The Ghoul Guide Shares Favorite Haunted Locations and Theories on Paranormal Activity [Interview]

Welcome back to DEAD Time. This month I talked with haunted travel blogger and paranormal investigator Courtney Eastman, who you might know as The Ghoul Guide.

Courtney and her team travel all over the country to haunted and forgotten locations and she has acquired over 100,000 followers on Instagram in the process by sharing short videos of her investigations with the world.

Courtney is also a featured writer in The Feminine Macabre Volume I and The Feminine Macabre Volume 3, a collection of essays and paranormal experiences from an all-female and non-binary perspective, including witchcraft, Tarot, cryptids, hauntings, and folklore.

Bloody Disgusting was excited to have the opportunity to talk with Courtney Eastman, aka The Ghoul Guide, about her favorite haunted locations, scariest paranormal experiences, theories on paranormal activity, and more.

Bloody Disgusting: How did you first get involved in the paranormal?

Courtney Eastman: The paranormal has pretty much been a constant in my life ever since I was a kid. I grew up around cemeteries. I was always into the spooky stories and the lore. So, when the paranormal TV shows started coming out in the 2000s, that’s when my interest in it was piqued. Then high school came around and I would try to get everyone to go out ghost hunting in the cemeteries and stuff with me. But no one really wanted to do it. So, it was kind of just like something that’s always been in my life, no matter how far I try to push away from it. There was always just a way to have it come back to me in a sense.

BD: You travel all over the country. What is your favorite haunted location that you have investigated, and why?

CE: It’s so hard to pick a favorite, but if I were to pick one right now, the first one coming to my head is the West Virginia State Penitentiary. I first heard about it on MTV’s Fear, and then I just knew of the lore through all the ghost shows and stuff and my own research. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I actually got to go and investigate it and ever since then things have just been really weird. Within the last two years, when we did our little weekends there, I was left alone in one of the jail cells and we had someone hit one of the doors or something.

BD: I saw that video. That was absolutely terrifying!

CE: Yeah, I love the video because you can just see my realization of just being like, “Oh no, I’m stuck in here. Like there’s nothing I can do.” I investigate the most with my two friends Steve and Dylan. One of them has a paranormal event company that I help out with, so that’s how I get to go to a lot of locations. They love to mess with me because they found out I was so easy to scare. Dylan jumped out and I yelled at him, and it was right after I yelled at him. I looked at it like the ghost was like, “Oh, you scared her but let me do this one.” Then a bang happened. He was quick to say that he didn’t do it. And I was I was quick to say, “Oh, it must have been Steve.” He was just like, “No, we’re the only two people in here.” That’s when I started realizing I’m literally stuck in here and whatever happened, happened. It was so loud.

Then this past year, a couple months ago, we went back for a weekend and that same noise happened. We could hear the chain or the fence, because maximum security is all fenced in, even on the inside. So, we could hear something hitting the fence and it kind of like reverbed it. We found this old kitchen cart and the door was halfway open, so we slammed it open against the fence and it made the same sound. And then it went right back into the place where we found it. So, I was like, “I wonder if that was it.” And then after like ten minutes of that, we ended up hearing a mimic of our friend who was on the other side of the prison, unaware of where we were. [laughs] He was on TikTok live, not even paying attention to anyone. So West Penn is a very, very creepy place. I feel like the more we go, the more it just starts to really show itself to us.

BD: How do you select locations you want to travel to and investigate?

CE: I kind of just go based off what I find and what I find interesting. When it comes to the events, I really don’t plan anything. I’m just going to show up and we’re going to have a fun time. But when it comes to the places that I book and the places that I’m interested in, I kind of just poke around on the internet and see what people are talking about or what rabbit hole leads me somewhere. I’m very interested in unique stories and unique places, especially like the places that are being completely forgotten about because there’s always stories to find in there. It’s just a matter of who’s going to find them and who’s going to dig them out.

BD: Can you share your scariest paranormal experience and how you handled it?

