Exploring the Paranormal with Blood Moon Paranormal, Part One | Guest Zak Wenzel

Today on the Grave Talks, exploring the paranormal with blood moon paranormal, a conversation with Zach Wenzel.

For Zach Wenzel, a fascination with the paranormal started young, and it's never left him.

Over the past decade, that fascination has grown into full-scale investigations

at some of the Midwest's most well-known haunted locations, including the old Joliet prison.

As the founder of Blood Moon Paranormal, he leads a team that not only investigates the unknown but documents it,

producing documentary-style videos that explore both the history and the activity they encounter.

Zach shares what it really takes to run a paranormal team, the work behind filming and reviewing the investigations,

and the experiences he's had during investigations that have challenged his perspective.

He also opens up about one of the more unsettling parts of his journey,

an attachment that he believes may have followed him from the Volisgax murder house,

something that still makes its presence known.

It's a look at what happens when a lifelong fascination turns into something more,

and when the unknown doesn't always stay behind.

Today on The Grave Talks, exploring the paranormal, a conversation with Zach Wenzel.

Well, Zach, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.

Now, you are with Blood Moon Paranormal. You are based out of Joliet?

That is correct, yes.

So, we're going to have to talk about the old Joliet prison,

because I've never had a conversation about that, so I want to talk about that.

But first, I want to talk about you.

Did you start this group?

One of the founders?

I did.

I did start this group, yes.

And what was the reason behind it?

Was the paranormal just something you were interested in for a long time?

Something that looked like fun? You kind of like the scares?

What was it that got you interested?

Yeah, so when I was eight and I kind of moved into the neighborhood I'm in right now,

I was the only kid on the block.

It was like a lot of, you know, older folks like no one for me to really hang out with.

Eventually, one day, a kid came down knocked on the door and he was the grandson of someone two doors down.

And he's like, hey, I heard you're new in the neighborhood.

Do you want to like hang out and like come play GameCube at my house?

And I'm like, yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, we walked down to his grandma's house and we walk in and is my first time in that house.

And where he had the TV, there was a painting on the adjacent wall and that painting was of a little girl.

And I looked at it and she's smiling in the picture.

And I looked towards the TV and it's like one of the older TVs with the reflective surface.

And in the reflection, she's frowning.

And I turned back around and she's smiling.

And I said to my friend, I'm like, hey, like this is a creepy painting and 12 years old.

I started watching these ghost shows. I'm like, there's no way this stuff is real.

I think the shows are interesting, but there's no way this stuff is real.

And I was talking to my friend. I'm like, I want to go try this and go somewhere and like a ghost hunt.

And his sister overheard us and she's like, hey, so there's like this abandoned asylum two hours out of here.

You just sneak in through the basement and you can go in there. It's apparently haunted.

And I'm like, all right, well, how do I get to our south?

So I go and tell my mom, I'm like, hey, can you drive us down to our south to go let us investigate this?

How old were you at that time?

I was 12.

Okay.

Mom.

And she said, yes.

Oh my God.

So she ended up taking us down there to Peoria, Illinois.

And it was this big limestone building.

And we pull up to it and it's lit up in purple lights.

And we're like, what's going on here?

Like this isn't abandoned. We were told this is abandoned.

So we get out and we start walking up to the front door and this guy walks out.

And I'll never forget the southern accent that came out of him.

And he's like, y'all here for the ghost tour.

And we're like, well, we are now.

So we signed up for it.

And we did some, we had the ghost tour.

It was like a two or three hour thing.

And next thing you know, like, I was like experiencing stuff and seeing things that like, I was like, that's a little weird.

That shouldn't be happening right now.

And that kind of dived me into the realm of like ghost hunting.

After that, I kind of did some research of haunted things in the area.

You know, of course, the prison was of interest.

Of course, there was other things of interest in Jolie.

It's a very historic town with a lot of historic buildings that have history.

And some of them people don't even realize it.

So I started doing research into that.

Nothing offered ghost hunts around here.

But one thing caught my interest.

And that was the Velisca X murder house.

Again, told my mom about it.

I'm like, hey, can we go here?

And eventually she took me.

I love your mother.

Yeah, she's the best.

She's the best.

After that, I ended up starting a YouTube group with my friends at school.

And it wasn't just paranormal.

Before I got into the paranormal, I did like magic tricks.

It was just a small little hobby thing I did.

I don't do them anymore.

So it was like magic, paranormal gaming and pranks.

