Bob Mahoney/The CWThe Vampire Diaries is a scary show—vampires, werewolves, witches and frighteningly sexy stars—but the set itself is also a pretty terrifying place to work.
What happened to cause star Nina Dobrev to believe in ghosts?
The actress, who plays doppelgängers Elena and Katherine on the CW thriller, says the crew had more than one close encounter with paranormal phenomena while filming at the Gaither Plantation in Covington, Ga.
Once, Dobrev told the AP, a phantom piano player interrupted a shoot.
"The ADs started screaming, 'Stop! Whoever that is, stop the music. We're rolling!'" she said, adding that when the crew barged into the room with the piano, it was empty.
Another time, when Dobrev was alone in a bathroom with no one nearby, she said "the lights were just spontaneously coming on and off."
The whole crew, said the actress, shared a "weird feeling" while filming at Gaither but "nobody could pinpoint" why.
Enter Syfy's Ghost Hunters crew, who investigated the plantation for an episode airing aired April 15, 2009.
"We have a lot of theories," Amy Bruni, one of the Ghost Hunters paranormal investigators, told us today about the hauntings. "The place is very historical—it's been around for a long time. There's a lot of history in that area. Sometimes we see that associated with paranormal activity, especially tragedies or things like that where something might not want to leave.
"I wouldn't blame them," Ami laughs. "It's a beautiful location."
Ami says The Vampire Diaries crew aren't the mysterious piano player's first audience. "I know piano playing has been reported there before," she told us, theorizing that "it could be what we consider a residual haunt. Something that doesn't necessarily interact with you but it kind of does things—goes through the motions."
The Ghost Hunters crew believe they found pretty conclusive evidence of paranormal activity during their investigation at the Gaither Plantation. "We basically put some flour down on the floor upstairs in the attic, left it and came back and there were footsteps in it." (Goosebumps!) "It's a very old-fashioned way of investigating. And then there was a cabinet door downstairs that we caught on camera that opened on its own [and] we heard footsteps throughout the location. It's been awhile but I do remember it pretty well as a really neat place."
A neat place to go on a dare, maybe, but would you want to work there?
"I don't think we've shot there since," Dobrev said.
The Vampire Diaries airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on the CW; Ghost Hunters returns to Syfy June 1 with a special investigation of Pearl Harbor.