‘Ghost Hunters’ Richel Stratton and Brandon Alvis Preview Haunting at St. Joseph Plantation With ‘Blood on the Bayou’ Episode (Exclusive)

Ghost Hunters is winding down and its penultimate episode of its extraordinary first season is definitely one for the books! In the tenth episode “Blood on the Bayou,” team leader Grant Wilson and his astounding group of investigators head down to Louisiana to help a woman worried her family-owned sugar cane plantation with history stemming from the Civil War, may literally be haunted by its troubled past. In addition to countless deaths on the property over the plantation’s 200-year history, the list of potential spirits is seemingly endless and one that has petrified owner, Maureen and her staff after recent sightings of a bloody apparition. Could the spirit be the ghost of a former plantation doctor well-known for performing gruesome surgeries?

Ahead of the new episode airing Wednesday night as part of A&E‘s Ghost Hunters double feature, paranormal investigators, Richel Stratton and Brandon Alvis open up to PopCulture.com exclusively about what fans can expect on their investigation of the grounds, which span more than 2,500 acres and include huge mansions and former “slave shacks.” Since the grounds have never been investigated before, Wilson introduces a new, special technique in an effort to build trust with any intelligent entities — one his team members are singing his praises for.

“With the St. Joseph Plantation, we’re introducing a new technique that we haven’t done before, which is awesome, and actually gives us great results I feel,” Stratton told PopCulture.com. “And it’s a really large location so you get to see us in different elements.”

Alvis adds that the technique the team employs was not only incredibly effective, but one that helped to create a “comfortable situation for the entities” to reach out and ensured they did not mean the spirits in question “any harm” or “disrespect.”

“But again, being a paranormal investigator, it’s always great to think outside of the box and to say, ‘Hey, look, how can we document this activity that these eyewitnesses and these clients are saying that they’re experiencing?’” Alvis said. “And we go in and conduct a technique and receive results because of that. That’s something that’s very exciting to us, and having the various pieces of the tech that we had and some of the really cool evidence that we collected associated with that, is something that’s very exciting as a paranormal investigator.”

Stratton adds something a lot of people don’t necessarily understand is that the witnesses they interact with are calling the team for help and are exposed to so much more than an investigator comes across.

“They live there all the time. They experience it all the time, and we are there for a first short period of time compared to them,” she adds. “And we have to figure out different ways to establish a connection and trust with these entities as quickly as possible, so we can actually get answers for our clients, and so we’re always looking at different techniques to try to help do that, in a quicker, more timely manner.”

Ghost Hunters airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET.

Photo credit: A&E Networks