For the love of a good ghost story

By Joanie Veitch - The Weekly News
Dale Stevens has always loved stories of things that go bump in the night. And that love of a good ghost story has lead him from reading Helen Creighton's Bluenose Ghosts as a young boy, to producing and directing a 13-episode series on haunted spots around the Maritimes and in the United Kingdom.
"I wanted to do something similar to Helen Creighton, but using modern technology," Stevens said.
Ghost Cases is the debut production of Clerisy Entertainment, a Dartmouth-based production company that Stevens started up in March of this year.
Ghost Cases follows hosts Paul Kimball and Holly Stevens as they look for ghosts and ghost stories in places such as the Five Fishermen Restaurant in Halifax and Duhaget House at the Fortress of Louisbourg.
With infrared cameras, tape recorders and thermal cameras to capture the experience, the hosts' aim is to not only tell the story of a haunted place, but to explore and possibly catch some paranormal happenings on camera.
Ghosts, of course, don't always show up when you want them to, so sometimes a creepy retelling is as good as it gets. But in some of the places they visited there were definitely some inexplicable things going on, Stevens said.
"We got a really interesting piece of evidence on infrared camera at the Algonquin (in St. Andrews, NB). There's a story of a ghostly bride there so we sent our crew in to investigate. After the shoot had wrapped we got footage of an orb - that's the only way I can describe it - that popped out of the wall and flew, literally flew, across the room. We took that footage and examined it closely and you can see a face in the orb," he said.
Stevens co-wrote the series with Paul Kimball, a documentary filmmaker who grew up in Dartmouth and has established a reputation as one of the country's leading UFO researchers.
In the series, Kimball and Holly Stevens (no relation to Dale Stevens) play on the Scully and Mulder dynamic from the X Files, calling themselves Mully (Kimball) and Sculder (Stevens).
"We're using a lot of technology, but it's all about the experience. We're trying to put Holly and Paul directly in front of the paranormal train then standing back to see what happens," Stevens said.
Although this was Clerisy's first production, Stevens is no stranger to television and film production. As vice-president of Arcadia Entertainment before starting Clerisy, he worked on numerous productions including Buried at Sea (CBC and Historia), Dreamwrecks (CanWest MediaWorks), Freemasonry Revealed (VisionTV and National Geographic International), That News Show (CanWest MediaWorks) and Go Deep (Alliance Atlantis and History Television).
Getting his new company going and launching a new series to air was a lot of work, but a lot of fun too, Stevens said, noting that the entire 13 episodes were shot with a budget of about $500,000.
Stevens won't be taking any time off soon though. He's working with a production company out of Los Angeles on a feature film and is developing two more ideas for documentaries.
Stevens and Kimball are also working on a book on the ghost cases they investigated over the past year of filming. The first draft of the manuscript is due in January and will be published by Nimbus Publishing's Vagrant Press in 2010.
Ghost Cases airs Oct. 18 at 8 p.m. on Eastlink TV. The series is distributed internationally through Breakthrough Entertainment, a Canadian company.
joanie.veitch@ns.sympatico.ca