Elton Castee and Corey Scherer are hugely popular YouTube superstars who take viewers along on their wild paranormal investigations. The talk about how they got started, why they love the paranormal and what adventures are coming up.
You can find more info here: overnightparanormal.com
Thanks Elton and Corey!
-TRANSCRIPT-
This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.
JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the program. I am Jim Harold, and man, we have some YouTube superstars with us today. I’m talking about Elton and Corey from Overnight, the YouTube channel Overnight. They have 1.42 million subscribers. Let that sink in, how many people it is. That’s absolutely amazing to me. And they go to different haunted locations, and I think at one point, Elton, you even invited a demon to possess you on the Queen Mary, I think.
ELTON: Yeah, that was a formal invitation. I would say every night I’m inviting demons to join us at locations. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Oh my. I guess what I’m saying is you guys have been tremendously successful, and congratulations on all that. So tell us how it all started for you. How did you get into the paranormal subject and decided, when it came to your YouTube channel, that’s the area you were going to cover?
ELTON: I can summarize it in kind of a cool way. Corey can speak to his childhood and how he started in the paranormal world. I have always been a horror movie fan, and then we were filming together travel/fun vlog things. The original channel I have is called TFIL. It’s “The F-It List: 1,000 Things I Want to Do Before I Die,” and on that list had Waverly Hills, it had Alcatraz, it had Queen Mary, it had Paris Catacombs. We ended up doing all these locations during that.
And then when COVID happened, we couldn’t really travel the same way we used to doing the fun stuff, and we’re like, well, the other thing that we love doing is going to these abandoned locations, haunted locations. Then that’s where we were like, let’s start “25 weeks of haunted.” And here we are 75 weeks later, having not missed a week. Well, we’ve missed a week here and there, but 75 weeks straight, around 85 different locations in six different countries.
COREY: It’s getting close to 100.
JIM HAROLD: That’s amazing.
ELTON: Yeah. I think by the end of this year, we’ll probably be at 100 different locations. You can start on how you got into it or wherever you want to shift the conversation to.
COREY: Growing up, my family, ever since I was a little kid – my parents grew up in a haunted house, so they would always tell me all these stories about when they were my age as a little kid and stuff that happened to them. Then when I was probably – dude, I was so young. I was probably around 10. Started playing with a Ouija board, and I didn’t know that it was bad at the time. I thought it was the thing to do. I was like, oh, this is how you talk to ghosts. This is how you talk to spirits.
I played with the Ouija board at my house for a couple years, and I ended up getting my home that I grew up in very severely haunted. I went through a lot of kind of traumatic things, but then also very cool experiences as well with it. And then as I got older, I’ve just always been obsessed with any ghost investigation shows. Anything that has to do with spirits, I’ve loved. And then we just decided, “Hey, let’s start investigating” as time went by.
JIM HAROLD: Elton, have you been interested in the paranormal since you were a kid?
ELTON: I think it’s been one of those things where I’ve always been maybe subconsciously interested in it. Just being completely no exaggeration, the house I predominantly grew up in, ages 15 to 19, was within a cemetery, and it turns out it was the old crematorium. So I spent my prime childhood years, all of high school, being surrounded by a cemetery, seeing funerals basically every other day just from my bedroom window. So I kind of became numb to it in that sense. I was interested, but I didn’t have this passion. I didn’t watch the TV shows. I didn’t search it out.
But I’ve always been a horror movie fan. I’ve always loved the genre, like Blair Witch. I remember that being one of the first movies that was like, oh my God. As Above, So Below, huge motivation for why I went to the Paris Catacombs and went in the exact same entrance they went into in the movie. I’ve just always been a fan of the Conjuring series, anything like that.
The paranormal interest in terms of the reality of the paranormal, not the movie side of things, has grown on me after doing these investigations. I’m the one who buys all of our gear. I know how our gear works. I take it apart and make sure there’s nothing weird or mischievous in it that could alter it. So when we start having these experiences over time that none of us can explain, none of us can break it down – we’ll tear apart gear after and be like, “Did this malfunction?” We’ll go to that extent.
His love for it and my interest in being in this world and exploring it has melded us together now. Now I’m significantly more of a believer than I was when we started.
COREY: Oh, 100%.
ELTON: And he’s significantly more willing to do the scarier stuff.
JIM HAROLD: That’s interesting.
ELTON: He wouldn’t leave my side within like 10 feet for the first like two years of these videos, and now we’re like, “Hey, do you mind going to the other building 20 acres way?” and he’ll be like, “Yeah.” [laughs] I’m like, cool.
COREY: Yup.
JIM HAROLD: Are you guys fascinated by how much this has taken off?
ELTON: You’re talking about paranormal investigation in general, right?
JIM HAROLD: No, no, no, I’m talking about your channel. Because, I mean, it has blown up.
