‘World’s Biggest Ghost Hunt: Pennhurst Asylum’ Stars on How Paranormal Investigators Celebrate Halloween (Exclusive)

The new A&E special World’s Biggest Ghost Hunt: Pennhurst Asylum premieres Wednesday, just in time for Halloween. Ahead of the show, stars Zak Heino and Max Baumle spoke to PopCulture.com, revealing how paranormal investigators celebrate the holiday in real life. For them, Halloween night is far less creepy than a night in one of the country’s most haunted locations.

Heino and Baumle are two of the paranormal investigators taking part in A&E’s historic new special, where five experts spend two weeks inside of Pennhurst Asylum, 24/7. They documented more than 100 paranormal encounters in that time, including apparitions, electromagnetic activity and possibly even an encounter. Compared to all that, Halloween itself is a breeze.

The two have been friends since childhood, and have developed their investigative skills together as a team. Heino and Baumle said that, for them, Halloween was always an exercise in practical stunts rather than visceral scares.

“So, Max and I would spend hours and hours making any home-like tent in the front yard,” Heino recalled. “This was when we were in middle school… it would be past curfew, and we would still be putting up fog machines and stuff. I think we just had so much fun doing that.”

This youthful pursuit is perfectly in line with Heino and Baumle’s work as adults, where they bring scientific precision to ghost-hunting. In The World’s Biggest Ghost Hunt, the two deploy some of the most advanced tools to track strange phenomena around Pennhurst Asylum, and are diligent in separating fact from fantasy, even if it debunks a promising theory.

All jokes aside, however, Heino admitted that Halloween is not much different for paranormal investigators than it is for the average person. While they do all the same things, they do bring a certain level of expertise that others don’t have.

“Obviously the public interest in ghost hunting comes up a lot during that time of year. I mean, but I mean we’re, we’re interested in, we do the research side year-round,” he said. “But I think that when we kind of get more in tune with the people, and I don’t even believe, you know, they kind of still get interested in the whole haunted aspect of things this time of year.”

That interest will be at an all-time high this week when The World’s Biggest Ghost Hunt: Pennhurst Asylum premieres. The special puts Heino and Baumle’s scientific expertise alongside a few more emotionally driven investigators for one of the most ambitious projects in paranormal television.

The World’s Biggest Ghost Hunt: Pennhurst Asylum premieres Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET on A&E.