James Cooper and Mike Bresselaar are both part of the Canadian Paranormal Expeditions team. Cooper acts as the lead investigator for the portion of the crew that ghost hunts in Saskatchewan. He told CTV News that his fascination with the supernatural started at a young age. “I’ve always been interested in spooky things, and it just so happened years ago I was dating someone whose mom happened to be part of the group, and she said if I wanted to date her daughter, I had to go on a ghost hunt with them. So, I did, I tagged along and I had a great time.” Bresselaar has been investigating with the team for 16 years. He is admittedly the skeptic of the group and took a different path than Cooper to find his love for ghost hunting. “As a kid, I was all over the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, UFOs, all of that stuff actually more than spirits and ghosts,” Bresselaar said. The seasoned investigator went on to say that his close friend Jackie ended up marrying the founder of the team, Brad Monks, found out Monks did paranormal investigating, and the rest is history. “It’s been great ever since then; we get to go every two weeks and have an adventure with our best friends. Like, it’s just so much fun,” Bresselaar said. The team’s most recent investigation was at the Regina German Club where the duo said they recorded all sorts of unexplainable phenomena. That included a piano key being struck, a heavy bag of nine-volt batteries falling off a table, disembodied voices, and a low growl. But according to Cooper, the scariest experience he has had was at an abandoned bank in Oxbow when he was standing in the basement of an old bank. “While I was standing down there, I felt something actually touch my neck, and it felt to me like someone put an ice-cold finger right through the back of my neck into my spine. And I almost went into shock from fear, like I instantly was freezing and jaw chattering cold.” For Bresselaar, he said that as a skeptic, he hasn’t experienced fear but instead gets excited when something happens that he can’t explain. One of his most memorable experiences occurred in the basement of a former school in Morse. “While Mike’s filming me, he pauses and he says, ‘James, it sounded like someone came up in my ear and just asked, ‘Whose play is this?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, okay, whatever.’ But when I got home and reviewed that tape, you can actually hear the boy’s voice and it says, ‘Whose play is this?’” Cooper says the old school in Morse is now a museum. When the team went back to host a fundraiser at that location, Cooper said he spoke to a 70-year-old man that once attended the school and had seen the interaction with the boy’s voice. The former school attendee told Cooper that the room where it occurred was where kids used to be put in timeout, therefore maybe that explained the boy asking that question. As for what’s next for the Saskatchewan crew, the duo says they have at least 18 locations to investigate next year, proving that the spooky season is not just around Halloween.
