SCHOOL SPIRITS: New Syfy series investigates ghosts on campus

The kids are now out of school, and summer is about to heat up. But the Syfy Network is banking on our interest to stay in school for a little bit longer.

School Spirits, the latest paranormal investigation series, premieres tonight, June 20, at 10 p.m. The six-part series, executive produced by Mark Burnett, Seth Jarrett and Julie Insogna Jarrett, looks into hauntings, possessions and all things that go bump in the night on a college campus. Culled from real-life stories, School Spirits balances reenactments with new interviews, creating an unsettling portrait of students who swear they endured a ghostly experience.

In season one, the show explores stories at the University of Michigan, SUNY Geneseo, Lebanon Valley College, Sweet Briar College, Slippery Rocky University and Eastern Kentucky University. The series premiere is a haunted retelling of a sorority house at the University of Michigan where the sisters uncover a long-forgotten tragedy.

School Spirits joins a long line of paranormal reality series, everything from Haunted Collector to Ghost Hunters to Paranormal State. What sets the new Syfy series apart is that it doesn’t feature a host; instead, it focuses all of its energy on the students and their stories.

“To be honest, we never thought about it once, to have a host,” Seth said recently during a press conference. “We want the people who have had the experiences to be the focus of the show and to tell their own stories. And we’ve always felt like anything other than that would feel like a distraction.”

In 2004, Seth, a successful director who is an alum of MTV, VH1 and Oxygen, branched out with Julie, his wife, to form Jarrett Creative Group. Their track record ever since has been impressive. From Growing Up Gotti to Jonas Brothers: Living the Dream, the husband-wife team has delivered original reality programming for years. Perhaps their greatest success story, and the one series that directly leads into School Spirits, is Celebrity Ghost Stories, a show now in its sixth season on BIO.

For the new Syfy series, both Seth and Julie said they were open to numerous stories from college campuses across the United States. There were no set guidelines on which stories would ultimately make the show. If it was interesting, engaging and could be corroborated, the executive producers dug deeper.

“I don’t think there was any story that we … were not open to,” Seth said. “And I think that over the course of the six episodes … the spirits range from, you know, from a father who died early to evil spirits. So you know, I think we’ve been open. I think we do cover a lot of different types of paranormal activity.”

Although there were many candidates for season one, Seth said they chose the stories that proved to be the most “credible” and “compelling to watch.”

During the first season of School Spirits, almost every episode focuses on one solitary haunting. “I don’t think we necessarily set out to do full hours,” Seth said. “But as these stories started coming in, and as we really took the time to explore some of these other voices, you know, find the corroborating voices, find the professors or the police officers, or you know, whoever, to validate some of this information, these stories, they started to grow. And before we knew it we were looking at stories where we said to each other, ‘To do this as a 1/2 hour story, we would be doing the story a disservice and we wouldn’t be telling the full story.’ ”

Seth said the reason for the one-hour episodes also has to do with his own interests in paranormal investigation series. When he’s getting into a show and investing his time in the story, he hates when the plug is pulled too early.

He promises that School Spirits will engage viewers with its thoroughness, high production value and dark, dark subject matter. Consider yourself warned.

“It’s like watching a film,” he said. “But a film that’s made that much more compelling by the fact that you know all this is real.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• School Spirits airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on the Syfy Network. Click here for more information.