Welcome back to DEAD Time, where we explore the unexplained and the things that linger in the darkness. I hope you left a light on for me. In a recent installment I spoke with TV Host Aaron Sagers about the Netflix series 28 Days Haunted, which follows three paranormal teams who each spend 28 days in a haunted location. The show is an experiment to test the 28-day cycle, which is a theory some believe was initially suggested by famous paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren.
For this month’s DEAD Time, I talked with paranormal investigator, demonologist, author, and musician Sean Austin, who was part of one of the teams who participated in 28 Days Haunted. Sean took me behind-the-scenes of the show to share the deeply heartfelt experience he had with a spirit at Captain Grant’s Inn in Preston, Connecticut and how the encounter not only moved him, but inspired him to write and record a song.
Before 28 Days Haunted, Sean starred in paranormal television shows Ghost Loop on Travel Channel and The Demon Files on Destination America. You can follow all of Sean’s paranormal adventures on his official website.
Read on as Bloody Disgusting chats with Sean Austin about the spiritual journey that led to him becoming a Demonologist, how 28 Days Haunted inspired the song ‘Mercy’, and a lot more!
Bloody Disgusting: In addition to being a paranormal investigator, you’re also a Demonologist and a psychic medium. When did you first realize you had psychic abilities and why did you want to pursue a career in the paranormal?
Sean Austin: It wasn’t really a choice to have a career in the paranormal for me personally. I watched all these documentaries back in the early years like Unsolved Mysteries and Sightings. I was watching all these people’s stories and it just gave a genuine feeling to what they went through and the ghost experiences they had. I was just thinking to myself, ‘Wow.’ I just never went and looked for myself, but I always believed in it. I was pursuing music and trying to be a singer at the time. I had a friend I had worked with who was like the biggest skeptic and I wanted him to have an experience, so one night I decided to take him out to this cemetery in Yonkers, New York. So, we went to the cemetery, and he was laughing the whole night but there was this one moment when I was at the grave of this little girl named Jenny, and I just recorded audio and said, ‘Jenny are you still here?’ It wasn’t until the following night when there was this defining moment for me when I heard a child respond to my questions who said, ‘My two toys died’ in a little girl’s voice. I think anyone would have been terrified and freaked out and of course I was. I had chills to the bone, but in this moment of being freaked out and scared, it was also exhilarating. This is what drew me in.
Two or three weeks after this initial experience, I saw the shadow of a little girl at the corner of my bed. It was light out and this seemed to be the flip of the switch where the veil started to lift, and I started to have a spiritual awakening. I did not know I was having a spiritual awakening, but as soon as I started to engage with the paranormal it was like it was there and had been dormant. That’s when things started to happen, and all these experiences started to progress very quickly. There were omens, too. I wrote about it in my first book Shadow Chaser. After I started having all these paranormal experiences, I thought about if there were any signs before I got involved and it just kind of took over my life. It changes the way you look at everything, your perspective.
When I was a child, we had a house in Long Island. One day as I was running home between houses there was tall grass and in my peripheral vision, I saw something in the ground. It was a Satanic book, and it was burnt on the outer edges of the book, and I had this creepy feeling, and I threw it down, as any child would. That to me was a sign and then there was another one three years before I got involved in the paranormal. My girlfriend at the time was coming over to a house I was renting, and she never told me this story because she thought I would think she was crazy. She didn’t tell me the story until she saw me start to post paranormal stuff on social media. She told me that one night when she came to hang out with me, she pulled up and saw this black, hooded thing looking into the window of my room. It turned its head and then disappeared, and she said it was the most terrifying thing she had ever seen in her life. In my opinion, this thing was kind of watching me, knowing that I would be someone who would get involved in the work and I would be trying to help people and souls. So, that was pretty interesting.
BD: For readers who might not be familiar with the term, can you explain what it means to be a Demonologist?
