Katie Burr: Meet World’s Biggest Ghost Hunt’s fearless investigator

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World’s Biggest Ghost Hunt will go where no paranormal show has gone before- we have secured access to Pennhurst Asylum, the country’s most haunted abandoned hospital. Once our team of expert ghost hunters arrive on site, they will remain for the longest.. Image Courtesy A&E /

We sat down with Katie Burr, the veteran paranormal investigator from Ghost Lab to talk about her harrowing and life changing experience as one of the team members on World’s Biggest Ghost Hunt: Pennhurst Asylum airing on A&E Oct. 30 at 8 p.m.

Katie Burr is well known for her turn on Ghost Lab as a paranormal investigator. The series ran on Discovery Channel for two seasons. Known for being Brad and Barry Klinge’s “ghost bait,” the intuitive learned the tricks of the trade which prepared her for her most important case to date.

On Oct. 30, Burr will take part in an unprecedented event on A&E. She will join a team of scientists and an empath as they endeavor to uncover the truth behind one of the United States’ most notoriously haunted institutions, Pennhurst Asylum.

Ahead of the World’s Biggest Ghost Hunt, we sat down with Katie to talk about her paranormal experiences and how they changed her life.

The Interview

Ghosts from the Past

1428 Elm: Let’s talk about your background, Katie. When did you find out that you had a gift? Were you always attuned to the paranormal?

Katie Burr: From a very young age my mom and grandma let me in on their experiences with the paranormal, so I never really questioned whether or not I believed in it. Seeing as their experiences dealt with family members that had passed on, I saw the subject as comforting more than anything else, but their stories left me with a lot of questions I couldn’t even begin to understand.

I started having my own experiences when I was about 12 years old, but the bigger ones started when I was 22. That was when I woke up to something in bed with me. It was from that moment I knew I could no longer live without answers for why this stuff was going on.

I grew up in a scientific household, and since I was a kid, I always had heightened senses and intuition, but I never really knew the significance of how any of that affected my interaction with the paranormal. My time on Ghost Lab really helped me to merge my scientific upbringing with this field, and working with Zak, Max, and Austin has been such a great continuation of that.

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This year has also really pushed me to open up to my empathic side and I’ve finally begun to understand how my intuitive nature plays a role in investigating. Working with Ali has really helped me begin to understand that side of myself because she herself is very empathic.

We are different in our abilities, but it’s nice to have someone who understands and can help guide me through what I’m experiencing seeing as that part of me is still something I’m coming into and developing. Now that I am developing my empathic side, it’s become my goal to find a balance between science and the spiritual aspects of the paranormal and gain a better understanding of where they overlap.

1428 Elm: What was it like spending two seasons on Ghost Lab with the Klinge brothers? What was your favorite location?

Katie Burr: Brad and Barry are like my big brothers so I had such a great time working with them on Ghost Lab. They loved to use me as “ghost bait” and come up with all kinds of stressful situations to put me in, but I always had a great time with them in our investigations!

It was through working with the Klinges that I learned most of the investigation techniques that I still use today, especially experimentation and era cues. We investigated so many great locations so it’s hard to say which was my favorite, but one that still stands out in my mind is Hill View Manor in New Castle, PA. I absolutely love old abandoned hospitals, and prior to Pennhurst, this was the creepiest one I had ever investigated.

It was the first place I can remember walking into and feeling the energy, long before I was aware of my sensitivity. Just walking the halls in that place brings about a feeling of being watched and followed, and we saw multiple shadow figures lurking around corners backing up that feeling. I was sent down into the basement of Hill View for one of my infamous solo investigations and caught a heavy door closing on its own with my video camera. It definitely caught me off guard and went hand-in-hand with the creepy factor that place has.

1428 Elm: Did you have any takeaways from your experience of being on camera during investigations?

Katie Burr: One of the biggest challenges of investigating with a film crew is always the risk of production equipment interfering with our own equipment, creating false positives, and this is something that I’ve been fortunate enough to work with 2 different teams and production crews at this point who really take this aspect of creating a paranormal show seriously. On “World’s Biggest Ghost Hunt: Pennhurst Asylum,” our team really tried to get a feel for what equipment might interfere early on and took proper precautions to prevent this from affecting our investigations, even going as far as building faraday cages and limiting walkie communication with both the team and the crew to areas out of range of equipment that detects EMF.

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Although having to do all of this extra work to conduct a thorough investigation might make having a camera crew there seem aggravating, there are actually a lot of plus sides to them being there as well. They actually become extra sets of eyes and ears on the ground to verify our experiences.

There have been many times where a production camera will pick up a different angle of an experience from our own, or will be pointed in a direction that our cameras were not, allowing us to have more coverage of our environment. It takes some getting used to at first having the crew around, but once we establish a flow, they become an invaluable resource to have in an investigation.

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