If there’s something strange in your borough or ’hood, who you gonna call?
The Post busters — ’cause we ain’t afraid of no ghosts.
Prepare to take a walk on the dark side, courtesy of what is sure to be this summer’s guiltiest pleasure, “Haunted, Abandoned and Hella Creepy.”
The new, weekly ghost hunting series from The Post follows paranormal investigator Colin Browen as he takes an unsuspecting — and often skeptical — Post reporter inside some of the scariest and most spine-tingling locations in the tristate area.
Skeptics will be turned into believers, as Post cameras capture sinister forces from the other side, hell-bent on having their voices heard, their spirits felt and their often evil and murderous messages shared with the masses.
“It was exciting to host ‘Haunted, Abandoned and Hella Creepy’ because New York City, and all the areas that surround New York, have some of the craziest history in all of America,” Browen explained. “You’ve got serial killers, old abandoned insane asylums and haunted houses with mysterious pasts.
“You could set an entire show with a million seasons in New York City. There’s just so many stories to tell. It’s a gold mine. A lot of these locations had never been investigated before.”
‘I was investigating and, in the middle of the video, my nose just started pouring blood.’
Colin Browen
For the series’ six-episode run, which will be available on noti.group’s YouTube channel, Colin and company filmed on location inside the haunted Kreischer Mansion on Staten Island; at the “Spy House” in Port Monmouth, New Jersey; inside TikToker Matty Magaraci‘s supposedly haunted house in Monroe, New Jersey; and on the grounds of the Mid-Orange Correctional Facility, an all-male, medium-security prison in the New York village of Warwick that closed in 2011.
Cameras also followed Browen into the basement of the COS clothing store in Soho, which houses “the Manhattan Murder Well,” said to be one of the “10 Most Haunted Places in America,” according to the Travel Channel.
There, the spirits were also in fashion.
“At one point, an audio device picked up on a woman’s voice saying, ‘I’m here,’” recalled Post writer Brian Fass, who helped Browen explore paranormal activity at the “Murder Well.”
“It freaked everyone out,” said Fass, a once self-proclaimed cynic who now believes that the world encompasses an “energy that I can’t explain” — and admitted that Browen is the “real deal” with a true ability to communicate with dead people.
“I think he has a special connection with this invisible side of our world,” said Fass. “Maybe it’s all just an electromagnetic field floating around and passing over us, but it’s still cool to explore.”
Cool was not at all what I experienced while roaming the haunted prison grounds at the Mid-Orange Correctional Facility alongside Browen for Episode 3 of “Haunted, Abandoned and Hella Creepy.”
On the contrary, I immediately felt my blood pressure rise from the heat of the dark forces that swirled around us.
At one point I was literally left screaming and running for the door as we used the Estes Method — which involves noise-canceling headphones and a high-volume “spirit box” that scans radio frequencies rapidly — to communicate with a particularly sinister entity that threatened that “Satan is coming.”
“That night was particularly frightening,” Browen agreed. “The Estes Method is something we do in all of our investigations. The theory is that spirits can talk on frequencies that you can’t hear with your actual ears.
“Sitting there in that dark room, the voices we heard definitely send chills down your spine,” he added.
Browen, 26, first became interested in the spiritual realm at a very young age, thanks to the numerous ghost tours his family would attend on vacations in Massachusetts in Salem and Cape Cod and all over the East Coast.
And then, as fate would have it, his family unknowingly moved into a haunted house in his hometown of Sioux Falls, North Dakota.
“It was a crazy experience,” Browen recalled. “My parents heard things running across the kitchen towards their bedroom. Lights would go out. Our security system would go off at 3 a.m. Doors would open by themselves. I saw a shadow figure in my bedroom. I heard my mom’s voice when she wasn’t home.
“We ended up having the house cleansed by a team of psychics,” he further revealed. “And that didn’t actually work, which was scary because it seemed like whatever was there got even angrier — and eventually we moved out.”
The rest is haunted history.
After being invited to investigate spirits at his high school, Browen was dubbed “The Ghost Guy” and used the film from the ghost hunt to launch his popular YouTube series, “The Paranormal Files.”
He later went on to host “Teen Spirit” on the Verizon Go90 Network and currently co-hosts a true-crime podcast, “Murder in America,” with his wife, Courtney.
‘If anybody’s going to be cursed with a f – – king demon, it’s definitely going to be me.’
Colin Browen
During his more than 300 ghost hunts in some of the world’s most notorious locations, from Hoia Baciu Forest in Romania to the Sallie House in Atchison, Kansas, Browen has encountered a plethora of sinister forces that were quite the opposite of Casper the Friendly Ghost.
“I’ve almost been stabbed while I’ve been ghost hunting,” Browen revealed of the darker forces he has encountered throughout his career. “We’ve gone to places where I’ve been scratched. We’ve had stuff slam doors [and] had things thrown across the room. I’ve thrown up. Once I was investigating a haunted courthouse in jail in New Mexico and, in the middle of the video, my nose just started pouring blood.”
And yet Browen’s time filming “Haunted, Haunted, Abandoned and Hella Creepy” may prove to be his most terrifying time yet.
“Some of the locations had really dark energy,” Browen said. “That negative energy sticks around. The energy from a murder, people that died terrible deaths or from patients at a mental institution stains the properties. You feel that and you feel terrible people. It’s really shocking.”
There’s also a more sensitive aspect to his spiritual sojourns.
“I’ve started crying before, hit with the emotion. And I think that it’s from the people that obviously suffered there,” he recalled. “People can say whatever they want, but it’s hard to not feel that sort of emotion when you’re thinking, ‘Damn, this place saw a thousand deaths, and all of them were brutal.’”
Even worse? Browen admitted his “Hella Creepy” lifestyle may have lasting effects.
“If anybody’s going to be cursed with a f – – king demon, it’s definitely going to be me. It’s very scary.”
The premiere episode of “Haunted, Abandoned and Hella Creepy” debuts on Wednesday, June 28, 2023.
Are you brave enough to watch?
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