That's what we did on the channel.

Eventually that kind of dissolved.

And I completely and wholeheartedly focused mainly on paranormal.

And have been for the past 10 years.

I love how your mom saw your interest and said, okay.

I will help you out.

I will take you to an abandoned asylum so you can sneak in and investigate it.

And I guess she's going to wait in the car or something.

She goes in sometimes.

And I mean, sometimes she'll go and like explore a little bit.

But then she'll just go right back to where the wherever the lights at.

You know, she really enjoys it.

She doesn't do it with us anymore.

Ever since I got my license, that's kind of changed.

She went with us like one or two other times.

One or two other times since then.

But yeah, she doesn't really go with anymore.

So you put the team together.

Who are you looking for as far as I think it matters who is on the team?

Of course, you need people who want to be on your team.

But a lot of times it's kind of curated group of people

where people bring different skill sets.

Did you kind of look for that?

Yeah, you know, I always look for, you know, unique people, unique personalities.

I want to make sure that the people I add to the team can contribute something.

So that way they just don't feel like, you know, they're just an investigator.

So like, you know, the most recent person we've added to the team,

she is very much into historical research.

So that's what she does for us is she does deep dives and the places before.

Yeah, it was always just me beforehand doing it.

And like, with all the video editing I have to do,

like it's just time makes it tough, you know.

You know, when you think about the editing footage,

you know, you could be in a place hours and hours and hours.

And you have to look through all that stuff.

Yes, I would say we typically, by the end of investigation,

it's somewhere between like seven to ten hours of footage

and that's on three to four different cameras up to 40 hours of footage

sometimes between the three to four cameras.

So yeah.

And that's a lot.

It is a lot.

So when you go in to investigate, is it, is that an important component of it?

Is the video or do sometimes you just go in just to kind of see what you get?

When I first started, I was more interested in like the paranormal,

like the just the ghost stuff, like more curious about that.

And I still definitely am like no doubt about it.

I am interested in like capturing good evidence and, you know,

experiencing things, but I want to also show our evidence off

and create something that people might find entertaining or interesting

that's the real deal on like a lot of the TV shows out there that.

I heard your cat.

Yeah, he's around that time.

Before anybody, before anybody writes in and says,

I think I heard something an EVP.

No, it was a cat.

Yeah.

With YouTube as well, like I got monetized, I would say maybe two years ago.

And again, after ten years, eight years of doing the YouTube channel,

like finally getting monetized after that long, I know some people,

it's like quicker, some people, it takes longer.

It was a grind.

It was a grind.

Yeah, absolutely.

Doing that and getting monetized while it doesn't fully pay for an investigation

because it is very pricey to do this.

It helps a little bit and anything that I can do to help a little bit alleviate the cost

while still paying, you know, the price that we're going to pay to not only investigate,

but that money helps those locations maintain the location.

So if I can do that by providing content and entertainment for people to watch,

that's for free and truthful and real.

And then take that money to go towards locations that need it.

Then, yeah, you know, that's a good thing.

And the videos are really well done.

Thank you.

They are really nice.

Everybody check it out.

We'll put a link up in the show notes for your YouTube page.

But they're just really well done videos.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Now, over the years, I'm going to guess then, since you've been doing this 10 plus years,

you've probably investigated a lot of locations.

Do you like to go back to locations, investigate them more than once?

Do you kind of, are you want to done?

How do you like to approach that?

You know, I really do like going back to locations and investigating them more than once.

I think it's beneficial because you know, one night you might get nothing at all.

And then the second time you go back, it's like they're more familiar with you.

And it's like super active.

I think the thing that's been preventing me from doing that a lot recently has been

the fear of my big bucket list locations.

I've been wanting to go to closing down because we are seeing like an influx of locations

just closing doors and getting torn down.

So that's been like kind of making me stay away from going back to places I've been to before

and starting to go to new places.

What are some of your bucket list locations?

I've covered quite a bit of the Midwest.

I want to go more out east, like eastern state penitentiary,

even though they stopped investigations.

That would be a good spot.

Winchester Mystery House, Montana Frontier Prison or Wyoming Frontier Prison

whatever one it was.

Those two states I confused all the time.

There's quite a few.

There's a lot.

There's a lot out there.

So you're from Illinois.

And there are a lot of locations in your area.

Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois.

When you think about it, there's a lot just in your area.

That's drivable.

Yeah.

I've been very fortunate.

