‘Haunted’ EP Brett-Patrick Jenkins Has a Message for Skeptics: “The Show Is Completely Real”

Whether or not you believe in the supernatural depends on a lot of variables. Were you raised religious? Have you ever experienced something unexplainable? Are you a horror fan? Or is it October and you’re in the mood to stream something spooky? If you’re a Netflix subscriber, then any or all of those inclinations probably led you to the hit horror anthology series Haunted. But Haunted promises something from the very beginning, something that other scary shows can’t: Haunted claims its tales are based on truth.

The show’s entire setup is built around this, with the storyteller recounting their paranormal encounters to their closest friends and family members. While the story is spun, the Haunted crew brings the account to life using movie-level special effects and chilling cinematography. Because of this format, each half-hour episode feels like a ramped-up version of Unsolved Mysteries.

But unlike Unsolved Mysteries, which had the benefit of airing before the introduction of the Internet and the amateur Sherlocks that populate it, Haunted’s veracity has been questioned from Episode 1. Okay, actually Episode 2, as “The Slaughterhouse”–an episode about a supposedly very real serial killer with very real victims–got people worked up. Since then, everyone that watches Haunted has wanted to know if the show is really real, or some kind of Blair Witch style storytelling trick. We did our research, but that pales in comparison to the insight show creator and executive producer Brett-Patrick Jenkins could offer.

Decider got the chance to talk to Jenkins about his creation, its relationship with the truth, and the strange occurrences that have plagued the show’s production.

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Decider: The one thing everybody wants to know is whether or not it’s real or fake. I’m not going to put you on the spot and ask you to prove the existence of ghosts, but can you clarify if the show uses actors or scripts? Are these real people telling their stories?

Brett-Patrick Jenkins: I totally understand why people question the show. We are in the day and age when everyone questions the world around them, and so it’s only natural that Hollywood and reality would be subjected to those same questions.

Yeah, the show is completely real. The inspiration for the show is multifaceted, but it all springs from my own life and meeting people throughout my childhood and my career who had unbelievable stories to tell. And in my experience, it’s very rare that you meet someone that they ever feel safe to share a haunted story with you. It’s usually after you’ve known them a few years, you’ve gone on several dates, you’re in a relationship, or you open up to your best friend. And we thought, ‘Could we create a platform, could we create a vehicle, that people who have been haunted can reveal those stories to people in their own lives that they’ve never felt confident enough to share before?’

So that’s the challenge to producing the show, finding people who have a real story to tell, that they haven’t shared with the world before, that feels and is authentic. And I think it’s fascinating to me how many people like the show, yet I also feel for people who come on the show like Terrilyn from Season 1, who was the subject of “Slaughterhouse.” She, no doubt, has experienced something incredibly haunted and scary, but traumatic. She had the courage to come on the show and share her story with people, and that wasn’t about her solving the crime—she knows who the killer is, right? It was her dad—but she needed to get that off of her chest, and together we were able to capture something very chilling that I think resonated with a lot of people.

That’s the story from Season 1 got so many people talking. Are there any updates on the slaughterhouse? Have you heard from Terrilyn or the police?

Yeah, there are some updates. Ultimately, it’s not my story to tell; it’s Terrilyn’s. Our job as producers of the show is to really provide a vehicle for people to tell those stories, and that’s really what Terrilyn did, and when she opened up there with her sister and people from her family, we didn’t know how far it was gonna go. One of the things she told on the show, we as the producers didn’t know. But as part of our show, what we try to, to the best of our ability, is just to vet people. And that’s a long process that we’ve tried to make efficient, and it starts by listening to people, right? In the case of Terrilyn, we heard some things that really scared us, and so we, in our fact checking and background checking process, connected with the New York State police. However we’re not investigators, I’m not an armchair detective. And as much respect as I have for people who are in law enforcement, and people that are armchair detectives, I’m not a guy who’s ever going to bring a criminal down. I was more concentrated with making Haunted a great show and listening to Terrilyn than going after serial killers who were deceased.

We didn’t feel the responsibility to communicate what we’d heard to the New York State police, because Terrilyn had already done that multiple times. She’d spoken on the record about sharing that information with the police in her local community. I mean, she wrote a book with every single detail of the case and documented it. It’s available on Amazon. Ultimately, what the police choose to do with that, it’s completely up to them. I don’t know where the police are with the investigation.

I do know in that area of New York, there are serial killers who have never been found, there are plenty of murders that the killers have never gone to jail or have been accounted for, so I don’t know how many people her dad was responsible for, but what I do know is that Terrilyn wasn’t lying when she came onto the show. No one can come on the show and tell that emotional of a story, with facts, with a book that’s written, with things that she’s put out into the public many years before we ever met her and we ever identified her. So we did everything we could, and we can communicate the facts we know to the police. I hope that curiosity will reach to other killers being found and being documented. I have friends in law enforcement, and what I do know is there are literally hundreds of serial killers out there that have never been identified. As shocking as that is to hear, it happens, and hopefully as a byproduct of Haunted is more awareness can come up for those kind of scary figures that are out there.

Some episodes of Haunted cover real world horrors, ones that aren’t supernatural. There’s “Slaughterhouse” in Season 1, and there’s also the “Cult of Torture” episode in Season 2. You can’t fact-check a ghost, but you can fact check the events of those episodes. Did you approach telling a story like “Cult of Torture” differently than you approached a ghost one, like “The Mimic”?

