The Destination Fear team is heading overseas for the first time to investigate a location so terrifying, it’s rumored the devil himself dropped by. Paranormal explorers Dakota Laden, his sister Chelsea Laden and longtime friends Tanner Wiseman and Alex Shroeder opened up to PopCulture.com ahead of the Saturday, Dec. 18 investigation of Ireland’s Loftus Hall about the terrifying results of their investigation – some of which you can see in an exclusive sneak peek.
Loftus Hall is believed by locals to have been visited by the devil in the 18th century and is also thought to be haunted by the ghost of a young woman who was locked in her room by her parents for the rest of her life after getting pregnant outside of wedlock. “This location might be up there when it comes to how sad the origin story is,” Wiseman told PopCulture of the story he described as like a “twisted Disney princess” tale.
“It’s so different than what we normally get in America,” Dakota added of the building’s haunted history, which dates back much further than the team usually gets to explore. “The energy we felt actually stepping inside was scarier than anything I’ve felt in the U.S.,” he added, noting that while editing the raw footage, he noticed it was “very obvious” that everyone on the team was more scared than usual right off the bat.
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“I think a lot of it had to do with just the legend of the devil being there,” Schroeder explained of his heightened fear. “We’d never heard of anything like that, so it was messing with my mind and my emotions.” Chelsea added that she could feel the “depth of history” at Loftus the moment she walked in the door. “I am not one to mess around with anything associated with the devil,” she noted. “So knowing the alleged legend of the devil himself visiting Loftus Hall made me very uneasy!”
Wiseman had the most difficult time in Loftus, however, as he was tasked with staying alone for the night in the room the young woman was believed to have been kept – and her baby’s eventual grave. As you can see in PopCulture’s exclusive sneak peek of Saturday’s episode, Wiseman’s night takes a wild turn almost immediately.
“While I was in that room, for some reason I could just feel the sadness really overwhelm me,” he shared, calling it “one of the most bizarre feelings” as his emotions shifted without warning from fear to loneliness and sadness. When he then started hearing bangs and knocking on the door, “That’s when I was like,’I don’t know if I can handle this by myself,’” Wiseman recalled.
Exploring Loftus Hall, as well as Spike Island in the next episode of Destination Fear, the team was more aware of investigating paranormal energies outside of the U.S. “The biggest difference would have to be the difficulty sifting through the source of the paranormal responses as we were dealing with nearly a thousand years of layered history in Ireland!” Chelsea explained. Don’t miss the Destination Fear team’s Loftus Hall investigation, airing Saturday, Dec. 18 at 9 p.m. ET on Travel Channel and dropping the same day on discovery+.