You know, Illinois itself has some locations you can investigate,

but like Illinois where I'm at the closest location that you can investigate

is like an hour and a half away.

And I know I live by the prison, but the prison no longer,

even though I've investigated it, they no longer have investigations available.

So you can't even go there and go any more.

So yeah, we'll get into that in a little bit.

But yeah, it closes one is like an hour and a half away.

You know, it's it's tough.

And Illinois is like where I'm at, there's just not much,

but you go to like Indiana, Ohio, Iowa.

They're all over the place.

Like you can drive like 30 minutes and you'll be at your next haunted location

to investigate, you know?

Yeah, it's crazy.

There's so many.

Like I always say Iowa is just in crazy haunted.

And I don't know what it is.

Like my sister lives there.

She owns a building in a ton.

And I'm like, what are the odds?

That's because every place in Iowa is haunted.

I swear.

Let's talk about the old Juliet prison then because that's a prison that you're

referring to.

That is a like a kind of a medieval castle looking sort of prison.

And it looks like it's all built from limestone on top of that, right?

Oh, yes.

Yes, it is definitely limestone.

And I, a couple years ago, I reached out and I'm like, hey,

would you be interested in doing an episode?

They're like, no, okay.

So I've never gotten to talk about the old, old Juliet prison.

So they're not doing investigations at this time.

That's correct.

So I mean, technically they do, but it's if the price is right.

It's a very high price point that they charge at and for very little time.

And it's, it's like the highest I've ever seen investigating.

And I've seen some pretty high highest like prices for investigations.

But this one is by far the highest price.

And I don't think anyone else is going to get close to that.

They don't want anything to do with ghosts or the paranormal anymore.

They just, they, they're stopping that completely.

They're mainly focusing just on history and restoration.

So yeah.

Which would be interesting to take a history tour.

But it's not exactly paranormal investigation.

But I could definitely see maybe something paranormal happening.

But there's a difference.

Yeah, they would probably tell you, no, it's not haunted.

That's like one of those places that you just look at it.

And you're like, how would it not be haunted?

Exactly.

You know what I mean?

But so do you have investigated there before?

Yes, I've investigated there a total of two times on the main side

and one time on the women's side.

Now this, like this was a prison, I'm getting gas.

Because I didn't do a deep dive into it before we talked.

But I would say like 1800s, it was built.

Sometime in 1800s.

Correct.

It was built in 1856.

And the way it was built was they brought up prisoners of war during the Civil War

from all knowing the way at that prison.

And they had those prisoners of war mind the limestone out of the quarry

out back to then build the walls around themselves.

That's kind of morbidly cruel.

Definitely.

No, I agree.

Because that would be hard labor.

Like I would imagine there was a lot of injuries and things mining limestone.

Most definitely.

Especially with the tools they would have been using back then.

Yeah.

That equipment's not safe.

They don't have Oshan and whatnot.

No.

And it's big, isn't it?

Yeah, it's a pretty massive facility.

Obviously they expanded as time went on.

But part of it being the women's prison as well, which is.

I worked there for the past like five years because they had a haunted attraction there.

So that's actually how we got to investigate that in the facilities.

Huge.

Having a haunted attraction there is kind of a great idea.

It is.

It is definitely.

And you said you worked at the haunted attraction?

Yeah, yeah.

And I worked there for the past five years.

And part of the reason why I kind of wanted to talk about the prison was

because we actually just found out on Tuesday that we would no longer be open.

Do you just found out recently they're the closing all that down?

Yeah, I found out on Tuesday.

Wow.

Yeah, I was devastated.

I still am devastated.

I'm still grieving from it.

I'm really sorry.

No, it's okay.

That's kind of why I wanted to talk about it because I, you know, it's an important part

of my life.

I mean, I grew up.

Since I was six years old in this town that has this, you know, the prison city.

You know, I love this place.

And I love the prison.

And, you know, everything it stands for and everything that it is.

And its history, its architecture, its ghosts.

And having worked at the honoured attraction, I was able to put that love back in and,

you know, let it breathe again.

Yeah.

It was incredible.

So when you did investigations there, kind of walked me through that.

Like, was it open to a lot of people investigating?

Was it a few?

Because it's a massive facility.

I could see they could let quite a few people in and you're not even kind of running into each other.

Yeah.

So the main side of the prison, the larger side that I assume that you're looking at pictures

of that side is ran by the Juliet area Historical Museum.

And that side was the side that we investigated twice.

So they would charge 2K for six to seven, maybe eight hours.

