) in the Vieux Carre - which is called the French Quarter. It's a very notorious house, it's a very famous house - meaning it's allegedly the most severely haunted house in the United States of America... that's what they tell me. So at any given moment, I have five or six ghosts surrounding the house, all looking up at this haunted temple, and I'm in there ... We'll (my family) come over and have dinner there but nobody sleeps there. I will sleep there, I will at some point - but I'll be alone when it happens ... I try not to have a narrow mind about things ... (I've gotten) five or six requests from parapsychologists' groups to come into the house, and I won't let them in - because of respect. If there's something in there, I don't want them being exploited.
In an interview with Star magazine, Cage details another ghostly encounter at the home of his famous director uncle, Francis Ford Coppola, that prevents him from sleeping there.
I was living in the attic, and there were bats there between the walls - you could hear the scratching ... One night I was not quite asleep when the door in front of my bed opened and there was this pitch-black silhouette of a woman with big hair ... I thought it was my aunt coming to say goodnight. So I said, 'Goodnight,' and it didn't say anything. Then it moved towards me and my body froze up and I let out this bloodcurdling scream and threw my pillow at it ... Then it disappeared. Now, am I saying I saw a ghost - I still don't know. But I saw something that freaked me out.
The star of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past told TeenHollywood.com in 2003 that he has the ghost of an older woman that appears in his home when he's nude. The ghost's name? Madame Blue. Says McConaughey:
When I first moved in there I had a tent, and I put it up on the floor of the upstairs bedroom with my sleeping bag and my dog. That's when I first saw Madame Blue. The first night I'm hearing noises, I'm hearing bass sounds, wood moving and coyotes, but then I hear this sound like a dime dropping from 10 feet off the ground onto a glass table. I popped up out of bed and went, 'That's too much trouble, man, that's man made, and that was not the house.' So, I get up out of the tent with my dog Miss Hud and I'm running around buck naked and I've got a bat so I'm gonna go and investigate. I go downstairs and there's nothing there, but I have seen her since. She has no qualms with me. We get along just fine. She's a cool ghost. Maybe me being nude all the time is why we get along.
Keanu Reeves
While doing press for his 2005 exorcist super hero/supernatural detective flick Constantine (based on the Hellblazer comics), Reeves conducted an interview with John Miller of British newspaper Sunday Mail UK where the star details two of his paranormal encounters:
When we meet in Los Angeles for the launch of the movie, Keanu tells me he has seen ghosts on at least two occasions. As he notices I'm goggle-eyed, he asks where I'm from - and, when I say Scotland, he laughs and says: 'My God, man, that's full of ghosts! You gotta walk on the moors at a certain time.'
Maybe the rest of us are just not as sensitive as Keanu, who details two vivid examples. Once, he was lunching with a friend in Austin, Texas, looked round and saw a ghost appear behind him. He recalls: 'I said: 'Did you see that?' And she said: 'Yes.' 'But that was different from when I was five. I was sitting onmy bed, my sister was asleep and our nanny was there - and through the doorway came this white double-breasted suit. 'No body and no legs - just a suit. And then it disappeared.'
He doesn't regard the experiences as terribly special, saying: 'I've known many people who have seen ghosts and told ghost stories.'
British tabloid The Mirror reported in May 2010 that the pop star spent about $5,000 on paranormal investigative to rid her of a spirit at London's O2 arena where she stopped for her Monster's Ball tour.
Gaga told her people to get the equipment because she was afraid of "bad energy." Supposedly they then conducted a sweep of the backstage area after getting the gear from Dan Webb's "ghost-busting firm." He added that "Her aide said the gear had to be robust as they were taking it on the road - so they must be doing this everywhere Lady Gaga is performing."
Newsoxy then reported Gaga admitted to getting the gear after she says she was troubled by negative forces for weeks. Says writer Susan Harris, "Gaga originally thought she was experiencing a mental breakdown, or hallucinations, that usually come with schizophrenia. However, she is still convinced that unseen forces are haunting her."
The story was reported by the Telegraph in the UK, where Godot was playing in Aug. 2009. Apparently during the show, McKellen noticed Stewart was caught off-guard, and when they exited, he asked,"What happened, what threw you?"
"I just saw a ghost. On stage, during Act One," Stewart replied. He was apparently stunned about the event and told everyone about it.
The ghost is thought to be that of John Baldwin Buckstone, an actor-manager of the theatre in the mid-19th century and a friend of Charles Dickens. Nobody caught any images of the ghost.
Dave Grohl The lead Foo Fighter told The Sun and German publication Visions (the 1997 article from which is archived on the Foo site) he encountered something while using the Ouija board in his Seattle home with his ex-wife Jennifer, and Nate Mendel and Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs.
According to Grohl, "Jennifer asked if there were any spirits in the house. The glass on the Ouija board spelled out 'Y-E-S'. The glass was travelling without her pushing it. Jennifer then asked, 'What happened here?' The glass spelled out 'M-U-R-D-E-R-E-D'. I asked who was murdered and got the reply 'M-Y-B-A-B-Y'."
The Sun wrote the musician "discovered afterwards that according to legend, a native American baby was murdered there during the late 19th century by its mother."
As for how it affected him, Grohl told Visions, "There was a ghost in my house, and other musicians from Seattle were present when it happened. We played with the Ouija board, and some unbelievable things occurred. I'm not really interested in supernatural phenomena, but ever since then, I believe in their existence that little bit more."