ELTON: I feel like it might be – we talk about this all the time. When we started doing paranormal investigations, we were one of I feel like three channels that were doing it. Literally just 50 weeks ago, I feel like we were a handful of channels.
COREY: Yeah, it’s gotten so much bigger now. There are so many channels investigating now.
ELTON: I think that’s part of also why our channel has gotten bigger, because I feel like the whole genre, the field, the interest in it has grown with us. It’s been really cool because our audience has watched us grow in this space and learn more and take it more seriously and evolve and push limits, and then we’ve also watched the people that watch us become more interested and learn more, and they start coming to us with more feedback.
It’s been really cool because I feel like the community of people that are interested in the genre has grown with the channel. I don’t think it’s us growing faster than the community. It’s kind of this mutual – it’s a really cool feeling that we have with our fanbase.
JIM HAROLD: It’s neat. It reminds me – you guys have huge success, but I started podcasting on the paranormal back in 2005, believe it or not. I’ve been doing it 10 years full-time, and similar with podcasting. When I started podcasting – well, first, nobody knew what a podcast was. But secondly, there were no paranormal podcasters. That’s why I got the name “The Paranormal Podcast.” Just to see it skyrocket and how many podcasts there are, and now with YouTube, you guys have done this and had such great success on it.
What is your philosophy of ghost hunting? There are some people who go in and they want to have all the tech. Some people are a little less tech-centric. Some people go in very maybe respectful, or maybe they go in kind of quiet; some people go in and they provoke. What’s both of your philosophies in ghost hunting and ghost investigation?
ELTON: Take it away on this one.
COREY: Personally, now I love the tech. When I was younger, all I had, like I said, was a Ouija board and my cellphone. I would set my cellphone in the hallway and I would have friends spend the night and I’d be like, “Hey, watch, I’m going to let it record for a minute, and when I take it back in the room, you’ll hear whispers.” We would do that, and almost every time we would hear whispers, but that’s all we had.
But now that we have Rem-Pods, K-IIs, cat balls, Ovilus – we could keep going.
ELTON: I wish I could pan this camera over, and if you saw the arsenal of gear that we have here – people send me prototypes now of things, and even recreations of things from the 1800s that we have. We have so much bizarre stuff. We have briefcases full of gear. But at the same time, I think the fun part about how we go into things is we don’t ever go into it with the same method every time.
One, every location we go to has their own set of rules, and we do everything we can to make sure we don’t break any rules. We’ve done it on accident, but some people are like, “Hey, you cannot instigate.” Some people are like, “You can’t do these things.” We always follow those rules. But there’s other locations that are like, “Hey, the best activity you get is if you provoke.” Our job when we make these videos – I’m not going into any location and I’m not traveling to England to not do the best possible investigation we can. If the owner of a location is like, “Hey, provoke,” cool, where are these little [bleep] spirits at?
COREY: I don’t do that. [laughs] I’ll go in there and I’m like, “Hey, um, could you please touch the cat ball?” and Elton’s like “Listen up, a. I’mma need you to go grab this Rem-Pod right now. Oh, you’re too scared? You’re too scared to grab the Rem-Pod?”
ELTON: But the thing is, he hates it, but it’s worked.
COREY: It does work.
ELTON: We went to Pendle Hill in England and the tour guide there, the historian, was like, “Yeah, provoke.” We tried going the chill route and just here and there, and then as soon as it started to be more of a challenging statement, activity was insane. It got to a point where Corey and Matt left and they started praying from about a half mile away because they got that scared of whatever I was engaging with.
But the flipside, we’ve gone to places like Trans-Allegheny and had just incredible experiences with the spirit of Lily, this little girl spirit that’s there, and she has kind of a dark story. But that was a completely playful, passive, fun experience where we read her stories, we made up our own pirate stories, and have phenomenal activity, engagement, communication, however you want to refer to it.
I don’t think we ever go into one with just “this is the way we do things.” We adapt to every location we go to.
COREY: We feel the energy of the place, and then it kind of just rolls from there.
ELTON: I think the fun part is we don’t even know how we’re going to approach every night until the night’s over and then we’re like, “Oh, okay. That’s what we did tonight.” We don’t really have a gameplan. We just follow the lead and listen to the locals and go from there.
JIM HAROLD: Well, it seems like it works. What’s the creepiest place you guys have ever been?
COREY: Ooh. Creepiest place?
ELTON: Go for it. Do you want paranormal or just in general creepiest place?
JIM HAROLD: Since it’s the Paranormal Podcast, maybe the paranormal would be good.
ELTON: Sure.
COREY: Want me to say one?
ELTON: Go for it, yeah.
COREY: Activity-wise insane, I would say how creepy the activity was was Dracula’s Castle. Dracula’s Castle is one of my all-time favorites we’ve ever done.