What?

Yeah, I was pricing.

That's why I'm telling you like the new price point is much higher than that, like much,

much higher than that.

They're the ones that shut down the investigations.

Now the women side never, that side was ran by 13th floor entertainment group in that side.

That side never had paranormal investigations.

But because I worked there, I was able to talk with corporate and get my way in to do an investigation and film in there.

So we were one of the first groups.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was, it was pretty incredible.

And in my opinion, the women's side is more active than the men's side.

But that's, again, it's just one of those things where you got to investigate it multiple times to see.

And we only got to investigate it once.

So yeah.

So what did you find at the, at the women's side?

We were, you know, getting some pretty good EVPs.

I saw something I had never seen before, which was like a full body apparition for like a split second.

And anybody who knows me knows that I'm not the type of person to, you know, you know, I saw a figure, I saw a figure.

Like I'm just not that type. I'm very science based.

Yeah, I saw a full body apparition and fortunately didn't get it on camera because it was when I was shooting B-roll for our documentary there.

And I saw that in it like it freaked me out.

And I tried to keep it like quiet. I didn't want to say too much about it because it was very, very creepy.

And that coming season for the haunted house, everybody knows me as the ghost guy.

Like they're coming to me like asking me questions, telling me I just experienced this, I experienced this, experienced like the actors.

So like I always open my, you know, door for them to come and tell me that kind of stuff because I find it interesting.

Oh, yeah.

That season I found out that they started seeing the same thing that I saw.

And it was people coming to me that I had never told that to describing the exact figure and everything.

So it was very bizarre. I was like, this is weird. Like while all of a sudden did I open something up to kind of interact with, you know, the actors here like nothing bad, nothing malicious, nothing like that at all.

It's just very curious, I think.

And I do think it is interesting when you have a haunted attraction inside a haunted location.

And especially for the people going through, they don't always know. Like I talked to someone a couple years ago about that.

And they would, I remember they said something about how, so somebody scared him really bad at a certain area.

And they're like, we didn't even have anybody there.

And, but they didn't tell them they're like, oh, good, we're glad you liked it instead of saying what you saw as an apparition.

So as far as the guests go, they don't know.

As far as the people working there, you all know.

For the most part, I mean, I think that there is room for like maybe confusion or you thought you saw something because we do have like runners.

We do have like management that will go and like kind of sneak through the show here and there.

So like they might do something real briefly out of the corner of their eye.

And it maybe it's me running to go fix a light or something like that, you know.

Did you dive into the history much of the women's side or had once you found out multiple people seeing the same apparition.

Did you maybe start researching that to see if that was kind of a thing?

I did, I did kind of dive a little bit into like the paranormal side of things on that side.

And I was able to talk to some guards and there was a guard that that came forward that worked on specifically the women's side.

So to give you some context, the women were mixed with the men sort of on the main side.

They were on the fourth floor of the administration building.

It wasn't until 1896 1895 somewhere around there 1890s when they just when they built the women's prison and they move all the women over there.

But in the 1930s, the women were moved from Jolie at all the way down to Dwight Correctional Center.

It was a new facility. They just built for them.

And then the women's prison became the annex. So it was reception and classification basically.

So anybody entering the prison system within that region of Illinois would go through that prison.

So for example, like Richard Speck or John Wayne Gacy would have gone through that prison on the women's side, not the main side.

However, Gacy, sorry, I'm sidetracking real quick, Gacy never was at Jolie at like people say he was.

They brought him there, brought him to the Sally Port on our side of the prison.

And the warden came out and said, hey, if you put him in there, if he goes in there, he's getting killed immediately and they sent him away.

So Gacy was never there. So from the 1930s forward, it was used as reception and classification in the annex of the prison.

So again, people just processed through there. They would spend about somewhere between I think two to four, maybe six weeks there.

Before they were sent to a different prison where they would be housed for the rest of their time unless there was issues.

Then they also held sex offenders there as well.

The thing is, is when the women were there, I was talking to some historians about it and they said that there would be times as punishment that they wouldn't feed them and they wouldn't, they would shave their heads.

The figure that I saw was very, very scrawny, gray skin, barely any facial features completely naked and had no hair.

It was just completely, yeah, it was very bizarre. So I don't know.

Now, when I talked to one of the guards that worked there on that side, he said he worked night shift, how perfect that I found a guard that worked night shift that has some stories, right?

