To “Hell” and back
Travel Channel’s “Portals to Hell” tears open Denver’s urban ghost history
Back when it was fun to be afraid of things, Jack Osbourne and Katrina Weidman climbed the wooden stairs at Denver’s Croke-patterson Mansion, searching for any sign of ghostly activity in the 130-year-old, castle-like structure on Capitol Hill.
“I approach it as an enthusiast, and Katrina is very much the lifer,” Osbourne said on a chilly night in late January. “She’s been doing this since college and has a very methodical approach. I’m like, ‘Hey, this is fun! Let’s explore and see what we discover.’ ”
Society’s idea of fun has shifted considerably since late January, but the Travel Channel’s “Portals to Hell” series still serves up spooky TV that is alternately transporting and close to home.
Executive produced and cohosted by Osbourne — the son of rocker Ozzy, and no stranger to reality TV — as well as paranormal investigator Weidman, “Portals” attempts to cut through the glut of ghost-hunter shows with sharply researched, evidence-based narratives that spotlight horrific histories.
That’s not easy. Travel Channel, the home network for “Portals to Hell,” is littered with titles such as “Ghost Adventures,” “Ghost Nation,” “Ghost Hunters,” “Paranormal Survivor,” “Scariest Night of My Life,” “Paranormal Caught on Camera” and more. (There’s even a “Ghost Adventures: Quarantine” premiering June 11.)
But even as “Ghost (Whatever)” has become a genre unto itself, “Portals” tries to differen
tiate itself in key ways. Weidman got into investigating ghosts as a Penn State student and member of the Paranormal Research Society, which was less “Ghostbusters”-style antics and more evidence-based research.
“I was always the girl who had Ouija boards at slumber parties and would send everyone home crying,” Weidman said. “But our (paranormal) club in college had a lot of supervisors from the science and psychology departments. And there was a semester-long training course that had a 50% dropout rate. It was serious work.”
Osbourne, who creates series for various TV networks, knew Wiedman from a show he produced for Syfy called “Haunted Highway.” But “Portals to Hell” had yet to open up for him.
“The initial conceit was that we would have a spelunking show and it would be called ‘Hell Holes,’ ” Osbourne said. “Everywhere’s got that weird sinkhole, right? But over time it evolved into this — a more traditional paranormal investigative series.”
After a successful 2019 run, Season 2 of “Portals to Hell” premiered on March 13, right around the time U.S. citizens were starting to grapple with the reality of the coronavirus pandemic. On April 30, Travel Channel exploited some of Osbourne’s star power by airing a watch party with his parents, Ozzy and Sharon. And at 10 p.m. on Thursday, May 21, the Denver episode (No. 7 of the second season) premieres on the Travel Channel.
It’s not the only Coloradobased episode that producers have considered, but it’s the first to make it to the air. While prepping Season 2, the “Portals” team had caught wind of Croke-patterson (sometimes called CrokePatterson-campbell) and deemed it promising enough to contact the current owner, who runs it as the upscale Patterson Inn.
Almost immediately, they began salivating over “one of America’s last great ghost mansions that had yet to be investigated on television,” as Weidman put it.
“When you’re doing 20 episodes, you’re looking for a lot of haunted houses,” said Weidman, who first appeared on A&E’S
“Paranormal State” from 2007 to 2011. “But this show has a different mission than a lot of the other shows. We dive deep into the history, talk to witnesses and get actual documentation of the murders and deaths that occurred there.”
“Portals to Hell” has visited abandoned prisons, factories, asylums, mass graves and other tragedy-filled sites. But increasingly, “the tree has been plucked,” Osbourne said, which renders interesting new spots near-invisible.
Croke-patterson, which Osbourne heard about through Denver-based friends, offered the sort of deep history around which TV episodes are built. Erected in 1890 and named after builder Thomas B. Croke and state Sen. Thomas Macdonald Patterson, the 12,000-square-foot estate on the corner of 11th Avenue and Pennsylvania Street is one of urban Denver’s most infamous places.
The hulking sandstone has been studied and mythologized, generating research papers, books and ghost tours that use its architectural prominence (it’s a rare example of the Chateauesque style, according to Historic Denver) as a jumping-off point. Being closed to the public for many years only helped the mystique.
In 2011, Boulder’s Ann Alexander Leggett and daughter Jordan co-wrote “A Haunted History of Denver’s Croke-patterson Mansion,” which provided eventual fodder for Travel Channel’s oncamera interviews. Phantom voices, invisible hands that open and close drawers, ghost children and suicidal guard dogs jumping from lofty windows were all part of the package.
Along with Leggett, Denverbased psychic medium Cindy Kaza — who has appeared in the Travel Channel series “The Holzer Files” — also gets in front of the camera for the Denver episode.
But tapping into a pre-fab community of believers can be tricky.
“We look for the sweet spot,” Osbourne said. “If anyone says, ‘You’re going to think I’m crazy for saying this,’ I usually end up believing them. And then some people who have their tinfoil hats firmly on say stuff like, ‘Then Satan came out of the wall and punched me in the face!’ We approach everything as skeptics. We don’t fake things or make them up, but there is a dance.”
“Plus, we’re really into Satan,” Wiedman joked, prompting a burst of laughter from Osbourne.
A tour of the historic house with Osbourne and Wiedman, who had been sleeping there for a couple of nights at the time of this interview, served as a dry run for the May 21 episode.
The Gilded Age exterior — steeply pitched roofs, graveyard-esque cresting (roof fencing), imperiously conical towers and dormers — seems out of place next to Capitol Hill’s sleek condos and remodeled apartments. The inside is even creepier.
“Everything we talk about is speculative,” Weidman said, after describing an infant’s alleged burial site in the house’s basement (formerly its billiards room, now a bar and parlor). “But what we do know is people have these experiences, whatever they’re filtered through.”
A dark brown circle on a wooden post shows where Sen. Patterson used to stub out his nightly cigars. In the yawning entryway, the “heart” of the house, a large mirror reflects the ornate banister and wrap-around stairs leading to the upper floors, where various figures have been seen and felt — including by the “Portals” co-hosts.
“During our research, we did find a woman who committed suicide here in 1950 by taking cyanide mixed with water,” Weidman said as she pushed open the door to a second-floor bathroom. “Our Denver psychic, Cindy, strong believes it happened in here.”
As big as the house is, it still has areas that look unfinished, with dusty floors, exposed brick and woodwork, and minimal lighting. One such room leads to the north-facing turret on the house’s west side.
“The story is that this place was having problems, and during construction workers would report equipment missing or work that was being undone,” Osbourne said as he gazed at the stories-high wooden latticework. “So they got guard dogs. But they came back one morning and the dogs were both dead in front of the house. They allegedly had jumped through the glass. But it was clear that if they didn’t, they had been thrown.”
Weidman also busted out the show’s “ghost box,” a custom ITC (Instrumental Trans-communication) device built by George Brown that combines radio waves into a haunting backward whine that occasionally drops a recognizable word.
“How many people are in the room?” I asked it. Two seconds passed before the ghost box seemed to say “six” (the number of people in the room) before devolving back to echo-laden noise.
“For the believer, this is where ghosts live: in static, in glitches and in blurs,” The Atlantic wrote in a 2016 article titled “The Broken Technology of Ghost Hunting.”
Of course, it’s possible to take all of this too seriously. This is television, not academic research.
At one point during the tour, a small door slowly creaked open, seemingly by itself, prompting me to jump back a few inches and let out a high-pitched noise.
“Got him!” Osbourne said as he emerged from the darkness, smiling wide. “Zing!”