12:00 AM, 13-JUNE-06
John J. Oliver, a self-styled medium and star of Court TV's upcoming paranormal investigative reality series Haunting Evidence, told SCI FI Wire that he's been offered many TV shows, "one more ridiculous than the other." But it wasn't until this series, which investigates criminal cold cases, that he was interested in being involved, he said. "It reminds me of putting Unsolved Mysteries together with Psychic Detective," Oliver said in an interview. It's got "a little bit of spooky, haunted kind of feeling" to it.
Haunting Evidence tackles one cold case per episode and follows Carla Baron, who calls herself a "psychic profiler," and Oliver as they perform apparent psychic readings based on only a name and location. "We don't prefer to know any details until we give our first reading so that we don't have any mental noise disturbance," Oliver said.
They travel to a significant location where a missing or murdered person might have spent time or where a body was found. Acting as their guide is so-called paranormal investigator Patrick Burns, who also operates paranormal equipment.
Oliver added: "Carla and I don't compare notes at all until the entire shoot is wrapped. And that's important, because it's very easy to influence each other. ... There are some differences in some of the things that we say, and we have disagreed on some things, but what's spooky is all the things that we agree on. That's what is interesting. At the end of the show we have what is called the Main Event."
At the Main Event, Burns sets up his equipment, while Baron and Oliver stand in different spots. "Carla and I can't hear each other, and we try to give an in-depth reading on what we think happened," Oliver said. "If there is perpetrator, who it was, why this happened, just as much as [we] can reconstructing the crime. One of the things I try to do, if there is a perpetrator, I try to give as many clues about the perpetrator's appearance so that a little sketch can be made by an artist."
Oliver found himself involved in the paranormal world at an early age. "I was a psychic child," he said. "You know the boy in The Sixth Sense? That was very much like my childhood. I mean, it wasn't that dramatic. I never saw ghosts with axes in their head or anything like that. But seeing spirits was a common occurrence in my house and in my childhood."
Oliver said that he doesn't see spirits anymore. Since then, his gift has turned inward toward "visualization, feelings, things like that." These days he often works with the police on unsolved crimes, so the series was a natural progression for him. "I hope, at the very least, so far we've helped give some closure information to some of the family members of the victims of these crimes," Oliver said. Beyond that he has one more big hope for Haunting Evidence. "I hope that it, like Unsolved Mysteries and some of these other shows, ... helps to actually bring some cases to conclusion," he said. Haunting Evidence premieres June 14 at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT and will run for nine weeks. ?Kathie Huddleston
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