From Prison Cell to Paranormal Art: Mike “Danger” Castro

What do Army military intelligence, a wrongful murder charge, and the visual identity of the paranormal world have in common? Mike “Danger” Castro.

Mike served seven years in the Army, including tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, before becoming one of the most sought-after creatives in the paranormal space. He’s been the creative voice behind Beacon TV since before it launched, including the artwork for Amy Bruni’s docuseries, co-ran Ghosted magazine for nearly three years, and founded Black Frame Society, a community of artists, musicians, photographers and creators standing up for human-made art.

But the road there was anything but ordinary. Mike opens up about being arrested for a murder he didn’t commit, fighting the case from jail, and ultimately winning a settlement and an apology from the State of New Jersey. He shares how that ordeal forced him to rebuild his life through art, and how his first paranormal gig, branding ghost tours at the Old Columbus Inn, led to everything that followed.

Then it gets personal: the woman who died in Mike’s home, and who his whole family has seen since. He describes finding her standing on his staircase looking up at him while his young son talked to her, and a photo he took just feet from where he sat for this interview that he says doesn’t look human at all.

Plus: the difference between a real investigation and an event investigation, why evidence-hoarding holds the field back, the paranormal figures Mike respects most, and his theories on residual energy and parallel dimensions.

Links to Mike and Black Frame Society are in the link tree in our bio.

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Do ghosts have a message for the living? Paranormal investigator and empath Bianca Pierre-Louis, known as Spooky Melanin Magic ( @spookymelaninmagic ) joins Gary and John for a ghost-hunting conversation that’s funny, eerie, and eye-opening. From the most haunted places in America to the feelings that follow her home, Bianca shares what it’s really like to sense the spirit world.

This episode dives into empaths and psychic intuition, haunted history, paranormal evidence, and the stories that never made it into the history books. Bianca explains how she tells her own emotions apart from the energy of the dead, why some spirits are still trying to be heard, and what keeps drawing her back into the dark.

Whether you’re a seasoned ghost hunter, a true believer, or just curious about the paranormal, this one has everything: real hauntings, big laughs, and the question at the heart of every episode, what are spirits? Plus, John and Bianca tease their upcoming investigation together. Grab a seat, Spirit Squad. We’re spirit maxing.

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She sees the dead. She collects haunted dolls. And ten million people can't stop watching.

Clairvoyant, actress and paranormal powerhouse Kelsi Davies joins Gary and John to talk about growing up with spirits, the family gift nobody wanted to talk about, and what really happens when she walks into the most haunted places in America. Plus her new Tubi series, a trip through a past life, and the question we ask everyone: what are ghosts?

It's funny, it's dark, and it gets a little cosmic.

New episode is now everywhere you listen. Watch on YouTube or Spotify, or catch it on Apple and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to like, comment, hype and share!

Follow Kelsi everywhere @kelsiidaviess.

John Kruth runs one of the strangest labs in America, and he's got the data to prove it. As executive director of the Rhine Research Center, the oldest continuously operating parapsychology lab in the country, with roots tracing back to a 1930s Duke University basement, Kruth has spent over fifteen years running ESP, psychokinesis, and psychic phenomena through controlled, peer reviewed, double blind experiments.

He grew up doing meditation and healing work before he could ride a bike, and a shared childhood dream convinced him early on that something bigger than five senses was going on. This episode is built around one question. Are spirits energy, or are they information?

Gary sits down with Kruth to unpack what parapsychologists mean when they say psi, which covers telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and the far edges of human consciousness. Kruth breaks down the Ganzfeld experiment, a sensory deprivation setup involving ping pong balls taped over your eyes, red light, and white noise, then tells a genuinely unsettling story about accidentally leaking his own thoughts into a subject sitting in another room. From there it's biophotons, energy healing, near death experiences, and survival research, plus a real debate over whether ghosts and hauntings are leftover human energy, like John Santa's theory suggests, or something closer to an informational field we're all quietly plugged into.

It's a rare chance to hear a working scientist take hauntings, apparitions, and mediumship seriously without checking his skepticism at the door. Kruth compares psychic ability to golf, something anyone can practice but usually needs a natural gift to really excel at, and explains why the Rhine still runs lab studies instead of just chasing ghost stories on camera. If you care about parapsychology, ghost hunting, or just want a smarter conversation about what might survive after we die, don't miss this one.

@RhineResearchCenter-ESP @Santaparanormal

Paranormal author and investigator Sam Baltrusis joins Gary and John Santa from @santaparanormal live with a reveal they didn’t see coming. Sam’s distantly related to Lizzie Borden. With his new book, Lizzie Borden and the Family Curse coming out October 13, Sam digs into the Borden family tree and its unsettling ties to other infamous names, including Aileen Wuornos and Marilyn Monroe. He also traces an ancestor whose father was executed on spectral evidence, begging the question whether a family can really carry a curse.

The conversation goes deep on the Fall River axe murders. Sam walks through alternate suspects, including William Borden, and the Bertha Manchester murder theory. He also shares what Ryan Murphy's take on the Lizzie Borden story got wrong. From there, the talk turns thoughts on a different ways ghost hunters should work. Sam, Gary, and John debate going into a haunted location cold versus knowing its history, trade notes with the skeptics, and explain why critical thinking matters.

If you love true crime, haunted history, New England ghost stories, or paranormal investigation, this live episode is for you. Sam and John will both be at MASS ParaCon, October 2 to 4, 2026, in Taunton, Massachusetts. Subscribe to Splintered Spirits for weekly conversations with the people chasing the unexplained, and Stay Curious.

Tarot cards get a bad rap in the movies: dramatic candlelight, a mysterious stranger, and a death card that spells doom. The reality is a lot more interesting, and a lot less scary, and in this episode we're getting the real story straight from someone who reads professionally and is currently fighting a legal battle over it.

Beck Ravenswood, the Hanover, Pennsylvania witch making headlines as the plaintiff in a landmark court case over Pennsylvania's fortune telling laws, joins Gary for a full breakdown of the craft that started it all. Beck walks through tarot's murky medieval origins, the difference between the major and minor arcana, why the deck splits into four suits just like a regular deck of playing cards, and what it actually means when a card shows up reversed. Along the way she also gives an update on her ongoing lawsuit, a case that's turned into something much bigger than tarot itself, touching on free speech, religious practice, and what the government gets to decide counts as legitimate spiritual work.

Then Beck puts Gary in the hot seat for his first ever tarot reading, a full ten card Celtic cross spread that digs into what's really going on beneath the surface. Whether you're tarot curious, already have a deck collecting dust on a shelf, or just want to understand what's really happening in a reading before you write it off, this episode is a genuinely useful crash course in one of the most misunderstood tools in the paranormal and spiritual world.

Chris McKinnell, grandson of legendary paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, joins Splintered Spirits for a conversation about ghosts, consciousness, fear, and the real stories behind the Warren legacy. With more than four decades of fieldwork across 10,000 cases in 18 countries, Chris brings a perspective shaped by firsthand experience, psychology, religion, cultural anthropology, and a lifetime spent around the unexplained.

Chris discusses why he moved beyond the demonology framework associated with the Warrens, why he believes fear can make paranormal experiences worse, and what he thinks spirits actually are. He also talks about the true cases that inspired The Conjuring universe, the modern obsession with Annabelle, haunted objects, psychic ability, residual energy, and why the paranormal may have far more to do with human consciousness than horror movies.

This is a grounded, surprising episode of Splintered Spirits with one of the most connected voices in paranormal investigation.