‘Buried Worlds With Don Wildman’ Illuminates Real Paranormal Mysteries of The World, Exclusive Interview and Preview
Buried Worlds with Don Wildman, the host formerly of the long-running hit series Mysteries at the Museum and Beyond the Unknown, takes his thirst for adventure into new territory to explore mankind’s darkest mysteries in his new series that kicks off this coming Monday, June 8.
TV Show Ace has an exclusive for the premiere episode of Buried Worlds about vampires in Eastern Europe. Wildman begins his adventure by traveling to Eastern Europe to discover the truth behind the still-told tales of vampires that still linger and torment rural Bulgarian townships.
He even crosses into the most strange of all places, a cave where the Trigrad river that enters, it drops down into the center of the earth. The perfect place for a crime or to conceal wrongdoing, of which happened in copious quantities in the time of the notorious Vlad the Impaler.
As Wildman discovers the dark past of vampires and witches, he is given the opportunity to contact the spirits of those who have passed, with the help of a modern-day medium. He learns about this infamous Vlad, aka Count Dracula.
Wildman’s prodigious on-camera investigations have carried him far and wide to mankind’s greatest legends and lore.
Whether descending the underground cities of Cappadocia in Turkey or slogging through London’s labyrinthine sewer system or hiking in Ethiopia, Wildman has traveled around the globe to history’s hardest places, where visceral tales are set against ancient backdrops and human intrigue is carved into walls.
From Off Limits to Mysteries at the Museum and spinoffs like Monumental Mysteries and Greatest Mysteries, Wildman calls the world his oyster.
Buried Worlds schedule of shows
In Buried Worlds with Don Wildman, he will take us on seven hour-long episodes and a two-hour special event finale airing on Monday, July 27 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.
Additional episodes include:
“Voodoo’s Dark Magic” – Premieres Monday, June 15 at 9 p.m. ET/PT
Wildman travels to Haiti and New Orleans, he witnesses a top-secret ritual as one man is possessed by the God of Death.
“Demon Woods” – Premieres Monday, June 22 at 9 p.m. ET/PT
Wildman visits a Virginia town where paranormal activity is spiking and finds a connection to the lost Roanoke colony.
“The Nazi’s Supernatural Weapons” – Premieres Monday, June 29, at 9 p.m. ET/PT
Traveling to Poland and Germany, Wildman sees a mysterious Nazi diary, and Wildman witnesses how Hitler used black magic to conquer the world.
“Temples of Doom” – Premieres Monday, July 6 at 9 p.m. ET/PT
In Peru, Wildman investigates a deadly ancient cult and finds evidence of a supernatural war. Finally, he uncovers clues about bloody sacrifice.
“Devil’s Swamp” – Premieres Monday, July 13 at 9 p.m. ET/PT
Wildman investigates dark cults in the Louisiana bayou. He goes to the swamps south of New Orleans looking for the mysterious orbs.
“Curse of the Druids” – Premieres Monday, July 20 at 9 p.m. ET/PT
Wildman visits magical wells and dives the wreck of “the first Titanic.” He meets modern Druids to see if a bloody battle ended with a deadly curse.
“Curse of the White City” – Two-Hour Season Finale – Premieres Monday, July 27 at 8 p.m. ET/PT
Wildman faces lethal dangers and curses in the Honduran jungle on his quest to find the legendary Lost White City.
Interview with Don Wildman
Travel Channel just can’t quit you…
Don Wildman: Indeed we had been sort of at the end of things in a happy way with Mysteries at the Museum… I don’t know, eight and a half years and 24 seasons. I think we did?
We were kind of flirting with each other, what are we going to do next? I need to get out into the world again. I’ve become known as a man who looks at glass cases and I had done a lot of specials for them and that sort of thing, but I really wanted to do a series that kind of had a full through line.
In the meantime, they’d rebranded totally paranormal. I said, okay, well I can do that. But how do we do that for real, because I have no history in that world. I am just history. That’s my gig.
I suggested that I go out into the world and approach paranormal as a fish out of water, sort of outsider. And in the process create sort of an inverted triangle where I was learning abroad history and the perspective of where I am in the world, and who I’m meeting.
But at the meantime, start to have experiences that sort of take an outsider into the inner circle. That required of me a change of perspective… to sort of leave my skepticism and judgment at the door and go in full of sort of an open book in terms of what do I need to understand about this world?
The information that educates me, but also the people that I’m dealing with. Needless to say it is a very unusual environment. You’re always sort of disappearing in it and it’s everywhere.
We went from Peru to Haiti, to Germany, to Bulgaria, to England, to Ireland, et cetera, et cetera, all the way down the line. My big takeaway was that everywhere in the world, people are trying to figure out what’s beyond the veil, and what is their access point and how do they do it?
Maybe they’re doing it because they just are fascinated by it, but in all cases, they have a sensitivity that I have always lacked, which I’ve always envied people for.
I always felt if I could understand and can have an experience, I would know so much more than I do now. It would just be as simple as that. And all these people are apparently having these experiences and they’re seeing and talking to ghosts, people I really grew to really respect.
I’m just standing side by side in the series with people who are talking to spirits and having experiences that are pretty undeniable as I’m with them. And a few occasions coming to mind.