I think yes and no. Largely, we sort of have a process now and we have a great team of people, you know, including James DeMonaco, who’s our producing partner on this, but largely we produce them all the same, and it begins by connecting with people who have unbelievable stories to tell. When we were first ideating on the show, our working title was The Things I Saw, not Haunted, which it became, and The Things I Saw, to us, what that meant was there are people out there who have seen crazy things; that could be a demon, that could be the devil, that could be an alien, it could be so many things, and there’s no real rigid formula for the types of stories that we want to tell.

But when I heard James [Swift]’s story—I think we’ve all seen cult TV shows on television, but I thought James’s point of view—if you know anything about James, he’s someone who has spent almost his entire adult life helping and putting efforts towards helping kids in the LGBTQ community. He’s just an incredible guy. And when he started to tell us about his story, I got emotional, because this is a guy who saw a lot of things, this is a guy who was truly haunted by Herbert Armstrong’s cult. And while his story is very different from some of the others on the show, I think it’s one that a lot of people out there can relate to. Maybe not in the literal sense, but I think there’s so many people who have wanted to express themselves, express who they are, and they’ve got other bullies or sects or cults or organizations that have tried to stop and confuse who they are. James is an extreme example, but he’s an incredible guy, and I hope that him sharing that story allowed him to clear some of that energy from his life. And along the way, with the help of James, we are able to tell extremely horrifying stories. I think the show is kind of complex in the sense that we tell stories that are incredibly scary in a style that we try to make it as cinematic and compelling as possible, but underneath it all, there’s somebody like James, who is real.

Where do you find these stories? Skeptics have done = armchair sleuthing and learned that some of the storytellers are horror movie producers or work professionally as psychics, and feel that their work in the broad horror/supernatural industry discredits them from having had a supernatural experience. Did you begin looking for stories in those career fields?

You know, my dad is an incredible guy. My dad is actually a minister, and I remember being a little kid, and being conscious enough to open up the Bible, and when I opened it up, I found and read all these unbelievable stories about demons and dragons and serpents and things that I wasn’t seeing at school or in my house or in my real life. What that did to me was open up the possibility that there are things out there that are beyond ordinary comprehension, that there could be things that—the spirit world could exist for some people. I grew up having people come and seek help from my dad, saying, “I am struggling. This crazy trauma happened to me,” or “I’ve been haunted by these things,” and so there’ve been people coming in and out of my life and many other people’s lives forever who have had crazy stories to tell. And so when we were trying to make this show, we thought, “Well, how do we find those people?” And so, they’ve come through in many, many ways.

Everyone who’s working on the show has a large network of people we reach out to when we’re working on documentary projects to try to find and get people involved. So that’s people who work as paranormal professionals, people that are psychics, people that are mediums, people that are otherwise ministers of the underworld, people that make their living in the upside down. We started to talk to those people and tell them about the project, and then referrals started to come in. And largely that’s still how it happens. Every day on Twitter I get a message or two from people saying, “Hey, can I tell you about my story?” And so I’ll connect those people with our team, and other producers who work on the show, I’ll connect them with our team. We get a large mixture of people. You know, sometimes, somebody may have seen a flying saucer one day when they were at work, but we know that won’t carry 30 or 45 minutes of compelling television, but we have a real process to try to find the ones that we think will be most effective to share with the world.

A lot of these stories end with the person usually saying something like “the demon’s still attached to me!” Does that ever spook anyone out on set? Do you ever see anything on set while they’re talking?

There have been so many crazy occurrences of things happening on set. We changed locations, if you notice, Season 1 to Season 2, where we film the group interviews, we changed locations. That’s because in Season 1, we kept having problems with the lights shutting off. And like most Hollywood productions, we were running off a generator. It’s not like we were running off house power and somebody could flip a switch, and we kept running into problems at this location. I’m not sure why. I think when you’re digging skeletons out of a closet, there’s a lot of people who don’t like that.

But we had a lot of problems Season 1, where people thought there was dark energy in the house.The show in many ways is an exorcism that allows people to come on the show and really get something heavy off of their chests, but undoubtedly, there’ve been many, many occurrences on set where cameras haven’t worked, where the lights have turned off. When we got the footage back from the first day of shooting Season 1, all of the memory card had been deleted, which is very frustrating. We had to reshoot a bunch of stuff. We don’t know how that happened because it wasn’t anyone on our crew. So, it’s gotten better as we’ve moved on, but I definitely think Season 1, the production was very haunted.

Is there any chance of an update special of where all these people are now?

I’m trying to do that. What I would like to do, if we get lucky enough to have a Season 3, what I would like to do is an episode where everyone who’s been on the show comes on and we can talk to people and get updates from everyone about their life and their story. There have been some fans and viewers of the show who have been upset because, as you said, they found out “This person had directed a horror movie” or “This person was involved in the paranormal scene,” and so I want to give all of those people an opportunity to talk and answer questions. There’s still a lot to be said if we’re able to do that, but I would love to have an update episode. Hopefully we can bring that to Netflix around this time next year.

Haunted Season 2 is streaming on Netflix.

Stream Haunted on Netflix