State asylums always make for interesting television. With ghosts or without. There's something, depressing, poignant, and potentially scary watching two people spend the night in gloomy and crumbling institutional rooms and hallways. In this premiere episode of Paranormal Lockdown, hosts Katrina Weidman (Paranormal State) and Nick Groff (Ghost Adventures), spend 72 hours in the asylum, walking the halls by day, sleeping in them at night.
Having weaned myself away from Ghost Hunters–too many, "did you see that? did you hear that?" moments of subjective experiences and nothing to show for it, I wasn't expecting much. But this premiere episode is paced well, has good camerawork, and minimizes the de rigueur backstory provided by an employee (or in this case a former employee) that stifles so many ghost hunting shows with he saw, she saw moments WE never get to see.
So you usually wind up watching people talk about what supernatural experiences they saw at the start of the show, then watch other people talk about their subjective emotions and feelings for the remainder of the show. Toss in a lot of interpreted voice recordings and you have an hour's worth of not-much-happening.
The hosts for our Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum tour, however, manage a bit more than that for us. Not only does their onscreen relationship work well, we're treated to a backstory that's frightening all by itself, a brutal double murder. And we get a few good geobox moments. The geobox, or ghost box, is essentially a radio the dead can speak through. It's bigger than a breadbox, so Nick and Katrina carry around a more portable sound recorder with them through the various rooms and hallways. A daytime response to an EVP session is promising when they first enter the asylum. Another is repeated twice, which, given the circumstances it's heard in, is noteworthy.
With 13 buildings to choose from, they focus on the Women's Auxiliary Building, the lobotomy recovery room, and the morgue. Adam Berry and Amy Bruni (Ghost Hunters) pay a brief visit.
By the third day, having slept little (would you sleep at all in such surroundings?), things perk up. Maybe it's the exhaustion making our hosts more susceptible to suggestion or maybe the asylum's former patients, who never left, are getting tired of all those annoying EVPs, but the 4th floor provided the more watchable moments. There's one thing caught on camera that was so creepy as hell even the cameraman was unnerved.
I admit I got goosebumps. Now that's what I like to see.
"Premiering tomorrow at 10/9c, Destination America’s six-part series PARANORMAL LOCKDOWN, hosted by Nick Groff (formerly of Ghost Adventures) and co-hosted by Katrina Weidman (formerly of Paranormal State), follows the two as they confine themselves in America’s most terrifying places for an unprecedented 72 hours straight. Living at haunted locations, Groff and Weidman believe that the longer they stay, the more the spirits will communicate with them and the more information they can gather about the unknown. Stretching the limits of paranormal investigation, PARANORMAL LOCKDOWN premieres on Friday, March 4 at 10/9c exclusively on Destination America."
