INTERVIEW: Following in the footsteps of Dr. Hans Holzer, America’s first ghost hunter
Photo: The Holzer Files pools the talents of Cindy Kaza, Dave Schrader and Shane Pittman. Photo courtesy of Travel Channel / Provided by press site with permission.
The Holzer Files is back for a second season of ghosts, paranormal activity and things that go bump in the night. Dave Schrader, paranormal investigator and radio host, joins with Cindy Kaza, psychic medium, and Shane Pittman, equipment technician, for ghostly adventures around the United States. Their guidebook for these investigations is the infamous Dr. Hans Holzer, believed to be the first ghost hunter in U.S history.
The successful Travel Channel reality show returns, just in time for Halloween, Thursday, Oct. 29 at 11 p.m. On the new season, the team looks at cases that involved everything from John Wilkes Booth to the Amityville horror house. One of their connections to the maestro and namesake of the show is Alexandra Holzer, the ghost hunter’s daughter who helps the trio with their scary journeys.
“I was so excited to be able to be a part of season two,” Kaza said in a recent phone interview. “I love our team. I love Dave and Shane, and the production company and the network, so to be able to go back and go into more investigations and go to really cool historic places, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity really. That’s how I look at all this, so it’s really exciting.”
Pittman, whose biography states that he has had many paranormal experiences since childhood, concurs with Kaza’s excitement for season two. “We’ve got such a great team,” he said. “Dave and Cindy are like family to me, and our production company has just been great. The network has been fantastic. It was an automatic yes for me. We have such a good thing. I’m really blessed to be a part of it.”
Schrader has been interested in the paranormal since he was a child. In fact, he loved reading Holzer’s books at a young age, no doubt pitching a tent underneath the bedsheets and holding a flashlight up to the text as it seemed to jump off the page.
“I love it as well,” Schrader said. “It was a no-brainer. I’ll come back for all 20 seasons if Travel Channel will have them because we have that many cases. We could easily do 20 seasons of this series and still not exhaust all of our opportunities, but we’ve really grown together as a team and a family.”
Schrader’s other job is as host of the popular radio programs Darkness Radio and Midnight in the Desert. These paranormal podcasts have been going strong for 15 years, and he actually had the chance to interview Holzer on the radio show.
“I was very familiar with him, his work, his family,” Schrader said. “I’ve had a lot of people approach me over 15 years to be a part of a ghost-hunting show and a team, and it really hasn’t excited me until they said, ‘Well, this is going to be different. We’re going to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Hans Holzer. You’re going to get reexamine these long lost and sealed files.’ We started on the 10th anniversary of Hans Holzer’s passing, and to get this opportunity, count me in. Let’s do this.”
Pittman went one step further and said that he is blessed to be on The Holzer Files, and of special importance to him was the chance to work with Holzer’s daughter. “So I was blessed to know her and to actually ask her questions on what they call the ‘Holzer Method,’ which was what her father was infamous for as far as him going into investigations,” he said. “It was bare-bones investigating, so I was lucky to pick her brain about some things early on.”
Kaza has said that her first memorable encounter as a psychic medium was when she was only 10 years old. It took her awhile to be convinced of her abilities, but she eventually caught on and trained at the Arthur Findlay School of Intuitive Sciences.
“As I say in a lot of interviews, I trained and worked as a medium for several years, but the worlds of mediumship and paranormal, they’re a little bit separate,” she said. “I never thought I’d be on a paranormal show, and I’m so glad that I am. I’m so glad that I’ve been able to be a part of a show where we’re going back and diving into Hans Holzer’s cases, and having said that, I feel like by being a part of the show I’m learning about Hans Holzer because before this show I didn’t know much about him. I’m the odd man out here, and so it’s been really, really amazing for me to be a part of a show where there are all these records and audio recordings.”
The premiere episode Oct. 29 is a doozy for the trio. Schrader said fans of the paranormal and fans of true crime will be intrigued by the story they have to tell (a story that they carefully kept under wraps).
“This episode to me feels like a perfect blend of both of those aspects,” the investigator said. “Our show, I think, stands apart from others because we, at least in my opinion, feel like it’s a very CSI show anyway, the way that we investigate and methodically break down the histories and stories to try to get to the truth. In this case, not only do we get to employ that aspect of our show, but we’re looking into the paranormal and its possible ties to some heinous murders that took place in this community where it wasn’t just one location that was haunted and dealing with the aftermath, but many locations. So this was a helluva kickoff for the season.”
Kaza said she loves this premiere episode, calling the mysterious case at the center of the narrative “really interesting.” She kept details secret, but much of the information they found was “really dark” and involved multiple murders.
“By the time we got to the location to do the investigation, I didn’t know where this was going to go,” she admitted. “It wound up being this amazing case where we were able to put these pieces together about these murders that happened years and years ago and to bring some closure to a family, which always feels really, really good.”
Pittman added: “On this premiere episode, you’re going to see some really amazing evidence as well. I mean, this whole season we’ve got some evidence that’s going to be mind-blowing, I believe, for the viewer. For this premiere episode, we’ve got some pretty fantastic evidence, and I’m excited for it to premiere and for people to check it out.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Holzer Files premieres Thursday, Oct. 29 at 11 p.m. on the Travel Channel. Click here for more information.
