Michael’s Blog 1: Rescue Mediums Rises

Michael Lamport is the co-creator, co-producer, and narrator of Rescue Mediums. He hosts veryparanormal’s new series How Are Your Spirits? where he returns to houses and businesses from Rescue Mediums and finds out how they’re doing with their spirits now.

He’ll be blogging about his experiences behind-the-scenes of Rescue Mediums.

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A lot of people ask me how we met Jackie, Christine, and Alison. What happens when we film, how do we find the locations, how do we do the research, and many other things like that. On this blog, I will explain exactly how we do things like that!

Firstly, the way the series came to be is very interesting. I think it would have been about twelve years or so ago, I had produced several documentaries and a show for CTV Travel called “Suite & Simple”, along with other projects and was embarking on new ventures. I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in an area called Riverdale. I received a phone call one day from a woman in Vancouver, BC, who was doing some genealogical research into her family tree, and my address in Riverdale came up. I had only recently moved into the house, so I didn’t know much about it. There is a certain rivalry here in Canada between Torontonians and the rest of the country, so I decided to show her that we Torontonians are not all bad, and that I would visit the Toronto Archives and get some information on the property for her. I sent what I found out to her and, about three weeks later, I received a call of thanks, which was nice. She also indicated that she had Googled me (which, as you know, can be a dangerous thing!) and saw that I was a TV producer. She then told me that she has a psychic cousin (twice-removed) living in England who had been on TV and goes into people’s homes to get rid of ghosts. Now, I thought at that point in time a profession like that was pretty odd! But the woman from Vancouver asked if I would like to contact the twice-removed cousin in the UK to see if there was anything we could do together. Now, full disclosure, producers get folk pitching to them all the time, and long distance pitches or ideas are some of the hardest to develop. But I took the number of the woman in the UK anyway.

Things got busy for me and I didn’t call. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I had any intention of calling at that time. But, about two weeks later, something was nagging at me inside that said I should call the UK number. So I did.

It was Jackie Dennison’s number. After telling her who I was, she asked where I lived. I told her the street and the number and, without missing a beat, she said that my house had been built by her great uncle with his own hands! (I later checked the records, and it was true). She also told me his name was Oliver. And that he was still here!!!

That explained some of the things that go bump in the night at my place! My business partner and I went across to the UK to film a pilot. A Canadian network picked it up and the rest is history!

Oliver and I get along famously. I feel his presence sometimes and I have several other stories about him and his wife, Perdita, that I will share in my next entry.

-Michael