ELTON: Dracula’s Castle was the one where we stopped everyone from doing everything they were doing to hold everyone accountable. It was the first time we had evidence where we had to scream across the building to be like, “Where are you? And prove to me that you didn’t just do this.” It was also one of the few times where everyone huddled up in the hotel room after, reviewed the footage. All of us simultaneously had the footage, zooming it in, changing the contrast, looking for anything to see if anyone was lying. It was I think the most remarkable paranormal experience we’ve ever had, and the fact that it’s on camera, clean, somehow perfectly got it in frame, was just incredible.
To recap, we had probably a 250-pound – I don’t know what kind of wood door. All the debunking possible has been done. We had this giant wood door completely slam on us directly after a question of “Are you the queen?” We were in the Queen’s Quarters, the lady who ended up renovating Dracula’s Castle. We hear a “yeah” on the EVP recorder, which we didn’t know about, and then the door slams. Then after the door slams, we run outside to hold everyone accountable, figure out where you are. Everyone’s like, “Not us, not us.” And then the door reopens and slams again.
This is one of those things where we spent two hours just moving the door back and forth, trying to see if it was a tipping point, if anything.
COREY: I remember I was on the other side, and I was in the torture chamber room. We were getting insane activity, having cat balls and other devices on the actual equipment. I remember our door opened. It creaked open by itself and we were like, oh, that was strange. And then probably 30 seconds later, a minute later, we hear you screaming. We go booking it over there, and immediately you told us what happened and we’re like, “There’s no way.” And then you showed us the footage and we were like, “Oh, there’s a way.” [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: What do you think ghosts are?
ELTON: I’m going to let him go first because I have a different opinion on it. We have very differing views on the afterlife.
JIM HAROLD: So what is it, Corey?
COREY: I feel like a lot of the good spirits that we talk to – this is just a theory, but I feel like maybe they are trapped here on Earth because either they can’t understand that it’s time to move on and they’re stuck, or they don’t want to move on. But then I also believe that more of the evil entities and demons and spirits like that – I believe those were really never here on Earth, living as a person. Those are just something from – I don’t know if they came from a planet in outer space. They came from somewhere. But they’re on Earth, not really tormenting people or other spirits, but they’re definitely here for a reason, to scare us. That’s what I’m still trying to figure out.
JIM HAROLD: Elton?
ELTON: I think the key difference between he and I is he had a very spiritual/religious upbringing. I didn’t. Basically, I claimed to be atheist until I got old enough to go, “Okay, let’s not be arrogant. You can’t know anything for sure.” So I’m completely agnostic with everything. So to me, it’s hard for me to say what I think ghosts are, but in my opinion – this is where I teeter on the line and why it’s fun for me to do this – I don’t know if the human soul, spirit, body, whatever you want to call it, essence, aura, can transcend or stay or anything of that nature.
So to me, I don’t know what ghosts are. What I would like to think they are is that something happens when the human body decides to no longer exist where the spirit/mind/soul can either choose to take the next step or choose to disintegrate or, in some circumstances, can choose to stay in the location which they love the most, or somehow get trapped in the location that they unfortunately have to reside in, whether it’s because they deserve to be there because they did something horrible or just lack of whatever it is.
That’s where I am. We all have the subconscious, we have this part of us no one can see, but we all know exists. So how do I know that that same element doesn’t also still exist without the physical embodiment? That’s where I view the ghost/spirit world. I’m very undecided, but I think there’s a possibility that Corey, without Corey’s shell, can exist, and hopefully not haunt this office when he passes away. [laughs]
COREY: Yeah. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: One of the scary things for me is the thought that – let’s say it’s a good person, not like some evil Hitler or something. To hell with them, whatever happens to them happens to them. But I’m talking about a decent person, and one of the most frightening things for me – Corey talked about getting stuck. I really hate to think that somebody could get stuck if they’re a decent person. You would hate to think that that’s the case, but a lot of paranormal folks seem to think that’s the case, that people do in fact get stuck – particularly when they die suddenly, unexpectedly, that kind of thing. That would be a real shame, I would think.
ELTON: Yeah. We also know about the theory of the time loop.
JIM HAROLD: Oh yeah.
ELTON: Like their soul is repeating the exact same minutes every single day, never ending. That’s a theory, too. Purgatory here. It could be anything.
JIM HAROLD: We’re talking with Corey and Elton from Overnight, that hugely popular YouTube channel, and we’ll be back right after this.
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If you love the Paranormal Podcast, be sure to check out Jim Harold’s Campfire, where ordinary people share their extraordinary stories of ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, and terrifying encounters. Find it for free wherever you listen to this podcast. Tune in to Jim Harold’s Campfire today. Now, we return to the Paranormal Podcast.
JIM HAROLD: We are indeed back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our guests are Elton and Corey from Overnight.
One of the craziest stories I ever got on my Campfire show, where people call in and share their stories, is this guy called in and he said when he was a kid, he was walking through the hall and he sees this guy, this teenager, in his kitchen making a peanut butter sandwich with a hoodie on. Then fast forward several years later, this boy has grown up to a teenager, he’s in the kitchen, he’s got his hoodie on, he’s making a peanut butter sandwich, minding his own business, and then he sees this ghostlike kid run through the hallway. So he saw himself in both directions.
