Entering the haunted house of of Kevin Kopfstein

Scottish storyteller and paranormalist Kevin Kopfstein is bringing his ghostly tales and collection of ‘hauntiques’ to Fringe World this summer. Following a sold-out season at Adelaide Fringe this year, Kopfstein’s new show, Haunted, makes its Fringe World premiere at the Downstairs Williams Room at The Brass Monkey from Friday, January 24, until Sunday, February 16—with tickets on sale now. BRAYDEN EDWARDS caught up with Kevin Kopfstein to enter the world of haunted dolls, ghosts, vampires and more.

It’s great to have you bringing your show Haunted to Fringe World this summer. How would you say this show is different from magic shows we might have seen before?

This is primarily a storytelling show with a paranormal theme using haunted objects. It’s certainly very different from your normal magic show! Each object has a fascinating ghostly tale behind it, and as the tale is told, strange things begin to happen!

You have spent over 30 years collecting what you call ‘hauntiques’. Tell us about one of them and how you came to acquire it.

One of my favourite ‘hauntiques’ is my Vampire Hunting Kit. I bought it at an online auction. These were made in the late 1800s after the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They were primarily sold to tourists travelling through Eastern Europe to protect them from vampires. It contains everything you need to ward off evil, from wooden stakes, holy water, garlic, rosary beads, consecrated earth and a prayer book.

But the story I tell doesn’t come from the 1800s. It’s something much more modern. The story is about the Highgate Vampire who haunted Highgate Cemetery in London in the late 1960s and includes a real Vampire Hunter!

What’s the spookiest thing that has happened during a live performance?

Every performance of Haunted has strange things happen that I didn’t plan. I often select people from my audience to help me, and during one performance, each person that I selected had the same first name as the person in the story I had just told. It freaked everybody out! And on another occasion, I was showing an old black-and-white photograph of a Victorian girl, and a woman in the audience swore that it was the exact image of her daughter, who was very much alive.

Have you ever performed to, or ‘spooked out’ any memorable or famous people? And what was that experience like?

I had the pleasure of Allen Tiller attending one of my performances. Allen was one of the stars of the TV show, Haunting Australia. He’s a paranormal investigator and historian, who’s written many books on Hauntings in Australia. If ghosts are your thing, then I’d highly recommend reading Allen’s books.

Is the paranormal realm different when you travel to different parts of the world? And if so, how does Australia compare?

People’s belief systems around the world are certainly different, and I love that in my show we get to explore the paranormal realm from different cultures, such as Voodoo, which was brought to Louisiana from West African slaves. I was gifted a set of tarot cards and a voodoo doll from an elderly practitioner of Voodoo in New Orleans, and I use these objects to perform a spellcasting ritual during the show.

The UK has older buildings and castles than Australia, so probably has more ghosts haunting them. But on saying that, I recently did a Ghost Tour of the old Adelaide Gaol, and apart from its fascinating history, it was genuinely spooky, with one of our tour party feeling a presence in one of the jail cells. They ended up running out and not returning for the rest of the tour!

Do ghosts have accents?

Ha! What a brilliant question to finish on! I’ve never heard a ghost speak, but if they do, then I’m sure they have an accent. At the end of my show, we hold a Victorian seance, and the spirits that we contact communicate by ringing a spirit bell and writing in chalk on old children’s school slates, all through the conduit of a haunted doll.