So one thing he told me was in the basement of the annex building, so the women's side, there is solitary confinement cells down there.

And I'm talking like dungeon type cells, like just by looking at the building, I can't even imagine what that would look like.

Yeah, no, they're like dirt floors, not even enough room to stand fully up like your couch, if that and they would just throw the women in there during that time.

They said they stopped using them by the 70s and 80s, but you know how that goes.

But this guard, he was telling me that there was a light bulb that went out down there and one of the other guards is like, all right, go grab a light bulb, go change it.

So he said he went down there and as he was down there, getting ready to change the light bulb, he saw two glowing eyes, two glowing yellow eyes, looking at him.

He shined his flashlight at him, disappeared, nothing.

He got the light bulb in and he immediately went upstairs and he's like, I'm never going down there again.

He told me how there would be, it would feel like someone's walking behind them in the hallways at night and there's no one there.

Just various different bizarre things.

Now, when we did our investigation there, we do these things called isolations, which is about 15 minutes, like solos, like by yourself.

And my girlfriend Emily, who is one of our photographers, she did her isolation down there, completely by herself, 15 minutes, where the yellow eyed thing was, right?

Oh my god, she's brave.

She is so brave.

You have no idea.

You'd never get me to do that.

So, no, she did that and she was getting some weird responses through our obvious device.

And she had the music box, the motion sensor music box set up where it was facing into one of the solitary cells.

And through the obvious, it goes, pace, aggression.

Next, you know, like the music box starts going, Dini, Dini, Dini, as if someone's walking in front of it back and forth.

And with that, she got the word elemental.

That's interesting.

Yeah, very interesting.

Now, over the past couple of years, I will say, like, I didn't really believe in elementals and I don't know if I do yet.

But we have kind of dabbled a little bit in some of the locations we've gone to with reports of them just to just out of curiosity.

I mean, it's possible that between the limestone, the dirt floors, you know, there's railroad tracks nearby this prison.

The quarry in the back is flooded with water.

Just all these different elements makes you wonder, is there an elemental that's attached to this building or something, you know, like you never, you never know.

I mean, going into this, like I said, like, I would watch those ghost shows and I'd be like, there's, there's no way this stuff is real.

Like, so I was going in as a skeptic right from the bat, right from the get go.

Yeah, a lot has changed over the past several years.

I didn't believe in attachments at all.

I was proven wrong. Very wrong.

Does that happen to you?

Yeah, whatever or whoever it is is still so attached to me.

I'm more curious about it than anything.

I like refuse to get rid of it unless he, you know, gets bad.

Do you know where you were that attached to where you were when that happened?

We think it came from the Velisca Axe Murder House.

You're very haunted, Iowa.

Very haunted.

And I just talked to them, the girl who runs that here a month or two ago and super nice person.

Like she did not, I go, you know, it's so interesting to even have that particular job as property manager of the Velisca Axe Murder House.

Never thought about that as a job.

It's, it's dark.

Yeah, it's pretty dark.

Yeah.

I don't think the family is there anymore.

Just my take on it.

I don't think the family is there anymore.

I think whatever it is is this entity that either she did alluded to that as well.

She did alluded to that as well or no.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think whatever it is is this entity that either is the killer or thinks it's the killer.

She didn't actually really want to talk about it.

Okay. Interesting.

Yeah.

She didn't really want to talk about that.

That part she didn't want to talk about, but she talked about everything else.

That's, that tells you all you need to know right there.

Yeah.

There's something about that house and whatever is there, it picks and chooses people.

Because I know at least two or three other people that have the same experiences I do where it seems like something followed them from that house, which is very interesting.

Like it picks and chooses who it wants to like target.

I've just, I maybe I've just been a little more vocal about it because I find it very interesting because we'll be doing like spare box sessions or S sessions and next thing you know, like something will start coming through and you almost know right away.

And it's like it gets jealous that we talked to other ghosts.

Yeah.

It's, it's so funny.

You know, last year I had a couple of experiences with it where they got a little too real.

Like, all right, let's let's back it up for a second.

Let's reevaluate and figure out how I can control this a little bit.

Like I said, I never believed in attachments and I mean, like never.

I was like, all right, okay, sure, sure thing.

Same thing with portals, never believed in portals.

Maybe still don't even believe in portals.

I'm not sure.

I guess I'm a little more open to things now, but still skeptical minded.

And that wraps up part one of our conversation about exploring the paranormal with Zach Wenzel,

a blood moon paranormal.

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Thank you.