How do you explain something like that? That’s not a ghost. He’s still alive. So there was some kind of circular, weird time loop where they saw each other. What do you think about that? Other explanations other than the dead, like explanations about time loops, parallel universes, those kinds of things? Have you thought about any of that?
ELTON: You’re opening our Pandora’s Box where we could go on for eight years just throwing out ridiculous theories. It’s our favorite thing to do, just throw out these random theories.
COREY: Oh yeah.
ELTON: You want to start it? [laughs]
COREY: That just goes into my whole theory of like, is time even real? Like, was that the world somehow glitching in a way, that he was seeing his future, and then somehow when he got to that point in the future, he was then seeing his past? But then is that even paranormal? Isn’t that just more of a glitch?
ELTON: Technically paranormal is anything that can’t be scientifically explained.
JIM HAROLD: He saw a ghost, in a way. Of himself.
ELTON: Can we exploit what your biggest fear is?
COREY: Sure. Go ahead, you tell them. What’s my biggest fear?
ELTON: You can explain it better than I can understand – your biggest fear is just like floating into nothing.
COREY: Stop. Okay, okay, okay.
ELTON: I’m more grounded in terms of I’m living here where I live, but you have some fears that get a hold of you.
COREY: I used to have sleep paralysis two to three times a week in the house that I grew up in when I was a little kid, and I would always wake up in the middle of the night just crying and trying to explain to my family, “I was stuck and I couldn’t move, and then I couldn’t breathe, and then there was someone standing in my corner,” and they would just be worried, like, “You were dreaming. Just go back to bed.”
But I always had this feeling during sleep analysis and I never could explain it. But as I got older, I realized – have you ever been to a carnival? You know the ride that spins very fast, like a UFO, and you’re just stuck to the wall?
JIM HAROLD: Yeah.
COREY: During my sleep paralysis, what I realized is I would have that stuck feeling, and then out of nowhere, it was as if time sped up and everything was going very fast, but I am floating in slow motion, just away into nothingness.
JIM HAROLD: Yikes.
COREY: The feeling, or even just the thought of floating away – it triggers me, because for years as a little kid, that was my biggest fear without knowing that was my biggest fear. I couldn’t even explain that.
ELTON: This is one of those conversations where we start talking about infinite possibilities and parallel universes. We’ll go on with this conversation so long he’ll want to not ghost hunt anymore. He’ll start being like, “Wait, what if I am unlocking other universes, and what if…?” And he’ll start freaking out. I’m like, “No, no, Corey, we’re fine, we’re here. We’re here right now.”
COREY: But what if I float away, and then what if I hit the sun, and then what if when I land on the sun, I then go to the star, and then the star doesn’t like me, so then the star sends me back to the Earth, and then I float again?
JIM HAROLD: What’s your biggest fear, Elton, with the paranormal? Or are you just “I don’t have any fear”?
ELTON: I don’t have any fears. I don’t have any at all.
COREY: He doesn’t.
ELTON: I don’t know. I feel like anything that could’ve happened to an extreme extent has already happened, or someone out there would know how to be prepared. And for whatever this is worth, I do go into the challenging element of things a lot. I did literally sit in Room B340 at the Queen Mary for an hour and a half and let them perform the ritual and volunteered myself as best I could to be possessed. But I’m fortunate enough where I feel like if that were to happen to me, if I actually were to be completely taken over, he would be two phone calls away from being able to get someone to immediately help. Hopefully before I did any damage.
COREY: Oh, no, trust me, dude. After that B340, I talked to the witches. I was like, “Okay, so if Elton is possessed, and I see he has an extra two pair of eyes, what kind of salt should I buy? What temperature should I turn the bathwater on? [laughs] How do I get rid of this?”
ELTON: The bathwater was unrelated to the possession.
JIM HAROLD: Elton, I will ask you – why did you decide to take that step of basically inviting demons to possess you?
ELTON: What we do is paranormal investigation, right? With investigations, or anything of that nature, scientific experiment, there’s an experimental element to it. I want to be able to progress our ability, my ability, to find answers or at least open up a possibility that maybe there’s something here that works. To me, I treat myself as a guinea pig for all of this. I’m completely open to it. I make it super clear anywhere I go, permission to do whatever you want – scratch me, touch me, push me, communicate with me, whatever it is. I feel like I’m very transparent with it.
So if I can over myself as a way to document evidence and do the thing that we’re here to do, that we’ve been trying to do for almost two years straight now, then I’m all for it. To me, that’s my perspective on it. I just want to do whatever I can to get some form of – I want to get a level of proof that anyone that could ever watch it would go –
JIM HAROLD: Corey’s shaking his head. [laughs]
ELTON: Sorry?
JIM HAROLD: I said Corey’s shaking his head.
