Sci Fi show makes contact

Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson are two blue-collar buddies who work as plumbers for Roto-Rooter in Warwick, R.I.

But if there’s something strange in your neighborhood, they’re the people to call to investigate whether that house, museum, prison, ship, lighthouse, hotel or castle is haunted.

They have also become the most unlikely TV stars. Over the last three years, they have brought their paranormal search to television as the stars of Sci Fi’s popular reality series “Ghost Hunters,” which kicked off its new season a week ago with a visit to two haunted areas in Seattle.

The series scored its best premiere ever with some 2 million viewers tuning in despite the stiff competition from network premieres such as “Private Practice” and “Bionic Woman.”

Mark Stern, vice president of original programming for the cable network, said, “It has really shown that our audience is totally there for reality if it’s done right and in a certain way.”

The hourlong series has also skewed younger for Sci Fi. Stern says the average Sci Fi viewer is in their 40s, but the median age for “Ghost Hunter” is 37, and the audience is 56% female.

Tonight, Hawes and Wilson visit San Francisco for the first time to investigate claims of a ghost at the old Presidio. And on Halloween, the show will present a six-hour live investigation of the location of one of the creepiest segments, Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Ky.

Hawes, Wilson and the other members of their TAPS team -- the Atlantic Paranormal Society -- are an eclectic group of paranormal researchers. Tech manager Steve Gonsalves, for example, loves ghosts but is afraid of heights, spiders and airplanes. Investigator Brian Harnois hasn’t been the most reliable guy around and often ran into problems by spending too much time on the phone with his girlfriend, whom he has married.

“You are so close it’s bound to happen,” says Wilson of the backstage melodrama. “But there is an equal amount of goofing up.”

“It is what it is,” says Hawes, who is the group’s disciplinarian. “Where there is a group of people dealing with each other all the time. . . . Families have quarrels, the only difference is the camera is rolling when we have ours.”

(“Ghost Hunters” also has been looking for a new cast member by inviting viewers to send in their audition tapes. The three finalists will have their on-screen audition during the live investigation.)

The series follows the same format every week. The TAPS gang investigates one or two places armed with electronic equipment that it believes can identify paranormal activity including digital thermometers, electromagnetic field (EMF) scanners, infrared and night vision cameras, hand-held digital cameras, digital audio recorders and laptop computers.

After taking a tour of the location, they set up the equipment and then go lights out to investigate. Wilson and Hawes spend a lot of time trying to debunk a haunted location, and 80% of the time either they don’t have any personal experience at the site or their equipment doesn’t catch any bizarre activity. Because they are plumbers, they often can chalk up banging noises to problems with a house or edifice’s pipes. After the investigation, the group looks over all the video and audio and then reports the findings to the person who called them.

But it’s often spine-tingling when they do seem to encounter the spirit world.

They have caught full-body apparitions on their EMF scanners -- especially in their investigation at the Jim Henson Co. studios on La Brea in Los Angeles -- and the voice of a distressed woman haunting a house built near the location of the Tate murders in the Hollywood Hills.

In their live show last Halloween at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado -- the stately old hotel that was the basis for Stephen King’s “The Shining” -- viewers watched as Hawes and Wilson heard a voice of a little girl saying “hello” repeatedly in the basement.

Whenever they do have a close encounter of a paranormal kind, Wilson and Hawes further investigate to make sure what they saw or heard really happened.

“The main reason behind that is anybody can say a place is haunted,” says Hawes. “Where is the proof to solidify that? Are you hurting the field by just walking around saying, ‘There’s something here’? No matter what, if you are going around saying everyplace is haunted, the skeptics are really going to tear you part.”

“And not only that, you are not helping your client,” says Wilson.

Because of the series, the two say, they get hundreds of requests a week to investigate. They make their selections first based on the severity of the claim, “also the amount of activity and how often it is happening,” says Hawes. “If there is a child involved, it automatically takes precedence over all the rest.” TAPS never charges anyone for an investigation.

Hawes has been investigating ghosts for the last 17 years; Wilson became friends with Hawes 15 years ago when he redesigned the TAPS website for him. “We struck up a friendship and we started trying to build the group,” says Hawes.

Both say they had paranormal experiences when they were teenagers, though neither go into details.

“I had something happen when I was about 15 and it lasted two years,” says Wilson. “I was about 18 years old,” says Hawes.

Though they still work as plumbers, their schedule is irregular when the show is in production. “We can’t do both jobs 100%,” says Hawes. “Or we would die,” echoes Wilson.

“When we are not in production, life is still normal,” says Hawes. “We still work for Roto. It’s a recession-free industry; we’ll never lose our jobs.”

--

susan.king@latimes.com