INTERVIEW: Austin Cook gets up close and personal on ‘Killer Contact’

Austin Cook, star of Syfy’s Killer Contact, is a self-avowed “nerd.” It’s probably because of his “nerd”-ness that he’s now hunting ghosts on primetime television.

“I am kind of a nerd when it comes to trying to figure out what production company works with what show, and so I was researching who was producing Ghost Hunters,” Cook said recently during a phone interview. “So I went on Pilgrim’s website, and they had this banner ad saying, ‘Hey, if you want to be on a new team of investigators, fill out this application and send in a picture.’ And that’s all I did. … But it was literally like six months later, I got a call from a casting producer at Pilgrim saying that they were doing another show, and asked if I just wanted to do a really quick … really casual Skype interview. No big deal. And so I did that, and then I mean I kept kind of moving up the totem pole, I guess you could say, and the rest is history.”

Although Cook is new to television, he’s not new to the so-called paranormal world. Growing up in Franklin, Tenn., he had exposure at a young age to the bloody history of the local area.

“There’s a lot of talk and hype about the paranormal because there was a battle that happened like right here like right next to my house in downtown Franklin called the Battle of Franklin,” he said. “It was a Civil War battle where just under 10,000 casualties happened within a five-hour period of time. … A lot of people say that because of these tragic events that happened, like there’s all this energy still around looming.”

Cook counted himself as a skeptic for the longest time, but then he bought that house in downtown Franklin. Roughly 10 years ago, he started to see what he called apparitions of a young boy.

“It was about 11 o’clock at night, and I felt kind of as if something had bumped my bed. And I looked to the right of me, and I could see the apparition of this little boy just staring right at me. … It looked like he was scared to see me more than I was to see him. And so that’s why I didn’t really freak out necessarily as much as I thought I would have the first time I saw something like that. But it definitely left me asking just a million different questions, and so as soon as that happened, I really just kind of grew this passion.”

For Killer Contact, Cook and his group of investigators travel around the world to discover the truth behind many well-known ghost stories. One of the cases that will be featured on the show’s final three episodes (set to air Dec. 17 at 10 p.m. and Dec. 18 at 10 p.m. and 11 p.m.) involves the Hellfire clubs in Edinburgh, Scotland and Dublin, Ireland.

“I mean pretty much every location we’ve gone to has been active, and I really do think it’s because of the different techniques that we use,” Cook said. “We’re not just kind of run of the mill. I mean we spend hours in a room, and if nothing is happening, then we send Greg [Niecestro] antagonizing, or Molly [O’Connolly] role-playing or Hector [Barragan] with his gadgets. So we really do kind of hit every sort of facet of what we can do.”

For the Hellfire Club episode, Cook encountered something that shook him to his core. He still has no answers of what was he actually saw. “It’s one of the weirdest things, the strangest and quite frankly the scariest thing to ever happen to me. Yeah, we’re really lucky to be going into these places that are so active, but sometimes there’s just unanswered questions that come along with them.”

The field of paranormal investigation has grown substantially in recent years, especially with the advent of reality television. For Cook, sometimes the best approach is not to be aggressive. Often the best method is to sit in a room and wait for hours. He even mentioned “annoying” the ghosts until they start making contact.

“There’s a lot of people, even people that are in these investigative teams, that have never experienced anything,” he said. “And they get so frustrated because they haven’t experienced anything. But then again they literally live their lives trying to come into contact with something. … There’s no rhyme or reason for me. I mean sometimes it is just patience, and sometimes it’s just a matter of them wanting to be seen or not. And honestly that’s the first thing that I started to research with all this stuff is, where do they go during the day? Why do they come out at specific times? Why is the dead of night, you know 3 a.m., the witching hour? There’s just a billion different questions surrounding it, and that’s why we have to take every single approach, not just the whole ‘let’s-be-nice-and-respectful’ approach. We have to do everything we can to try and make contact.”

Although the full-body apparition of the little boy was perhaps the most memorable paranormal experience of his life, electronic voice phenomena (EVP) is what excites Cook. “That’s something that you can take to the bank,” he said.

For some parting advice, Cook told his team not to play it cool.

“There’s a lot of paranormal shows that say you’ve got to keep your calm in these instances,” Cook said. “What are you talking about? Who wrote the book on paranormal? The last time I checked it’s based on opinion. … There’s one time when something happens to me on this next episode, and I’m like, ‘I got to leave. I got to get out.’ And I’m the team leader. I’m expecting to get a lot of grief on that, but who cares. It’s not their show.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• The final episodes of Killer Contact’s season air Dec. 17 and 18 on Syfy. Click here for more information.