COREY: He’s just so brave.
JIM HAROLD: I will say you’re a lot more brave than me. I’m a coward. I’d be like, “Forget it. I’m gonna find a new line of work.”
ELTON: Where do you want to investigate? Where can we take you?
JIM HAROLD: I don’t know. You’re coming to Cleveland, so…
ELTON: You’ve been doing this for how long and you don’t know? Come on. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Actually, you mentioned Trans-Allegheny. That was one that I always wanted to check out.
ELTON: Let us know when. We’ll make it happen. We love that place. We just went back a few weeks ago and it was somehow better than the first time.
JIM HAROLD: You think about an asylum like that and the horrible life that those people had, and then they had these mental illnesses and all that sadness – it just has to be a really fertile ground for hauntings and some really sad situations.
ELTON: Yeah. What was actually really cool when we just went back to Trans-Allegheny is we didn’t know – everyone knows the main forefront of the building, which is a four-story building. Everyone knows about that. When we got there, they’re like, “We have a surprise for you.” I’m like, “Cool.” Don’t know at all what the surprise is. There’s four, maybe five more buildings behind it that no one’s ever allowed in. And they let us into there. They have a completely preserved prison for the criminally insane, they have an extension of the women’s ward area. They had all these buildings. We had no idea. They have another 150,000 square feet of buildings back there.
So we had a really cool, well-rounded experience getting to go to all of these different sections that were built over hundreds of years, different decades, all these different uses. So that place, when you have full access to it, is…
COREY: Incredible.
ELTON: Yeah, it’s really, really cool. And then you can start sending people that are more open to the children spirits, like Corey, or the people that want to go more toward the criminally insane, like me – we can send people on our team to the buildings that they’re more fit to, which is really cool about the team dynamic that we have.
COREY: And it works. I think we get incredible activity, honestly.
ELTON: By the way, we asked him the scariest place he’d been to, and he answered, but I realized we kind of skipped over –
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, let’s find out for you.
ELTON: It’s weird because my brain didn’t register this as an answer because the video hasn’t come out yet, but we just went to the Warren Museum. We actually went to the real Ed and Lorraine Warren Occult Museum in Monroe, Connecticut. We were the first paranormal team other than the family or NESPR to ever investigate there. So we were in the room with the real Annabelle, with the real “Devil made me do it,” Satanic altar, with all of these different artifacts from all of these cases, with all the cameras and everything they had ever used. It’s in there, and all these items that people have sent in from all over the world that they believe are haunted.
A room full of probably a thousand items, Ed’s original paintings – to be in there, to be in the house – that was probably the most insane night we’ve ever had.
COREY: That was the most anxious I’ve ever been during an investigation.
JIM HAROLD: You’ve got to believe those artifacts hold some really wild energy.
ELTON: What was so, so bizarre about that night – originally we were supposed to be out at I think 1:00 or 1:15 in the morning because they didn’t want us in there for Devil’s Hour. And somehow I convinced them to let us stay in there until 4:15 in the morning. After a little bit of back and forth, they were like “Okay, we’ll let you do it, but these are the rules. There can only be two of you at a time.” They gave us all these specific rules. They’re like, “We’re going to make sure we have holy water there.” The most, rightfully so, serious situation that we had ever been in. They’re like, “We’re not letting you go in unless we guide you physically and spiritually and make sure that when you leave, you’re safe as well.”
I don’t mean this in a sarcastic way – it couldn’t have been any more of a storybook buildup of events. When we were in there in the earlier evening, activity was normal but nothing was outstanding where you go, “That was 100% a thing.” As it got later into the evening, we had all these different items set up – none had gone off. And at 2:57 a.m., one of our devices goes off. It had been in the room for five hours, and at 3 a.m. on the dot, it goes off for a minute straight. One of the devices we’ve used basically since Day 1 of investigating. We’ve never seen it go off for a minute straight.
And things started building and building and building, and then all of a sudden our tape recorders, our old school – we bought classic real tape reorders – started turning off on their own. We recorded this all on VHS camera. We wanted to do everything as original to the way Ed Warren would’ve done it. Everything started building at 3:30 in the morning, 4:30. It was such a bizarre experience.
All of those stories you hear about Devil’s Hour and how things are more – it all happened, and it was just – the fact that it all happened in that place with those items was like, “Oh, okay, we’ve got to take this.”
COREY: And you were so brave. Every question that you asked, you weren’t – like me. You weren’t scared. Every single question that I asked during that investigation was I started it with “In the name of God.”
ELTON: In the name of Jesus Christ.
COREY: Yes, “In the name of Jesus Christ, do you blah, blah, blah?” “In the name of Jesus Christ, can you touch this cat ball?” Because they told me as long as you say it in that form, they can’t really attach to you as likely, I guess I could say, because you’re bringing up religion and stuff like that. But you were walking in there – [laughs]
ELTON: Like, “Hey Annie!”