SA: Well, it’s the study of demonology and also the way that you approach cases and the paranormal as a whole. Now I never thought to myself, ‘Oh, I want to be a Demonologist one day.’ It was kind of like a thing that was drawn to me and I was pulled to it. It was kind of funny because when I started investigating the paranormal, I was invited on some podcasts and there was kind of a resonating thing that they were saying to me that I have some kind of calling. I really didn’t understand what they meant, but I guess maybe it was the way I spoke about dealing with evil spirits. Later on, finding out that people like Ed Warren, who was a pioneer in the paranormal field, he would even say that people in demonology are called to it. As soon as I was involving myself in the paranormal it was taking me in that direction. Those types of experiences and those types of cases kind of opened up doorways and the universe was bringing me to them. It was like I was destined to be a part of that. Also, meeting Ralph Sarchie; if you’ve seen the movie Deliver Us From Evil, that movie was inspired by Sarchie’s book Beware the Night. He had actually started working with the Warrens and then he was mentored under Father Malachi Martin.
Father Malachi Martin and Bishop Robert McKenna are probably some of the most respected exorcists of our time. I invited him on my podcasts and talked with him for hours on the phone and then he invited me to come out on some cases and that was the first TV series I was on, being an investigator for him. That was The Demon Files, which aired on Destination America and Travel Channel and now it’s still on Discovery+. From there, I published my first book Shadow Chaser, and I continued investigating cases, helping people, and then I wrote another book and was on a TV show called Ghost Loop. It was on Travel Channel, and I was the lead investigator. I never thought that all this stuff would happen to me; I kind of just went out and discovered that this stuff was real. Once I had a little hint of that experience, I wanted to attain more knowledge from those experiences. That’s when I started reading all these books; the first book I read was The Demonologist about Ed and Lorraine Warren and then it was Shadows of the Dark by John Zaffis. I was reading so much, and it was just so fascinating. Once you know it’s real, there is no turning back. Everything is different now. It’s the way you look at everything and having a spiritual awakening in the process. [laughs] I don’t know if I can comfortably say or uncomfortably say, but I experience something paranormal every single day of my life now. It’s just a part of my life. I feel like I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing and I still have more to do.
BD: You mentioned the Warrens, which brings me to 28 Days Haunted, which is inspired by their theory that hauntings occur on a cycle of 28 days. What was it like being a part of that experiment and what is the most important thing you took away from the experience?
SA: I’m not sure if everyone is aware that Ed Warren came up with this theory because of the biggest case they ever investigated, the Amityville case. The Lutz family moved in about thirteen months after the DeFeo murders took place. The Lutz family moved into the house with all the original furniture and the original bedposts where this family was murdered. They lived there for exactly twenty-eight days, and they got up and they left everything behind. From what they said they experienced in the home, I believe Ed Warren took this as the perfect storm scenario in the paranormal to kind of give some kind of theory of watching a family move into a perfectly haunted home with the diabolical infesting it, and watching a family living there and how long it would take. That’s the only thing that I think makes sense. I’ve done investigations where I’ve investigated a place for like a week straight or stayed at a place for a week at a time, but you can leave. You can have a beer and have dinner with your friends and be in social environments and have an escape from that energy.
For 28 Days Haunted, that was not the case. We had no contact with the outside world, no TV, no internet, no cell phones, nothing. So, that isolation allowed us to really connect with the spiritual world in a way that most investigators never get to. We weren’t just living in a property; we were engaging and communicating, whatever we could to do be a part of that 24/7. We were investigating the hauntings at the locations every single day. Me being sensitive and having medium abilities, I would be visited when I was sleeping. I would just raise my hand when I would hear a whisper in my ear or see a figure at my bed, because we had cameras on all day. There is so much more that you didn’t see on the show. We were there for that amount of time and Netflix only gives you so much time. So, you’re basically trying to put a whole month into about an hour, so that just gives you a little bit more of a spectrum of what you didn’t see [laughs].
Obviously, the main core element of the story of the property we were staying at, which was Captain Grant’s Inn, we need to tell that story because that was a big part of it. What I took from it was my connection to Mercy Adelaide Grant because I was there living that every moment. She would visit me in my bed. I’d see an older woman with grey hair, and we had voices coming through the boxes saying, ‘I’m here without my captain.’ I was kind of tapping into that kind of emotion and I felt like I was a part of her story. I had to drop everything I was doing to do 28 Days Haunted, and I asked if I could bring my acoustic guitar with me. I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do? I don’t know the people who I’m in the house with.’ My guitar is kind of like my invisible therapist, so to speak, and in my downtime that’s kind of pleasurable for me; it’s a positive thing to write and play my guitar. So, they let me bring my guitar. I will never forget this one moment when we were at the location where Mercy and Captain Grant’s grave is and I had a vision that she would write these notes to him, almost poetically, but also like she was releasing something. I think that kind of like coincides with how songs are written when you’re really putting your emotions into it because it’s an extension of your emotions. I could see her, and I said on camera, even though it wasn’t on the show, ‘I savor your lips with the breath of each day. The wind is my only company. Life is enduring without you.’