However, Grohl laughed off claims from Robert Lang that his studio (near Grohl's house and where the band recorded their debut) is haunted by the same ghost and that the band Tad saw plates flying across the room. "Did Kerrang! come up with that?," he asked. "I never claimed other musicians' houses in Seattle were haunted."
Alyson Hannigan
The erstwhile Willow from Buffy The Vampire Slayer told World Entertainment News Network (and the San Francisco ChronicleSFGate blog) in Aug. 2003 that she lived in a haunted house with a ghostly gentleman.
I have a ghost in my house. I saw him a couple of months ago. I don't think he died there because there's a law in L.A. that when you buy a house, if somebody's died there they have to disclose that. And nobody did. So I don't know why he's there. But he's very friendly. My friend saw him first one night. She said, 'I don't mean to alarm you but I just saw a man follow us out of the house.' And I said, 'Well, at least he's gentlemanly, he let us go first' ...
Later that night I saw this silhouette of a man standing in the bathroom doorway. I was like, 'Sweetie, what are you doing?' I thought it was (husband) Alexis (Denisof). But then I looked and Alexis was asleep next to me ... I'd love to get his name. I'm thinking of putting a little chalk board where I think he lives to see if he will write his name down.
Mena Suvari
The actress best known for her performance in American Beauty is open about her belief that her childhood home in Rhode Island was haunted. In a 2000 interview with the now-defunct Mr. Showbiz site, Jane Wollman Rusoff spoke to Suvari about her experiences. (Interestingly, the interview is faithfully reproduced at a NSFW celeb-nudity site, CelebrityCastle. Yes we are dedicated to our research.)
Q: I hear that you believed in ghosts as a kid and had an imaginary friend. A: I still do. I believe that everything is energy and that we have paranormal activity because of it. There was a rumor that in our house in Rhode Island, a stone mansion built in the l870s, there was a murder: A slave was killed in a fox hunt. And, also, my brother Yuri actually saw things and told me. I believe him. He's 27, so he wouldn't lie. He'd wake up in the middle of the night and see white figures that looked like children playing in a treetop.
Q: Did your imaginary friend eventually go away? A: Yeah, because we moved. I never saw anything but always felt it. Once, when I was about 3, our parents were out and AJ, the oldest, was taking care of us. There was a blackout and he was walking us up the big staircase in pitch blackness and my brother Sulev said that all of a sudden his hand touched another hand that felt like a guy's — but it wasn't AJ's or Yuri's. So AJ grabbed us and ran all the way back down to the TV room.
Q: You must have liked the movie The Sixth Sense. A: I love all that kind of stuff. I'm really weird: I love horror movies, but I've always sworn that if something ever happened to me, like a poltergeist experience, you'd find me white and dead. I'd be so scared. I can watch movies like that, but I always think, "Oh God, if that was me, I'd be out of there!"
Renee Zellweger
The Bridget Jones actress called in a psychic to her new Hamptons home in July 2003 to deal with a poltergeist supposedly named Lillian that has been there for years, reports Sky News and MSN.
According to one of the New York home's previous owners, Lillian "loved to play tricks." The owner adds, "My first experience was sensing a presence ... and one night, when I was lying in bed, it felt like there was a large block of ice next to me."
While promoting her ghost horror film Gothika in 2004, Berry told iVillage she'd had paranormal experiences during her shoot on the Dorothy Dandridge biopic.
She said, "people who believe in ghosts are the ones who have had that experience. Our nature is to be very sceptical: unless we've seen it, we don't believe it. I did have a couple of experiences on Dorothy Dandridge. Her spirit or some spirit was around me all the time. I knew it, so did the crew and everybody around me. Nothing outlandish happened; it was just a feeling that we would all get. Strange things would happen that couldn't be explained other than by saying, 'OK, something supernatural has got to be happening here.'
Berry also told German magazine Bunte the dead return to visit the living. ''I absolutely believe in ghosts ... I'm convinced the souls of the dead can come back to take care of things that were unresolved when they died. Or to visit loved ones and comfort them." She added "I've never seen one, but I've felt the presence of a ghost near me. At least I'd like to believe that. I find it very comforting to think that we don't stop existing when we die.''
After beginning her career as paranormal pop culture's go-to adorable tyke in Altered States, E.T., Firestarter and Cat's Eye, I can't help but still have a soft spot for Drew Barrymore. Well, in case you missed it, she did a swell job with her hosting duties on Saturday Night Live this past weekend. Her take on Sharon Osbourne in this Celebrity Ghost Stories sketch was especially nice - although her (maybe?) boyfriend Justin Long stole the bit with his Matthew McConaughey spoof.
Meanwhile, if you've never seen Celebrity Ghost Stories on the Bio Channel (the channel-formerly-known-as Biography which has a Paranormal Zone on their site), I highly recommend it for the over-the-top cheeze and dramatic cutaways. The show is frequently entertaining, if even in an eye-rolling way. Although their definition of "celebrity is often questionable," this week's episode features tales from Carrie Fisher, Jon Waters and Rue McClanahan. Which makes me wonder, why hasn't this bawdy, curse-word prone trio been assembled before for some wacky, ghost-hunting hijinks??
The BIO Channel returns to its famous faces-meets-spectral places format this June with series returns of and The Haunting of ... 
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