Mint juleps won’t be only spirits stirred on Derby Day; curators of the paranormal to visit Walton farm

By Vicki Prichard
NKyTribune reporter

Emily Dickinson once wrote that “One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted – One need not be a House…”

Dana Matthews and Greg Newkirk know that a doll, a mirror, even – and maybe especially – a child’s clown, can be haunted because for four years the two have journeyed across the country with roughly 160 allegedly haunted, cursed, and supernaturally-significant artifacts in their Traveling Museum of the Paranormal & Occult, the world’s only mobile museum of paranormal objects.

So, on Saturday, May 6, mint juleps might not be the only spirits stirred when Newkirk and Dana help kick off the first Weird Weekends event at the purportedly haunted Benton Family Farm farmhouse in Walton. The farmhouse, which was built in 1898, has been a venue for small events as a haunted house to help raise funds for the Benton Farm. For 28 years, Benton Farm, a nonprofit, has educated children and families on farming and agricultural education.

Throughout the year, Newkirk and Matthews, who live in Covington, travel coast-to-coast doing presentations with the museum. The two self-professed “professional weirdos” have been featured on TLC’s Kindred Spirits and Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot. Newkirk says he’s particularly excited about the Benton Family Farm event because it’s the first time they’ll display the exhibit close to home.

The opportunity came about when Donnie Irvin, a friend of the Newkirk’s who worked with Nick Groff of the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures, decided he wanted to put the ghostly expertise he’d garnered from Groff to use back home in Kentucky through Weird Weekends. Irvin, from Burgin, had traveled the country visiting an array of haunted settings and the Benton Family Farm came up on his radar.

“I think the idea that it hasn’t been covered to death is part of the appeal,” says Newkirk. “The fun part about it is there are all of these stories that have been coming out about it for a few years and they’ve just recently started doing some overnight ghost hunts.”

Part of the mystery of the farm’s hauntings, says Newkirk, is that people can’t seem to figure out exactly why it’s haunted, or where it’s coming from.

“No one lives in the house anymore, but there was a family that lived in the home,” says Matthews. “We try to talk to as many people who had experiences, lived in the building, or spent some time there as we possibly can. We thought, ‘okay, this is a fun mystery,’” says Dana.

Apparently plenty of other people agree that it sounds like a good time. Greg says the $20 tickets for the 50-plus guests for the overnight ghost hunt at the farmhouse, which takes place from 8:30 pm until 4 a.m., quickly sold out. But between 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., visitors can view and handle the artifacts in their traveling museum as tickets are still available.

Newkirk says when they went in for their initial visit in the house with their audio recorders, infrared and thermal cameras, they detected activity in in areas of the attic and basement which weren’t used as part of the events.

“It seems like turning it into a haunted house might have stirred them [spirits] up a bit.

Strange vocation

The only thing that might be stranger than the Newkirk’s and Matthews’ vocation, is how they came to be husband and wife. As children, the two were rival ghost hunters, which Greg attributes to too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files, and Unsolved Mysteries in their childhood.

“Dana and I have been ghost hunting since we were kids, 12 and 13-years-old, and we ran rival ghost hunting websites and hated each other,” says Newkirk.

It was Matthews’ all-girl ghost-hunting team versus Newkirk’s all-boy team. The nadir of their feud occurred when Matthews got a Canadian television show, The Girly Ghosthunters.

“We were so mad because we were so jealous,” says Newkirk.

The rivalry continued for a while, then Newkirk apologized. They made their peace, eventually got married, and for nearly four years have traveled the country as a paranormal investigating team, with roughly 15 to 20 years of investigating between them. The two moved to Covington for a writing gig with Roadtrippers, a Cincinnati-based travel website where their area of expertise is uncovering the world’s weirdest hidden destinations.

“We get to be professional weirdos,” says Matthews. “It’s actually on our business cards.”