After this happened, I went back to the house, and I was coming up with a bunch of songs in my downtime. One of the other songs I came up with was really haunting and I felt really emotionally connected. I was thinking to myself, ‘When I go home, I’m going to write a song about her loss of her captain,’ because I felt so emotionally connected, living there and being a part of it every day. I feel like those words that she psychically wrote to him I could meld with my own lyrics. So, I had this idea in my head, and I’d hum the melody to this song around the house. You see part of this on the show, but this one night I was sitting in the house, and I started to have these visions of a golden locket and a beautiful brunette woman. I was starting to realize that she was the one who was coming to me in my bedroom as an older lady; she was showing me herself in two different parts of her life; when she was a young woman and also when she was older. It was as if I was looking through the eyes of someone on the shore and I could see a ship off in the distance. I kept on hearing her say, ‘Shipwreck’ to me and that’s when this emotion started to hit me. It was really, really intense. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I started to hear the acoustic chords of the song that I was going to write for her—I could hear the chords playing inside my head. In this moment, the realization and the telepathic connection I had with this spirit took me over so badly that I literally started sobbing. I could not stop crying and I was like, ‘Stop, I can’t handle it.’ I was feeling decades of heartache. It was so profound on so many levels. I had to get up from the chair and open the door to get some outside air.
She had said to me in this moment, ‘You captured my essence. You were meant to come here.’ This went on for like fifteen minutes and I had to calm myself down. I just couldn’t stop the emotions. The next morning, I had a recorder on the bed that was a burner phone with no internet, but I could record. I went back to what I recorded the night before and she was humming the melody to my song. It freaked me out. I ran to my guitar, and I recorded with my burner phone the acoustic chords and I took her disembodied voice EVP and I put it on top of the guitar, and she’s humming the melody in perfect key to my acoustic guitar. This is why I was so emotional, and I really wanted to sit at that grave and put flowers at her grave. Even though it was so sad and emotional, it was so beautiful. In this experience, think about how profound it is; like telepathy, psychic ability, how love lives on way beyond this world; now this lady was still having that love and that heartache. It’s so powerful in so many ways that I really sat at that grave and I said, ‘I will go home and record this song and do it justice,’ and that’s just what I did.
I went to Nashville to record the song and I named it ‘Mercy’ because it has a dual meaning, just stop the pain. Her humming is part of the song and there is kind of a swishing noise, but it’s key to the song. It actually creeped my producer out [laughs]. He was like, ‘Sean, I can’t have a ghost humming in the song. It’s creeping me out!’ She’s part of the song and that’s why I believe she basically co-wrote the song with me. I’ll never forget the first night I got the final mix of the song, I sat there in my bed, and I was listening with headphones, and I had a vision of a woman in a green dress, and she gave me a curtsy. I just knew in that moment that that was her saying thank you for doing what you did. I just think about a spirit communicating with a soul from a different time period and having her story connect with her and intelligently know each other and know about what has been created and was dedicated to what she went through for so many years of her life. So, it’s pretty crazy. I will never forget the day the show came out Netflix, I was dosing off and I had another vision of a woman in a green dress and a man taking her hand, and he spun her around and then he just picked her up in his arms. I had such a good feeling. It was as if she reunited with her Captain. After this happened and I was on the show, I prayed for her.
I decided to do a music video for the song and my filmmaker buddy lives in North Carolina by the beach, so I decided to do it by the ocean and tell her story. So, what I took away from all this is that it’s not just about being on a TV show. I took away something so beautiful and so emotional, and I want to share that story. I will take that story with me to my grave. In the end, I took away that beautiful experience and I know that I was meant to be there no matter what and I’m appreciative and grateful for that.
Below you can watch Sean Austin’s mini documentary about his experience at Captain Grant’s Inn, which inspired the song ‘Mercy’, along with the song’s official music video.