COREY: “Hey Annie!” [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Oh man. [laughs]
ELTON: I wasn’t actually like “Hey Annie.”
COREY: You said “Hey Annie-bell.”
ELTON: That was a cool night. They were very clear with us – take this place seriously, treat it with respect. I’m going to do that. They invited us to their home. But at the same time, I’m like, okay, where’s the line? I’m not going to say “In the name of Jesus Christ” because that’s not where my beliefs lie, and I like to stay true to myself. So they were like, “Okay, then you can ask your questions. Just don’t taunt.” Maybe that’s why it worked. Maybe because he was saying “In the name of Jesus Christ,” he was oppressing answers, and here I am just going, “Hey Annie, how you doing today?”
JIM HAROLD: Elton, the question is, have you taken selfies with Robert the Doll?
ELTON: I have not. The only time I’ve ever been to Key West, and I wasn’t even aware of that at all. But I am going to West Palm Beach next week. Should I take a drive down?
COREY: You should.
JIM HAROLD: There you go. And if something bad happens, don’t blame me.
COREY: Wait, you shouldn’t. [laughs]
ELTON: You’re turning him into a “no” answer. Let him be. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: No, it’s up to you guys, but it’s not my fault just because I suggested it.
We’re talking with Corey and Elton from Overnight, that hugely popular YouTube channel, and we’ll be back right after this.
The Paranormal Podcast is brought to you by ParaBox. ParaBox is your source for amazing, one-of-a-kind paranormal t-shirts that are not only great t-shirts, but they’ll actually lead you into online mysteries. We’re joined today by the mastermind and the founder of ParaBox, Jim Hamilton. Jim, tell us a little bit about ParaBox.
JIM HAMILTON: ParaBox is a monthly t-shirt subscription box with our shirts being themed around paranormal topics, like ghosts and haunted locations, UFOs and aliens, cryptids, urban legends, and other mysterious topics like that. But what makes our shirts a truly unique experience is that every shirt has a built-in puzzle. The artwork on each shirt design contains a hidden password, and that password can be used on a specific URL on our website that will unlock a monthly challenge.
JIM HAROLD: I want to mention you’re a graphic designer, and a great one. You do a lot of work for me, and I appreciate it, and you do a great job. We’ve worked together for years. But the thing I want to say is that this is such a great idea – ParaBox, that is. I’ve got to believe you’ve had a great response from your members.
JIM HAMILTON: We’ve been at this since 2017 and have had great reviews thus far. Our product is designed to have some user interaction and to get your brain gears moving. Whether you’re trying to solve it individually or as a family or even a group of friends that are competing against each other to see who can solve the challenge the fastest, it’s more than a cool t-shirt. Which, by the way, expect to be asked about it while you’re wearing one because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked about one of my ParaBox shirts when I’m out and about.
JIM HAROLD: And those designs are really something, I’ve got to say. My daughters absolutely love them and they wear the shirts all the time. They kind of fight over them. [laughs] It’s kind of funny here in the Harold household. So where do you get the ideas for these designs?
JIM HAMILTON: Ever since I was a kid, digging through the paranormal books at the local library, I can always remember having a curious mind. Even today, I love to find a topic that I can explore deeper and take down the rabbit hole. What we wanted to do was give our subscribers that same experience and explore new paranormal stories, and old paranormal stories that they haven’t heard in a while or that they want to explore deeper and learn more about.
JIM HAROLD: You’ve gone the extra mile and set up a special URL, a special webpage for our listeners where they can get a great deal, right?
JIM HAMILTON: Jim, if your listeners want to jump on over to www.paraboxmonthly.com/jim, there they can read some of our reviews and they can also get a promo code for 25% off all subscription plans.
JIM HAROLD: That’s so cool, Jim. Thank you so much for doing that. I appreciate it, and I know our listeners out there appreciate it, too. You heard the man; go to paraboxmonthly.com/jim. That’s paraboxmonthly.com/jim, and get that deal, 25% off a ParaBox monthly subscription. I highly recommend it. Thanks, ParaBox.
Subscribe or follow the Paranormal Podcast today wherever you get your podcasts. Please rate, review, and tell a friend, too. It helps so much. Thanks! Now back to the Paranormal Podcast.
JIM HAROLD: We are indeed back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our guests are Elton and Corey from Overnight.
Okay, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I know doing my own thing, full-time for 10 years, I’m thankful that I can sail my own ship and do the kind of shows I want to do. It occurs to me that your audience is bigger than a lot of these big name paranormal TV shows. What are your thoughts about that? Do you like being independent? I’ve got to believe, if they haven’t already – and I bet they have – but if they haven’t already, the guys from the cable networks are going to come calling with the success you’ve had. What is your viewpoint on the way you do things as opposed to maybe the way Hollywood does things? What are your thoughts on your operation?
