Travel Channel’s hit paranormal series Kindred Spirits rings in the New Year with a redo at the Proctor House located in Salem, Massachusetts. It’s a place they and their fans know very well, and a spot that demanded even more of a close up, as the spirits of the Proctor family are said to be wreaking some havoc still.
And after speaking with the three investigators, Amy Bruni, Adam Berry and Chip Coffey, poor John Proctor—hanged for witchcraft—may well have been a victim of a greedy land grab during a time when accusations of evil witchcraft obfuscated the true intentions of the person, in his case Giles Corey, who would benefit from their demise.
That, in itself, is pretty evil, and the souls of these wronged folks still seem to linger energetically to this day.
About Kindred Spirits and the Proctor House premiere
Kindred Spirits is back for 10 episodes beginning January 2. Professional paranormal investigators Amy Bruni, Adam Berry and psychic medium Chip Coffey are experienced in investigating America’s rich haunted history, their collective research efforts peel back the past to identify the restless spirits haunting the country’s oldest inns, homes and estates.
Old friends and haunts are back in focus as the premiere takes us once again to Salem, a town ripe with paranormal activity as Chip, Amy and Adam get back to digging around the famous Proctor House, as iconic playwright Arthur Miller penned a dramatic tale of John Proctor, his wife Elizabeth and nemesis, Giles Corey.
In the season opener, the Proctor House in Salem still has a disturbed spirit and our Kindred three will go deeper into the trapped energy and activity that plagues the house still.
They use cutting-edge tools and conduct multilayered investigations to solve possessions, aggressive entities and even a centuries-old mystery involving a murder conviction based on the “testimony” of a ghost this time out.
And in our exclusive interview, the team guarantees that you will be shocked and terrified at their latest findings.
The history in these locations they visit is downright creepy and scary – all kicked off by their return to the John Proctor House in Salem, a revisit to the mysterious activity exhumed during their memorable investigation of the building during the Haunted Salem Live special for the network.
During that event, they opened a gateway to the dead using powerful magic, which allowed them to communicate with spirits from the 1692 Salem Witch Trials.
Now, they will conduct a full-fledged investigation and learn more about the opened gateway and who came out of it.
Exclusive interview with Amy Bruni, Adam Berry and Chip Coffey
Monsters & Critics: Talk me through why you want to kick off the new season with the John Proctor house once again?
Amy: We had done a really great live event with Travel Channel at the John Proctor house. And typically with Kindred Spirits, we’re in a location for multiple days and multiple nights, and we can really get to the bottom of the case.
But for this live special for Haunted Salem Live, we were there for one night and it was amazing. And it really just left an impression with us. We couldn’t stop talking about the place.
And we talked to the owner that night. We said that we would love to come back here [Proctor House]. We really wanted to give it the full Kindred Spirits treatment.
So it was a no brainer that we would go back there, [feeling that way] since season five.
Adam: Yes, I think we had four hours to have really great [paranormal] activity and that’s not a lot of time. I mean, any ghost hunter knows that it’s hard to get activity if you’ve never investigated this place has never been investigated before.
But for some reason, the combination of Amy and I and Chip Greg and Dana in that space, looking for these spirits, we got tons of activity and it was really confusing. I mean, we left the Proctor house with so many more questions than we had answers.
And we knew that if we didn’t come back and really try to dig deeper and solve this haunting, we honestly didn’t know what was going to happen because we kind of left it unfinished.
Chip: I agree with Adam and Amy. it felt like there was more that needed to be done. I was excited when I found out that that was the location for the episode. It didn’t disappoint, even when we went Back,
M&C: Was Proctor an anomaly? Most women were the targets of witch trial accusations but he was hanged. Were a lot of men hanged during these witchcraft years? Was he an unusual case in that sense?
Adam: Here’s the thing, from my opinion and my point of view, the Salem witch trials got out of hand. I mean, anyone was fair game. It was much deeper than just witches.
I think it was greed. it had a lot to do with the people that were in charge and what they wanted, and if anyone got in their way, they were taken care of.
And we all know Giles Corey and John Proctor had not a nice friendship. They had beef and, what’s to say that Giles Corey didn’t want John Proctor out of the way?
And then immediately started the rumors about him, and his family and all that. I think yes, he could have been an anomaly, but I think at that point, he was fair game.
Amy: Right. I think if I got a minute, but if I remember correctly, it started with his wife, I think she was accused first. I think that kind of put the wheels in motion. So I do think that men being accused was not as common as women, but I also think that this was definitely a power move, and a highly manipulative moment because of Giles Corey and everything.
