A different kind of paranormal show…

Every once in while I’ll watch a paranormal TV show, documentary or similar; after all I can’t bury my head in books all the time! Actually that’s not true, I could bury my head in books all the time. However on this occasion I had heard some positive things about a little paranormal series following a case that couple Greg Newkirk and Dana Matthews; better known for their Week in Weird website, were investigating. Greg and Dana were joined by Karl Pfeiffer and Connor Randall, who are well known for their investigations at the famous Stanley Hotel. Along with an additional camera-man the team of five embarked on a strange paranormal expedition, which they compared to John A. Keel’s visit to Point Pleasant. Keel’s own journey later became better known as ‘The Mothman Prophecies’, but more on that later.

Before I jump into the whole paranormal aspects of Hellier, I want to firstly congratulate the team for the project. Hellier is beautifully shot in my opinion; better still its put together and packaged really well too. Each episode is very engaging and builds the bigger storyline really well. As a paranormal series goes, Hellier is a little different from the usual and current TV formats. Many of which seem to be built on one or a mixture of a few current formats. Hellier’s format is a breathe of fresh air. If you’ve not seen Hellier then I recommend you give it a watch, give it a chance as its certainly an interesting one.

What’s Hellier all about…

So, what’s Hellier all about then? Well Hellier is a small town in Kentucky, USA. However the story starts when Newkirk received an email from a guy that was supposedly a new resident of Hellier with his family, but had encountered some odd creatures in his yard. Of course Newkirk was relatively sceptical of the email initially and as any good investigator would, he asked for a little more evidence.

Often when we receive emails from individuals that claim to be experiencing some kind of paranormal activity, we may ask them to provide a little more information and evidence; they don’t return. However on this occasion Newkirk received another email with more information and also photographs too. The photo’s included some interesting footprints, which Newkirk states that some friends identified as being very hard to fake. These photo’s and the Hellier residence description soon had the creatures named as ‘goblins.’

Synchronicities…

Right from the onset the show mentions an area of psychical research that’s close to my own heart; synchronicity. Oddly in some of my own research and investigations I’ve encountered synchronicity on numerous occasions. These encounters eventually led me to the work of Carl G Jung and perhaps even added to my own perspective of psychical research, which is often evident in my Psi Theory posts. Synchronicity is all about events that seem to have “meaningful coincidences” if they appear to happen with no causal relationship, but are still meaningfully related. In Hellier, the team appear to be brought together by synchronicities to begin with, but these equally appear to continue throughout their investigation. Also adding to that is the possibility of their investigation being linked to something much greater, which initially is a similar case to that of the Hellier one, but eventually to the Mothman Prophecies.

Of course as an investigator myself, not knowing these guys personally and the simple fact its a YouTube show; means I must equally look upon the case with a certain amount of scepticism. Although the series shares a lot of information it doesn’t present enough detail to be properly analysed. Something which would only come from a proper peer review of the case file. So, Greg if you read this, I would love to take a look at the actual case with all the details you may have captured on this please? Call me old fashioned, but I prefer a good old well researched proper report.

Looking at the case…

With that in mind lets quickly run through a few aspects of the Hellier case. First off we have the email, which is engaging and fascinating. It equally becomes more interesting with the pictures of footprints and also impossible to distinguish the profile shots. However the team themselves look into the sender of the email in the middle of their investigation and find no trace in Hellier. They literally can’t prove that he was ever there in fact. There are no records and no one in Hellier knew him. When they look into the emails address headers and associated IP addresses they soon realise its possible it was sent using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, making it hard to pin point its origin. Raising the question regarding if this person was ever in Hellier.

The team speak to a number of locals regarding the case, but as viewers we must trust them on this one. Here’s why. Very few, if any of the people they interview appear directly on camera. Often we will see an obscured angle, with the audio playing or it will simply be a telephone call. It could be argued that those could be manipulated when edited to fit the storyline. This obviously isn’t something that can be proven either way though.

Estes method…

There were some interesting aspects that came out of the use of the Estes Method too. As long as the events of the Hellier series were in order, then the results of the Estes Method were interesting. Again as this is an edited TV show it makes it difficult to show these as facts. Still an interesting sequence of events, tell me your opinion on this part of the series?

It could be equally stated that the work the group do in the final part of the series could be seen as very circumstantial. Granted I do like the approach of using the Ganzfield Experiment method or at least a variation of it. As fascinating as it was though it really didn’t deliver evidence to support the case. The team didn’t manage to find their goblins. However that said, that is one of the standard magnetic points of the paranormal; every time we think we are close to a major breakthrough it manages to escape our grasp. With every answer we obtain, we are also presented with ten to one hundred more questions. The team certainly appeared to have experienced something interesting during their investigation of the Hellier case. It’s without doubt they’ve raised some interesting questions.

Another mongoose case…

Now as every serious experienced investigator knows each case is always going to contain elements we shall not know. Possibilities that we theorise over with a hope we can understand more. If I was in Newkirk’s position I too would have investigated the Hellier case without doubt, just like Harry Price did with his talking mongoose case.

I have to admit there’s a little of me that would like to know a little more about what happened to ‘INK AND BLACK’ and of the ‘THIRD ORDER’, if these are really out there then that’s one hell of a case to investigate. After all one is isolated and the other MIA. I am a sucker for a cryptic message though.

Hellier is without doubt a refreshing addition to the repertoire of paranormal shows out there and I hope we see more like it in the future. Pfeiffer has a great eye and talent for putting a show like this together. The series raised some interesting questions and got me thinking how one persons goblin could be another’s alien, perhaps even someone else’s ghost too.

If you’ve not seen it, head over to YouTube and check Hellier out.

https://youtu.be/2XkbF35lZEk

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