How Portals to Hell Found Its Name

When Portals to Hell returns for a third season on April 9, with a same-day debut on Travel Channel and discovery+, you won’t hear Jack Osbourne and Katrina Weidman talking too much about hell, or demons. Rather, the duo kicks off 13 new episodes with a paranormal investigation of the shuttered nurshing home Hill View Manor in New Castle, Pennsylvania, where they seek “The Creeper ” shadow figure.

“It was the fucking craziest place we’ve been to,” says Osbourne about Hill View in a recent interview with Den of Geek for the Talking Strange paranormal pop culture show and podcast (which you can check out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and embedded below).

“That place was bonkers,” he adds about the location featured in the season premiere. “Every time I investigate somewhere, and they go, ‘Oh, there’s a ghost named Charlie, or a creeper, or a crawler, or the shadow man,’ and you’re just like many times do we hear that? But they weren’t lying. That place creeped me out.”

And perhaps creeped out by The Creeper, which is something of a signature entity said to inhabit Hill View. A “creeper” shadow figure has entered the paranormal conversation within the last decade or so, and is typically associated with large asylums, hospitals, and jails. It is said to literally duck low and creep around when spotted. For Weidman, it’s a fascinating development that people are noticing this similar entity. But she said whatever she and Osbourne encountered was accompanied by a cacophony of strange sounds.

“When we were up in the wing where they claim The Creeper lives, we were having all these knocks and bangs — very jarring, significant, in-your-face knocks and bangs, ” she says. “It felt at points like the building was falling down. They seemed to happen when we were asking for things.”

Moreover, Weidman notes that when they enter a location, they’ll sit in the dark, not talking or making a noise to determine what the natural sounds are for an old building, even though that portion is never shown on an episode because “quite frankly, it’s boring.” But with Hill View, there were no noises on this level as they sat, and Osbourne’s noise-activated audio recorder didn’t pick up anything after they had left.

Says Osbourne, “[It] was like the building was alive; just Bangs, pops, and at one point it sounded like someone rolled a bowling ball down the roof.”

He adds he believes they were encountering an “intelligent, responsive activity” and “the pressure inside this one wing was nothing I’ve experienced as far as the consistency of the intensity.”

“It was all over, behind us, in front of us. We had a producer scream at one point because it was right behind her.”

For Osbourne — who also hosts The Osbournes Want To Believe show on Travel Channel where he tries to convince his famous parents Ozzy and Sharon about the existence of the paranormal — Hill View would be a place to take his folks to make them believe.

As far as the other episodes for their third season, Weidman says she is excited for the audience to see the episode set at an important historic location where their team uncovers notable documents the site didn’t even know existed.

But what viewers will not see is Osbourne and Weidman trying to prove the existence of demons. They say they both discuss the possibility, but Osbourne says he thinks there were maybe two places in the course of their show that could have been “really evil, dare I say demonic entity.”

“Our filter isn’t always demon, and so many people in the field are obsessed with the ‘D word.’”

“A lot of the conversations don’t make it to the final show. We’re investigating for four days, and people are seeing 44 minutes of what we do,” adds Weidman. “Jack and I have a lot of these big conversations of, ‘If there’s any merit to what the Catholic Church says, does it follow these patterns?’ And ‘What if it’s not this, and what if it’s time travel?’”

So where do the portals to hell come in? Osbourne said the name was initially intended for a different kind of show.

“Originally we were going to go investigate caves, and underground caverns,” he says. “Every town and country has the old hellhole. It was going to be a caving ghosthunting show, and it evolved past it, but we liked the title, so we just rolled with it.”

So the third season of Portals to Hell will not involve caves, but there will be a museum, hospitals, theaters, a Revolutionary War fort, and mansion to name a few. And, according to Jack Osbourne and Katrina Weidman, there will be plenty of paranormal activity.

Portals to Hell season 3 premieres April 9 at 10 p.m. on Travel Channel, with same-day debut on discovery+ streaming platform. To hear more from Jack and Katrina — and from other guests — check out the paranormal pop culture show Talking Strange on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube,  and don’t miss our Twitch livestreams.