So it was such a strange time and it’s such an interesting story. there’s just such a backstory to the whole thing. A lot of it centered around that property in that area.
M&C: What is it about New England? I noticed that a lot of your episodes are New England centric. Are you all from the area?
Amy: Yes, I live in Newport, Rhode Island, and I originally came from California, but when I was on the show Ghost Hunters, I ended up relocating here because that was based out of Warwick.
Especially this season, it is very New England-heavy because we couldn’t travel like we normally do because of the pandemic. We tried to stick to places that we could drive to, and we always liked to be as close to home as possible.
And in New England, there is no shortage of haunted locations. There IS something about New England. It’s like quintessential Halloween spooky area, and it’s definitely lived up to the hype.
Adam: Well, I moved here. I moved to Boston in 2001 from Alabama so longer, than I lived in Alabama. So I consider myself a New Englander. I can put on an accent if I need to.
Amy’s right. I mean, there’s something about the history of New England, of which is I’ve always been fascinated with…but combine that with ghost stories and combine that with the old history and things that we look at our history as a nation, it’s pretty fascinating.
And we consider Chip an honorary New Englander. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Chip: [Laughs] I had to kind of… for Adam and me, maintain that Southern thing… I think? [laughs] I had to kind of be the odd man out, which is not uncommon for me to be in a lot of instances.
But, I grew up in-between living in New York and South Carolina, and then 37 years ago, my goodness, I moved to Atlanta.
And, with this season again, Amy and Adam are spot-on with saying that it was kind of necessary because of the pandemic to actually keep things more centrally located for them.
I was the lucky one. Thank you, Amy, Adam, the network, the production company, because I wasn’t able to travel. And they allowed me to actually weigh in with what I was doing from here at home.
So that’s kind of a different sort of thing with this season from other seasons that I was not present on set on location, and did my psychic and medium thing from home.
It presented some challenges, but we met those challenges and I’ve seen a couple of the episodes so far, and they’re great. I mean, I’m definitely biased, but they are amazing and so good.
Amy: I would say they’re our favorites so far.
Adam: I agree. Yes. This is our best season yet.
M&C: Explain Zombie Boy (episode 2). How did this story come to you guys?
Amy: Basically, we’re friends with a lot of the people associated with the Oliver House in Middleborough and really seasoned paranormal investigators run that space. They bring in investigators regularly and do, like, group tours and things.
Then they came to us and they said, we have a new ghost in the house. Everyone has started to call him ‘zombie boy,’ because he kept appearing as this boy with, like, a scarred or burned face.
We needed to check this out. I think we solved the mystery of ‘zombie boy’. We know who zombie boy is, and I can tell you with certainty that you have never seen such an insane twist in any of our Kindred Spirits investigations, because the way we figure out who’s zombie boy is, is insane.
We do a really crazy experiment. That is a “do not miss” episode. It was one of those things where, when we did this experiment, the crew thought we were crazy, and then it worked and the crew were all blown away.
I would consider that probably one of the defining moments in my paranormal career. And I’m sure Adam could say the same. It’s something I don’t think anyone will have ever seen on television before.
Adam: What’s interesting about that case is that, we have theories around a lot of things. That ghost hunting is theory. We can’t really speak to facts because we base things and we know certain things, we experienced certain things, and this was a theory of ours that we had seen before.
And we wanted to see if there was a way we could confirm that this theory was actually real. We started working on that. And when you’ll see in the episode, we can go to way too much, but you’ll start seeing it effect.
You’ll start seeing it affect Chip. And so when it starts to affect Chip, we’re like, Oh my God…Chip is thousands of miles away from us. He is picking up on this experiment and he has no idea where we are and what we’re doing.
What have we done? It’s one of those moments that like we opened Pandora’s Box and can we close it? It’s the most insane thing.
When you see what the outcome is, you’ll realize that it’s something we now have to keep in mind in every single paranormal case that we do from here on out for the rest of our lives.
M&C: Your production company, Paper Route productions, after you’ve told me that you focused all of your efforts for this season because of COVID in the region of New England. Do you think that that’s a good model to do sections of the country and build out the season around an area?
Chip: Yes. I totally get it. I think we’d love to do. See, it’s hard for us because it depends on what time of year it is. And also the cases that we get are things that are requested by those that actually need help. So sometimes we don’t necessarily have a choice.
