Fans of Ghost Hunters were stunned when popular paranormal investigators Amy Bruni and Adam Berry left the long-running Syfy TV series in 2014. There were rumors of a behind-the-scenes kerfuffle, but the pair — who worked as a team on the show — insists they were simply tired of living out of a suitcase.
For Bruni, the pull of home got stronger after she had her daughter Charlotte in 2012. “Once my daughter got older and she could see that I was leaving, I thought, ‘Why am I doing this?'” she says. “And that was it. There’s no crazy drama or anything.”
Berry, who opened non-profit Peregrine Theatre with his husband Ben in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 2013, found last-minute calls to film episodes in faraway places disruptive. “It’s not a lifestyle that really benefits someone having a life outside that,” he says.
Bruni and Berry may have left Ghost Hunters, but they still operate as a paranormal and creative team. In fact, Berry hints that a new TV project is in the works. “I can’t really elaborate too much on it,” he says. “But know that we’re together doing what we love to do. It’s possibly a different spin on the normal. It’s really, really inventive and creative.”
But Bruni says she’s picky: “It just has to be the perfect thing.”
Until Bruni and Berry conjure up the ideal TV project, paranormal fans can catch them in a much more intimate setting through Bruni’s boutique travel business, Strange Escapes. Bruni says she’d long been toying with ways to blend her love of travel and ghosts and stepping away from Ghost Hunters finally allowed her time to pull it all together.
“Having a small group of people that are like-minded and going to some amazing places that are just beautiful vacation destinations that also happen to be haunted, to me, sounded like bliss,” she says. “And it turned out a lot of people agreed with me. I released it and it started selling like crazy.”
Strange Escapes allows “seekers of strange” to join Bruni, Berry, and other well-known paranormal personalities like Chip Coffey and John Tenney for vacation-style investigations at some of the most haunted locations in the U.S. Over a long weekend, attendees get to enjoy a mixer with guests, in-depth lectures on all things weird, and, of course, ghost hunting.
“We hang out, we have a party, we have cocktails,” says Berry. “We’re so accessible, we’re totally real. That’s the biggest thing people say is, ‘You guys are real. You’re real people.'”
Past events have included visits to the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire and Mackinac Island in Michigan. Coming up are tours of the haunted, hallowed battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Colorado’s notorious Stanley Hotel, which inspired Stephen King’s The Shining.
According to Bruni, Strange Escapes attendees have “an eye-opening experience” and many have so much fun they book multiple dates, showing up in place after place like spooky groupies. “I feel like we’re the paranormal Grateful Dead,” Bruni laughs. “They’ve started calling themselves ‘Escapees.'”
“Escapees” aren’t the only ones having fun. Bruni and Berry, who each grew up in a haunted house, still love hanging out with spirits.
“For me, it’s all about the experience,” says Bruni. “I’m more in it because I view ghosts as people. That’s a theory, of course, but in my mind they’re people.”
And sometimes ghosts, like people, just need someone to talk to. “I feel sad sometimes thinking that they’re just kind of by themselves,” she explains. “Some of them are so eager to talk and interact, and I know that I’m a social creature, so I think they might be, too.”
For Berry, brushes with the paranormal are an addiction. “I think every time we go on an investigation, it is like an adrenaline rush,” he says. “You want to find out what’s happening, you want to experience something. You’re not guaranteed that, so when it happens, you want more of it. It’s a drug.”
More information about upcoming Strange Escapes events can be found here.