ELTON: To be honest, I can’t speak to the way the Hollywood ghost shows are made. To be fully transparent, I try to avoid watching any other paranormal content I can. I don’t like the idea of accidentally piggybacking ideas in the slightest.
JIM HAROLD: Exactly. Oh my God, exactly. I try not to listen to too many other paranormal podcasts or anything for exactly the same reason. I respect that.
ELTON: Strangely, the only time I’ll ever watch another show is if I know I’m going to a location and I know it’s a big episode for them. I’ll watch it just so I can literally go, “Okay, these are the things they did. We’re not doing those.”
JIM HAROLD: That’s cool. I think that’s cool.
ELTON: Just to be like “we’re not doing that.” But as far as the show goes, you’re right, we’ve had them come to us and say, “Hey” – I think the biggest player in a paranormal TV show production company space has come to us. I was like, “I can’t do it. I can’t sign it away.” Because then we’re employees to someone else. It doesn’t matter if we’re executive producer or whatever it is. We’re employees.
I love the fact that I can just text Corey and Evan and Jonah and Corbin and Matt and anyone on our team and go, “Hey, you guys free July 7th to the 14th? Let’s do a road trip. Let’s go to these locations.” And they’re like, “Yeah.” We can do it when we want, how we want, where we want, whatever ideas. I don’t think making these videos would be fun for us, I don’t think our videos would be fun to watch, if we weren’t doing it the way we’re doing it.
We’re friends first, and we literally do this in my motorhome. He will sleep on the couch while I drive, while someone forgot to turn the fridge on and our food goes rotten. All these things.
JIM HAROLD: [laughs] It sounds like that might’ve happened, huh?
COREY: Oh, many times.
JIM HAROLD: That’s more frightening than a ghost.
ELTON: Someone left pineapple in our fridge for a month, and when I opened it, there were literally like 10,000 maggots in the fridge.
JIM HAROLD: Oh God. That reminds me of the Billy Joel story where Paul McCartney was coming over, so he hid all his cold cuts in his drawers, and like a week later – because Paul McCartney’s a vegetarian – Billy Joel was intimidated and he didn’t want to have cold cuts laying around. So about a week later, his wife is like, “What smells in this kitchen?” [laughs] Anyway, I’m sorry. Go ahead.
ELTON: No, yeah. To me, that stuff is just as fun as when we’re actually getting evidence. I think it’s really fun that we do this on our own. I think the only downside is we edit everything on our own. I think that’s when things start getting – because we want to film the best we can, and what I keep forgetting is when we film the best we can – like our Queen Mary thing, the last one we did, we ended up with like 33 hours of footage.
JIM HAROLD: Oh yeah, it’s like a 20:1 or 40:1 ratio or something crazy with video shot to editing. Editing’s the hardest thing.
ELTON: Yeah. So that’s our main bottleneck right now. We literally have – I think I looked yesterday; we have 23 episodes, locations, that are filmed, and we just can’t get them edited quick enough.
JIM HAROLD: That’s amazing.
ELTON: That’s the only downside, but that downside is so greatly offset.
JIM HAROLD: Any video editors out there?
ELTON: Please. Oh my God, please. [laughs] We’re on LinkedIn right now, we’re on Upwork right now. We’re in all these different places right now trying to find – I saw my shirt and I went to do the same thing, like please, help me.
COREY: But also, if it was with someone else, I feel like, like you were saying, it would feel like a job. All these investigations, all these trips that we go on – it doesn’t feel like a job at all. This is literally us being like, “Yo, boys, let’s go here, let’s go here, let’s go investigate here,” and we’re like, “Okay, bet. I’m 100% down.” It’s fun. It’s a hobby. It’s actually something that we all love to do, and we don’t have to force trying to do it. We actually enjoy it a lot. It doesn’t seem like work at all.
ELTON: We got really lucky, too, with the two camera guys that we have. We started with just Evan, and I literally will not do videos without him. We will not do paranormal investigations unless he’s available. We got really lucky because he cares so much. And he comes from the major TV studio / movie production background space, so he takes it very seriously and helps us keep gear things online and keep us on schedule as opposed to we would just spend nine hours talking about if he floated off in space.
So we’re very lucky to have Evan, who keeps us grounded and keeps the cinematography thing professional, and Jonah. They’ve become really good at giving us that TV show feel that I feel like our videos have.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, they look very good. They look very, very good. And that’s the thing. You can do that independently now. You don’t need the big studios. You don’t.
ELTON: Yeah.
JIM HAROLD: Now, you guys are going on tour. Tell us about that.
ELTON: August 10th. Our first day is the Whaley House in San Diego. Going all the way out to Boston, back across through Denver, Colorado, Salt Lake City – basically zig-zagging across the U.S. It’s cool because we’re starting – honestly, it’s similar to Campfire stories. We’re starting our own podcast live show, but the main focus of it isn’t really to talk about our videos and our experiences because we have the videos, and we don’t cut much out anyway.
