My Two Cents: Personal ghost stories & a chat with ‘Paranormal Witness’ producer

Welcome to the 14th episode of “My Two Cents” with comedian Bill Engvall, the show designed to make you laugh and think! Scroll to the bottom to listen to our chat with a producer from the hit Syfy show, Paranormal Witness.

Special Guest Appearance: Mark Lewis of Paranormal Witness

Coming on the heels of last week’s episode with the Marcus Dunstan, who’s the director of Bill’s new horror film The Neighbor, the ongoing chat about Bill’s lesser-known darker side continues in this week’s episode. But this week, the conversation shifts from the make-believe to the paranormal, and whether you can ever truly believe that ghosts exist.

Bill recounts two ghost stories told to him from convincing sources — and a third he hopes he’s able to recount some day. The first is a story about one of the first apartments he and his wife, Gail, rented in Los Angeles. Otherwise analytical and skeptical, Gail swears she was visited while she was breastfeeding by the friendly ghost of the woman who had recently died in the home of natural causes. The second story comes from one of Bill’s three little sisters, who swears she saw the ghost of their grandmother. When pressed, Bill’s sister described what her grandmother was wearing, which happened to be exactly what she was buried in — details Bill’s sister could have never have otherwise known. Lastly, Bill admits that due to the untimely passing of his oldest sister, he has long hoped that her spirit might visit him someday to assure him she has crossed over to another, better place.

Lastly, Bill is joined by Mark Lewis, producer of the SyFy TV show, Paranormal Witness. Now in its sixth season, this acclaimed British show isn’t your hokey, ghost-chasing reality show with transistor radios and seances who claim they can see specific ghosts or translate what they’re saying. It also isn’t a show that plays into the traditional notion that “all ghosts are from the Victorian era and wear veils,” Lewis jokes. Instead, the show’s producers search extensively for regular Joe’s who can tell the most convincing, corroborated, original ghost stories on TV. One story features three Georgia college students who swear they were haunted by the ghost of a crack fiend who died in their rented home. Another features the story of a Voodoo preacher who, according to legend, cast a spell on a home in the south — a story so compelling that great American novelist Harper Lee was pursuing as the basis for a true-crime novel before her death.

A skeptic himself, Lewis says that having now made over 60 episodes of this show “you start to think that ‘these people can’t all be aiming to deceive.'” You can watch episodes of Paranormal Witness online, and you can also follow the show on Facebook and Twitter.

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