This year we reached out and said, we need to stay in our area and thankfully or unthankfully? Everyone’s haunted. I don’t know. I’ve always loved to do like a sit down section in California where we do four or five episodes out there or somewhere, but, we have to get our crew out there. We have to find enough cases that [are] out there.
So it would be great to do a regionally specific season. But I think that’s more something along the lines of if we did a special.
We’ve done episodes, even before I came on board, but you all did episodes in various parts of the country and in a lot of different places. This season was just different because of pandemic travel restrictions.
Amy: It is also hard because I have a young child and we always have to take that into consideration. I’m always the one that’s like, “Hey, I have a kid in school here.” Trying to traverse remote learning and travel was very interesting, but we made it happen.
M&C: Has a spirit entity or phenomenon followed you after an episode? And do you still grapple or deal with any kind of energetic interference in your lives from a particular place or episode?
Amy: Mmm, good question. I have yet to have something follow me on any Kindred Spirit cases, but I think that’s just because I’ve learned my lesson early on how to approach this, to make sure that things don’t follow me home.
But I had the spirit of a child follow me home from a case we once did in South Carolina years ago from the old city jail. I was pregnant and there was some sort of interaction with this child ghost because they did have deaths of children and women there because they had this area where they kept families that were related to the inmate.
This child ghost followed me home. I was pregnant, which was interesting, but now I’ve learned how to make that not happen. We always have a conversation we can usually tell when something is wanting to maybe follow up.
And Adam and I are pretty stern with like, ‘Hey, we want to help you. We completely understand just trust us. We are working on this. You do not have to follow us. We’ve really enjoyed our conversation with you.’ We will literally, even if the cameras aren’t rolling, we’ll say that at the end of the night, like, we will be back or not going to leave you hanging. And that’s worked so far.
Chip: I think another thing that comes into play, and kind of continuing on what Amy said is the fact that we’re all three very strong personalities, and the truth is, I think that it’s a protective element that we put out this vibe that we’re here to interact with you and we tell them that we’re not going to disturb or distress you.
And when we leave, we say goodbye to them and say, ‘Don’t follow us,’ or whatever each of us individually says.
But being strong personalities too, I think spirits know that they just can’t mess with us, especially the ones that might want to mess with us or they shouldn’t follow us home.
We tend to resolve a lot of things before we leave. We don’t leave a lot of unanswered questions or, dot, dot, dot at the end of sentences. So I think that helps a lot. I have never had during a Kindred Spirits episode, anything really follow me home. As with Amy on a non-Kindred Spirits investigation, I had a spirit follow me home and actually caused a flood in my house.
I wanted to circle back, I think if you want to look for a recent example, we can talk about the Proctor House. All of us were at the Proctor House for that live show. And I think we all sort of had that place in the back of our mind for months before we got to go back.
From my own experience, when I left the Proctor House, we used a sigil and I took that sigil home with me because I was going to give it back to Greg and Dana. And I promised…it was just something weird about that night and what we experienced and the fact that Dana did Tarot and she threw the devil card twice….what does it mean?
We thought somebody was messing with us and manipulated the situation. And then we thought maybe it was Giles Corey, and then it was over and we just had to leave it. It stuck with me for months and months and months. And it’s something that I talked about and Amy can verify, I bring it up all the time.
Adam: I think in a way that something that followed us home and it stuck with us. In this first episode, coming back to season five, you’re really going to see a chance for myself, Amy, Chip, Greg and Dana to go back into a place and sort of wrap up that case and really get down.
And it’s much, much, much deeper than anyone had ever realized. If you saw the live show, you’re like, wow, that’s crazy. But the rabbit hole goes so much deeper than you think.
Amy: Yes. And not to mention, we actually felt for a minute that we had made things worse there, we had just moment where we had done so many weird experiments and things that we felt that we have to fix this now because now we’ve created a monster.
We made that place of probably 10 times more active than it was. And at that point, we could not leave this family like this. We have to fix this. So that’s the first time we have ever done that. And that was just like a whole new call to action that we were not expecting.
Chip: And from home, let me tell you this. I sat in on part of that time that Amy and Adam were on location with Greg and Dana… and some things that happened… I mean, all of us were kind of…I don’t even know how to describe our reaction.
It was more like, what the hell just happened? We were left quiet with our mouths hanging open and thinking that this is just beyond the scope of being able to even believe some of the things that happened.
It’s really terrifying. It’s truly terrifying.
Kindred Spirits airs Saturdays (beginning Jan. 2) at 10/9c on Travel Channel.