INTERVIEW: Adam Berry of ‘Kindred Spirits’ on the challenges of ghost hunting during a pandemic
Photo: Adam Berry is one of the stars of Kindred Spirits on Travel Channel. Photo courtesy of Travel Channel / Provided by press site with permission.
Kindred Spirits, the hit reality series on Travel Channel and streaming on discovery+, follows paranormal investigators Amy Bruni and Adam Berry as they search out things that go bump in the night around the country, especially in their backyard of New England. Joining them for the adventures is Chip Coffey, a purported psychic medium.
This season, which fans can catch up on discovery+, has been an interesting one for the investigators. Shot during the COVID-19 pandemic, the TV show needed to add extra precautions to ensure the ghost sleuthing was as safe as possible, and the team members needed to stay within the Northeast because each “haunted” location was visited via car and not plane.
If there were “a genre that kind of fit the restrictions, it would be ghost hunting because our crew is under 10,” Berry said in a recent phone interview. “It’s only the two of us. We go into abandoned places where no one is or places that have been closed for months and months. I’d say for those things it was easy to work around the restrictions in terms of how many people you could have in a space, but … I’ve never taken so many coronavirus tests in my life.”
Everyone featured on the show needed to be tested before they appeared on screen. They wore masks at all times when the cameras weren’t rolling, and the crew members were decked out in protective equipment as well. One person behind the scenes was designated as the temperature guy, and he checked on team members and cleaned down everything. In Berry’s mind, the actual ghost hunting was impacted by the pandemic as well.
“We investigated Fort Adams, for instance, on this season of Kindred Spirits, and Fort Adams was around when the flu pandemic in 1918 happened,” he said. “There were a lot of people that died during the flu pandemic at that fort. If we were interacting with them, and they would see us wearing masks, which is very different and very unique, we would totally bring that up in conversation.”
Berry said he’s also heard from sources that paranormal activity has picked up over the past year because so many families have remained quarantined in houses for extended periods of time. “There were months there where people didn’t leave their house,” said Berry, who lives in Massachusetts. “So the ghosts were like, are you going? Are you going to go to work? What are you doing? I think they were pissed off. We were all up in their space forever and forever and not going anywhere. … If they’re intelligent spirits, they obviously see what’s happening around them, and they might not know why. But they were probably just as over us being in the house as we were at that point.”
Kindred Spirits is different than other paranormal-investigation shows on TV. As outlined in Bruni’s recent book (reviewed by Hollywood Soapbox here), the show likes to help the “ghosts” as much as the homeowners. Bruni and Berry don’t believe that every entity they come across is evil or motivated by destruction. Sometimes, in their mind, a ghost needs to be simply heard and given a chance to pass over.
Many of the narratives on the series are focused in the New England area, the old stomping ground of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the two paranormal investigators who influenced The Conjuring movies. For Berry, who calls the Northeast home, this old area of the United States has a lot of stories to tell.
“There is something about New England that sort of connects to that whole spooky world,” he said. “Obviously the founding fathers, Boston, all of that happened. There’s so much history in New England. I think there are a lot of legends and folklore that come out of that, and they’re told to each other over campfires. And the stories get passed down, so I think there is something to say about the New England atmosphere, especially when we get into fall.”
So although Bruni and Berry were tied to the Northeast during the COVID-19 pandemic due to logistical realities, they didn’t struggle to find interesting cases; in fact, there were too many of them to cover. A January episode saw the team checking out an historic estate in Middleborough, Massachusetts. Another case saw them investigating the 1673 murder of Rebecca Cornell in Rhode Island, while one episode focused on the Toboggan Inn in Eagle Bay, New York.
“There’s a lot to explore obviously because it’s one of the oldest parts of the country,” Berry said. “But that’s not to say New Orleans isn’t just as haunted, but in a different way — even Savannah, even some places out in California that we rarely get to because we’re here on the East Coast. But for season five specifically, we only could drive. … I live in Massachusetts, Amy lives in Rhode Island, and our crew, some live in Mass, but some live in New York, so we had to be very diligent about where we were going because states would close their borders to visitors. You’d have to quarantine or get a test, and based on the rules and regulations, we had to cancel cases, move cases around.”
He added: “There’s a reason Stephen King writes a lot of his novels around Maine and New England. It’s spooky up here.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Kindred Spirits, featuring Amy Bruni and Adam Berry, airs on Travel Channel and streams on discovery+. All previous episodes are available on the streaming network. Click here for more information.
