The Mall is the New Crossroads with Celeste Mott

About this episode

The episode explores the impact of the documentary 'Hellier' on the perception of paranormal phenomena.

A strange thing happened in 2019. A five-part paranormal documentary series named after a small town in Kentucky was released for free on the internet. The promo art for the series featured a bizarre humanoid figure with a conical head and amphibious features and felt like clear counterprogramming to the run-of-the-mill ghost-harassing fodder dominating mainstream TV at the time. The project was helmed by first-time director Karl Pfeiffer, and the documentary focused on the chummy husband-and-wife paranormal investigation duo, Greg and Dana Newkirk. Up until this point, Greg and Dana were known primarily as ghost hunters, and their approach to branding could best be described as the intersection of the anomalous and fart jokes. This new documentary, Hellier, felt very different. As a pretentious snob, at the time, I would have called myself a Fortean. I was less interested in ghost-hunting shows and Ancient Aliens than I was in pondering the novel theories of Jacques Vallee and Terrence McKenna and their implications for what we might call the paranormal. Even though I was skeptical of Hellier initially, it was free after all, and I dove right in. Much like the Newkirk's…

People in this episode

Host: Chad Andro

Guest: Celeste Mott

Topics covered

• paranormal investigation
• documentary analysis
• cultural commentary
• ghost hunting
• Fortean theories

Keywords

• Hellier
• paranormal
• ghost hunting
• Fortean
• documentary

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Hellier

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