Eastern Europe sort of seems to be the cradle of all things vampire and the macabre…
Don Wildman: Some of that, a great deal of it has to do with how their story was told and ferried to the rest of the world, which was the Victorian era. And the Victorian commercial interests sort of took that mystery and weirdness and may stories that have it like Dracula.
And it was an easy sell to somebody in England or wherever it was so far away and so interesting.
But when you go to the source and you realize that these legends and myths and experiences that people have had are much closer to the ground, much realer, and what it really boils down to is some sort of explanation for them, a sort of balancing agent to make sense of the universe because they were dealing with such pressures, socioeconomic pressures or, or whatever. these were poor places in the world.
And, as the world sort of advanced in scientific knowledge, these places were less behind just because of lack of education and resources and so forth.
Therefore their mystery comes along for the ride, culturally speaking, whereas the rest of the world kind of moves on. And so they became the wellspring for these, these stories and this myth.
I come to these things with this broad interest, sort of the strength of understanding perspective. If you let that go instead of yourself, you know what… shut up…you don’t live here! What’s really going on here? Then you’re immersed in this world which still exists.
The set piece of that vampire premiere episode that you’re talking about is the visit that we went to on this vampire hunt. We go to a mountain top in search of a vampire. We’re joking uncomfortably and the cars were all driving there because we have GPS coordinates.
We have no idea where we’re going and we sort of wend our way up this Hill and find the creepiest abandoned farm village from the the 1800’s, gypsies have probably been living here, or somebody has been squatting a long time and, and there’s weirdness everywhere. It’s just creepy.
So the story is that the surrounding villages have been suffering misfortune. Wildlife has been getting killed in strange ways. Their cattle stock have been getting killed. They believe that this weird village is the source of this stuff. And that there’s probably a vampire up there.
It is talked about in those terms, it’s not like they’re embarrassed about that.
These three terrific guys come from the city to meet us there. I really liked these guys a lot. That was always my big takeaway from this world. Not that I had expectations of strange and uncomfortable people, but they were very sweet.
That’s what you realize. So often the case with people who have a sensitivity of this nature, they’re very nice people. Sometimes they are very fragile souls, and you have to be nice and you have to sort of understand that they’re coming from a whole different perspective of life.
I’m okay with that and I want to learn from people. I was open to what they could teach me.
Well, that night was one of the most revealing the epiphanies of my life, where I learned not only that the vampire idea was not literal. that it wasn’t an entity necessarily. One of the guys thought it was, but none of the other guys really thought we were ever going to see some walking creature in the night.
It was more of an explanation of what was the spiritual vibe that they got from this place. Everybody knows somebody like this, everybody knows they have a friend who has had that sort of vibrating sensitivity, like antennas.
And the one guy really has these experiences on a regular basis. The show in a big sense was a redirection for me, away from being “Superior American” equipped with my scientific version of life into a world where the investigation broadened my perspective on the possibilities of the paranormal.
Not only was it possible that it wasn’t necessarily a ghost, per se, it was more of a spiritual realm we were talking about.
Please indulge me. I’ve been thinking we are sort of on the cusp of a different world that is 200 years from now. We will be the infants in the understanding of existence. And science will finally unfold the realities of matter and the universe and black holes and so forth, and all that will become revealed to future people and we will be the idiots who were straddling two realities.
There was this pre-science world that was all missing legend. And there will be the real science world, which is down the road two or 300 years from now. And we’ll be the ones with a foot in both camps.
I have a feeling that what those people will know will relate quite a lot to the people that were pre-scientific, that there’s actually a connection between those worlds, not the myth and legend stuff, that’s human projection.
But the sense of a great unknown… that we just don’t even have an understanding of because we project everything about our humanity on to everything and expect it to operate that way.
You teach us the violent history of Eastern Europe in Bulgaria and Hungary, Vlad the Impaler, Countess Bathory, and how people died in the amount and the way they died in this kind of cloistered vacuum and that sort of creepy blood-centric evil, I think the only way people probably could survive something like that is to create this mythology to protect their loved ones from a horrifying death.
Don Wildman: Yes that being said, I’m all that high minded stuff being said. I’m pretty sure I saw ghosts.
I had an experience and I certainly was with people who were talking to NGOs while I was there. And, I can walk away going, well, I’m one of the dummies or, or it doesn’t, it’s up to me where you it’s up to anybody, how they determine what that experience really is.
But it was very convincing. It was very real. And there were dialogues with spirits that were conducted on camera that were not fakery. And it was really amazing… I’ve tried to approach this from a different perspective that I hope works for people. I hope I usher in another kind of audience into this world for Travel Channel, because it’s really worth it
I was fascinated with your GPS experiment with the Rhodopes mountains, the Devil’s Throat Cave and the Trigrad river where this water goes then disappears. Where does all of this water go?
Don Wildman: It’s crazy how many passages are in those places and those deep cenotes and plunge pools and so forth.
I’ve done a little bit of cave diving in my life and, and I’m dying to go back to that place. I mean, not THAT place. Yes, that water just drops into the middle of nowhere.
Buried Worlds with Don Wildman premieres Monday, June 8 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Travel Channel
Go to TravelChannel.com for exclusive behind-the-scenes videos and photos. Follow @TravelChannel and #BuriedWorlds on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for additional content and updates. Follow Don on Twitter: @donwildman Facebook: @GotoWildman Instagram: @donwildman
