Jason Milton didn’t put much stock in the supernatural until he visited an old asylum in Genesee County.
“I’ve worked in TV for most of my adult life, so I know how fake [paranormal] reality TV is. I thought, nothing’s going to happen,” Milton, a senior content producer at WXXI, said. “And I experienced a whole bunch of stuff there.”
Rolling Hills Asylum, a fixture of shows like “Ghost Hunters,” set Milton on his own journey of paranormal investigating. He’s since ventured to Irondequoit’s Union Tavern, the Nightmare Manor haunted house in Henrietta and Hose 22 Firehouse Grill in Charlotte — and had incidents at all of them. Some of these spooky outings can be seen in his own series, “Ghost Show,” which he launched with pal Jeremiah O’Reilly in 2020.
As such, he’s got a whole dossier of occurrences that have made him, for now, a believer. He shared some of those with CITY.
CITY: What happened when you first went to Rolling Hills that made you more open to the paranormal?
Milton: I heard voices that weren’t there. It was the intelligence of it all that really intrigued me. You would ask a question, and an EMF detector would go off, seemingly in response to your question. It was just enough for me to question, “what is actually happening here?” I always say I leave places with more questions than answers. I’m not ready to say that it’s ghosts in a traditional “dead people” sense. But I am willing to say I have experienced things that I cannot explain.
CITY: Do the kinds of experiences at Union Tavern contrast with some of the other places you’ve been?
Milton: That place just has a vibe. When you walk in there, you feel the history of that building in its walls, radiating around you. I didn’t like being alone in that building. It made me feel uneasy. I’ve walked around Rolling Hills at four o’clock in the morning, the only person in that building, and it’s not always like that. But I definitely think there’s something going on at Union Tavern that’s paranormal, but I wouldn’t say it was the most intense experience of my life. Something happened at Rolling Hills in the episode that we haven’t released yet. I saw a ghost, with my eyes, walking across a hallway.
CITY: Set the scene. You’re in a hallway, and you’re not alone, right, because you’re there with a production crew?
Milton: There’s five of us, the only people in the building. It’s probably 10 o’clock at night. We’re sitting in this cold, shadowy hallway, because people have always reported seeing shadows dart across the hall. We’re hearing noises, and it sounds like people are around us. We’re all a little bit on edge. I am asking (somebody) a question. I turn toward the hallway, and I see a figure walk across the hall and block out the light from the exit sign at the end of it. Two other people who were looking in that direction saw the same thing. Still to this day, my brain wants to be like, “You didn’t actually see anything,” but I know, watching the footage back, I can put myself in those shoes and feel that feeling again.
CITY: It must be tough because none of this is scientific. You can’t recreate the conditions in a lab for repeat testing.
Milton: Here’s the thing: I’m so skeptical and open minded at the same time. We might get to a point someday where people explain all this stuff. I’m not steadfast in any of my beliefs enough with the paranormal to be like, it definitely is this. I sound like a crazy person going into a dark basement to talk to somebody who’s not there. I’ve heard my name called in a building where I’m the only person in it, and I have it on a recording. I’ve experienced so much. I don’t know what it is.
Find more information at ghostshow.tv.
Patrick Hosken is an arts writer for CITY. He can be reached at patrick@rochester-citynews.com.
This article appears in Oct 1-31, 2024.