But it’s what we’ve learned over these years, and talking to more and more people, and even talking to our friends about what we do. A lot more people either believe in the paranormal or have had these experiences, but they’ve never felt comfortable sharing them. They’ve never felt comfortable telling their friends or their family, especially not strangers, about them. So part of what we want to do in this live show podcast is we want to bring people onstage and have a face-to-face conversation with them about their experiences in an effort to get more people comfortable about being open that they’ve had these things happen to them.
That’s the main part. We’re going to keep it fun, we’re going to keep it comedic, we’re probably going to ask them questions and poke jokes. It’s in our nature. And then right after, it’s the paranormal investigation. So right after that, we’re literally taking 12 to 16 people to do a paranormal investigation with us. We’re providing all of our tools, everything that we have. We’re providing a historian, a guide. We’re giving people two options to get the full overnight paranormal experience with us for 6.66 hours long, or the live show that we’re doing where we’re going to meet everyone and take pictures and say hello.
Really, the goal is just to meet this community. The best part, too, is the setting for all of our live shows is within the haunted locations.
JIM HAROLD: Oh, that’s cool.
ELTON: We’re not doing it at a theater nearby.
JIM HAROLD: Just rattle off a couple of them, so we get a feel.
ELTON: Missouri State Pen, we’re going in and setting up in one of the cell blocks. We’ll be ground floor and we’ll be using all the balconies of the cell blocks. Whaley House, we’ll be in the courtroom. USS Salem, we’ll be in one of the cafeteria brig areas. Pennhurst Asylum, we’ll be there. Waverly Hills. All these major locations. Old Joliet Pen, Eloise Asylum, Indiana State Sanitarium. We’re hitting as many as we possibly can, and always trying to set it up in the coolest room that the fire marshals will let us have 100 people in.
JIM HAROLD: [laughs] Got to listen to those fire marshals. And where can people find the details on if they want to sign up to come to the tour? What’s the website?
ELTON: It’s overnightparanormal.com. Just right there, all of our dates are there, all the different ticket options are there. Signup, information, questions. I built the site. So yeah, everything they could ever want to know about the tour is right there on the website. Even a little video where we explain the tour and show one of our live show settings as well.
COREY: Yep.
JIM HAROLD: So you’ve got the hugely successful Overnight channel on YouTube; you’re going to be doing the live podcast and so forth, and the live events. Where do you see this going years down the road? Can you see yourself sticking with the paranormal for the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years? Has it become that much of a lifestyle?
COREY: I can’t see it not being a part of my life now. Growing up with it and then now with it moving into – it’s what we do. I couldn’t imagine in 5 or 10 years not investigating – even 20-30 years from now. I feel like there will never be a time in my life where this isn’t involved. I just feel like it was meant to be for both of us. Since we were younger, we got hints like “Hey, you’re going to investigate when you’re older, you just don’t know.”
ELTON: Corey has wholeheartedly told me so many times – just us talking, he’ll be like, “I could never see myself going a year without investigating.” He loves it that much. I enjoy it, and I think we’ve gotten lucky in how we’re able to film this. We don’t go out once a week for an entire year. We will go out for 23 straight days and film, and that way everyone can get that break, energetically, spiritually, emotionally, just in general.
COREY: But it’s nice. I like doing it that way. Dude, so many times, we’ll meet up with other professionals and they’re like, “So you guys cleansed yourself, right? After last night?” We’re like, “Yeah, we haven’t seen a shower in six days. What are you talking about?” [laughs]
ELTON: I feel like that helps the other locations, because there could be spirits attached to us that are following us there that are going to help with activity. The spirits could just know, “Oh, they’re open right now.”
JIM HAROLD: Well, congratulations, guys, on all your success. I hope the tour goes fantastic. It sounds like it’s going to. Once again, tell people where they can find – I mean, over a million people have found your YouTube channel, but just in case one person’s listening and they’ve not found it, how can they find the YouTube channel? And again, how can they tap into the tour and everything?
ELTON: It’s simple. It’s just youtube.com/overnight. That’s our URL. Just type in “overnight,” we’ll pop up. And then overnightparanormal.com for the tour and tickets and all of that information. Everything is right there.
JIM HAROLD: Elton and Corey, it’s been great to spend some time with you and get to meet you. Congratulations on everything. Continued success with Overnight and the Overnight tour, and a pleasure to have you on the program today.
ELTON: Thank you so much, Jim.
COREY: Appreciate it, man.
ELTON: Yeah, a lot.
JIM HAROLD: Wow, that was great, checking in with those guys, and congratulations on all their success.
If you like what you heard, please make sure to subscribe or follow the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold on whatever podcast app you use – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, whatever it is, we’re on it. So please do that. I would appreciate it. And we’ll be back next week with a great Paranormal Podcast. We actually have Christine and Em coming up from And That’s Why We Drink.
I’ll talk to you next week. Have a good one, everybody. Bye-bye.