CE: It’s funny that you mentioned this because I always have my phone on silent and in the winter this year, I was trying to batch reels and I was trying to get things going just so that I could have a back stock whenever I wanted to post. And it was getting around 11:00 pm at night, and somehow my sound came on on my phone when I threw my phone on my bed. I just listened to it because it was a video of a staircase. I knew that nothing should have been there but as I was going to my bed and the video was playing, I could hear someone walking in high heels on the floor and I was like, “Oh, that’s weird. That wasn’t there.” Basically, the video was from months prior when I had an investigation at the old hospital on College Hill in West Virginia. It’s on the West Virginia and Kentucky border. It’s an old coal mining hospital that was like the only hospital in that small town, so it’s a very creepy place. My two friends from before were sleeping in the house that we rented on the property for that night, and I still needed to do B-roll.

I walked down, and I saw the keys on the counter to get into the hospital and I was like, “You know what? Might as well just go.” So, it was like 10:00 am in the morning and I ended up locking myself inside this hospital completely by myself so I could do B-roll and not have anyone scare me, but ultimately, the ghost inside scared me. When I was standing there in that moment, I remember because the video shoots down to the stairs and then up to the second floor. I was trying to make a video of like, would you rather go upstairs or go downstairs? And in that moment, I was just like, “I’m not going to go in that basement. I have no need to go in the basement.” It kind of freaked me out. Then here I am ten months later, not even knowing that I caught disembodied footsteps and what kind of sounds like someone whispering, “Get off your phone.”

It was so weird and the funniest thing about it is the fact that I used this piece of footage on reels probably like three times before I even noticed because I put sound over everything.

Sometimes you don’t pick up on the EVPs. It’s easy to miss the easy part sometimes. What I heard was the footsteps and then when I boosted the audio and I put it out on TikTok I was blowing up my friends’ phones at like 11:00 pm at night, like, “Are you hearing this? You need to, I’m panicking. I can’t go to bed.” Then people online were the ones to actually say, “No, it sounds like they’re saying, “Get off your phone or move out of the way or something like that.” I don’t know, in that moment, I feel like I handled it pretty well, mainly because I had no idea what was happening. But ten months later, the whole panic attack happened about it.

BD: Do you think that paranormal activity could just be leftover energy in a location, or do you believe there is life after death, or maybe a combination of the two?

CE: I kind of have a broad spectrum on it, but the more I do this with just like everything we learn and the random experiences that we had, like a mimic mimicking our friend or hearing the sounds that we did, I’m starting to kind of point to the fact that maybe we’re the ghosts. Maybe these paranormal interactions that we’re having are just us from the future or just some weird timeline where everything just kind of lines up perfectly for that one moment. What if the stories that we go investigating and the stories that we know in these locations are just us from the future showing up in the past, if that makes sense.

We just have so many of these weird experiences like at the Indiana State Sanatorium, seven of us were sitting on the stairs and we all saw flashlights come into a room when we were about to start an EVP session. So, we’re like, “Oh, we’ll just wait for them to come in.” And then all of a sudden, the lights went out and no one showed up. So, two people ran in the hallway and they were like, “There’s no one out here and there’s no way they could have run that fast away. We would have heard them.” Everybody in the group saw the same thing. Seven people saw it. Like at Trans-Allegheny Asylum, as rumor claims, what if you were to walk up the stairs and open the door and then instantly be taken back to like the 1930s when it was open, and the nurse saw you? Like he or she did, she saw us, all our ghosts, like black clothes and then our book bags. And then she goes off and tells someone and was like, “Hey, you’ll never believe what I saw.” And then we just end up investigating ourselves. It’s just like this weird circle [laughs].

BD: Like two different timelines that are taking place at the same time and just bleed into each other.

CE: Yeah! They just line up in the world.

You can follow The Ghoul Guide on Instagram and you can find Courtney’s haunted travel itinerary, social media links, and even The Ghoul Guide merchandise right here.