INTERVIEW: Don Wildman leaves the museum and searches for ‘Buried Worlds’
Photo: Don Wildman talks with Haitian fishermen about pufferfish on an episode of Buried Worlds. Photo courtesy of Travel Channel / Provided by press site with permission.
TV host Don Wildman loves a good mystery. He has been the force behind Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum and Off Limits for several years, and now he’s pivoting to a new topic for the network: the interesting and fascinating connection between history and the supernatural world.
Buried Worlds With Don Wildman is set to premiere Monday, June 8 at 9 p.m. On the new series, Wildman heads around the globe looking for ghosts, demons, vampires and witches, according to press notes. Along the way, he will meet eyewitnesses and participate in several cultural traditions and rituals.
“It was one of those perfect-storm moments when several forces came into play,” Wildman said in a recent phone interview. “I had been working for Travel Channel for a long time, and so I’m one of their history people. So straight history has been my realm, and we were looking for the next thing because Mysteries was running its course after 24 seasons. It was time for something new.”
At the same time, the Travel Channel changed its branding and started presenting more paranormal programming, so Wildman changed with the times. He has always been fascinated by these tales of scary creatures and things that go bump in the night, and now he is able to marry his interest in history with what TV viewers are looking for in their reality programming.
“Why don’t we find the historical context of this stuff and get me experiencing these worlds as an outsider,” he said. “Some of Mysteries at the Museum delved into the paranormal or various stories, but in terms of me going into that world — very, very little of that. And so I have a great respect for that, the whole realm, the whole genre of horror and occult and all that stuff. Some of my greatest experiences in movie theaters, reading [Edgar Allan] Poe and all the rest of these things, I have a tremendous amount of respect and fascination for that world. To me, it’s always been a kind of window on a mindset that I’m just not familiar with. I’m such a temporal person. I’m so of this world that when I visit these pieces of literature and cinema that take me there, it’s an adrenaline rush. It really is; it’s a lot of fun.”
Wildman and the team at the Travel Channel plotted a global adventure for him, and this has resulted in a first season of seven hour-long episodes and one two-hour finale on July 27 at 8 p.m. Those travels take him from Peru to Haiti to Bulgaria and back again.
“So I could be taking you both on an historical experience, but also a paranormal one,” Wildman said. “Eventually I end up in an inverted pyramid, and at the bottom of the pyramid is me involved in that world and doing those rituals or involved in some practice or having an experience. Quite honestly, really extraordinary moments of my life have been in the course of this, in woods and caves with a person standing next to me who is talking to a ghost and telling me what they’re saying.”
Wildman said he has always been fascinated by paranormal programming on television. He loves watching teams of investigators go into dark houses with their electrical equipment in the search of something supernatural. He especially loves when some of these stories coincide with his fondness for history.
“You can pretty much go anywhere in the world, and people are searching for this other realm,” the TV host said. “That wasn’t the hard part because it’s easy to find those people. They’re all over the web. The interesting thing was to put them in the context of a greater story that had to do with that area, so that you would walk away from every show feeling like you’ve not only learned, you’ve not only had that experience that you can watch so often, but in watching this show with me in it it’s a broader historical context. So you’ll, I dare say, have a serious experience in some regards of learning and contextualizing it.”
There was a mixed bag of criteria for the stories that were selected for the inaugural season of Buried Worlds. For example, they have a vampire tale out of Eastern Europe and a story of sacrifice in South America. They attempt to track down a crypt used by Nazis for occult purposes, and they also search out ancient “witches’ marks” in an English cave.
“I remember the first thing we really started talking about was the Peruvian show because there was a giant story that had come out a few years ago about a crazy amount of skeletons that had been found in this village, indicating what became the largest excavation of child sacrifice in history, so hundreds of bodies had all been sacrificed in the same ritual at a time,” he said. “Why was it there, and how was it there? What did it really indicate in terms of the greater culture of this part of the world? And that was kind of the in, and that’s going to be one or two acts of a show that has probably six acts, so you start building outward from that. That’s just TV. That’s how you tell a story.”
He added: “There was always that kind of scratch of the surface, and suddenly you’ve fallen into the hole.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Buried Worlds With Don Wildman premieres Monday, June 8 at 9 p.m. on Travel Channel. Click here for more information.