They’re clearly not alone in their interest in the subject of their sleuthing, but perhaps unique in their decision to make undertake it as a profession.

“I think that everybody has that interest, that innate interest in the unexplained, but it’s not everybody that decides to go and do this,” says Newkirk.

Creepy collectibles

Their well-known affinity for the “weird” is what prompted people to send ominous artifacts their way.

“Dana’s family would give her dolls that they said something was wrong with, or during our investigations we would college little nicknacks,” says Newkirk.

They had no intention of creating a traveling museum.

Four years ago, while giving a lecture in Kentucky about experiments they were doing about alien abduction they thought it might be fun to do a pop-up museum with a few of the objects they had collected. They knew by the response that there was something to it and people wanted to see more.

“We realized that there are only a few actual museums of paranormal and the occult, and so many people want to see this stuff, so we thought we’d do a museum,” says Newkirk.

Now they’re all over the country – from Maine to California – with their paranormal museum.

“People bring us stuff at the events,” says Newkirk. “We have a post office box set up just for people to send us things they don’t want anymore and it’s growing like crazy,” says Newkirk.

But, whereas one man’s trash is sometimes another man’s treasure, one man’s haunted hand-carved crone in this case, was still just another man’s haunted hand-carved crone.

“We have this one piece that was sent to us about a year ago that a couple of hikers found in the Catskill Mountains, and it’s a hand-carved figure of a woman with a noose around her neck and there are nails in her eyes, that’s obviously some kind of Appalachian folk magic,” says Newkirk.

According to the hikers, as soon as they brought the wooden figure into their home they realized that it was never where they left it. They woke one morning to find bare wet footprints on their apartment floor, their animals began acting strange, and when an apparition of an older woman showed up they decided to get rid of the object. Too frightened to return it the cave where they found it, they wrapped it in a pillowcase and mailed it to the Newkirk and Matthews, who plan to return it to the Catskills.

Matthews says they generally try to understand as much as they can about what’s going on with an object.

“For instance, haunted houses, sometimes people experience things that they kind of look at as being malevolent or terrifying, but really most of the time, the message is being missed,” says Matthews.

And as for the hand-carved crone, odds are, says Newkirk, she “just wants to go home.”

“This will probably be the first thing we try to take back to where it came from,” says Newkirk.

As one might expect, much of the museum’s collection is comprised of dolls and clowns. And just what is it about clowns that makes them so creepy? Well, well-crafted horror fiction and film have no doubt contributed to those nightmares.

“I think it’s because when you see the corruption of something that’s supposed to be innocent and pure, it’s very disturbing,” says Newkirk.

“That’s why children’s toys are always the creepiest things in horror movies. The corruption of the innocent is terrifying to us.”

Since they began collecting items for the paranormal museum, Newkirk says probably 90 percent of the items that come their way don’t necessarily act the way people think.

“But the things that do, do so in a way that we’ve been able to capture a lot of unusual things around them,” says Newkirk.

And sometimes, they capture a converted skeptic or two. Take, for instance, the man who looked into the scrying mirror.

Hundreds of years ago, says Newkirk, ‘seers’ would use pieces of black obsidian to gaze into to speak to the dead, or the future, or simply use for magic rituals. One such mirror was sent to them from a woman whose mother became obsessed with it, would sit in a dark closet for hours at a time with it and come out frazzled and defensive about her use of it – a red flag, he says, that something is going on. Since its inclusion in the museum, they’ve seen roughly a thousand people gaze into it and describe a scary experience, but some have great experiences.

“There was this one guy who walked up and saw the long line for the mirror – he was a really big man – and he says, ‘This all sounds like a bunch of BS to me,’” says Newkirk. “I said, ‘Please try it – give it a shot.’ So he picks it up, looks into it maybe 30 seconds and he looks so startled that he almost drops the mirror. He puts it down and I said, “What did you see?” He said he saw himself peek out from behind himself and smile. He said, “That’s it. I’m done.” And he never came back.”