Back with new stories for 2025! This ghostly multi-media program will take you on a journey through the haunts in your backyard, and around the world. Pulling from Jeff’s 25 years of research for his books, podcasts, adventures, and the various television shows he’s worked on, join one of the nation’s premiere storytellers for a trip through the unusual and the unexplained.
This program is a MUST SEE for anyone who ever plans to die! In a Cemetery Safari, Jeff Belanger takes you on a journey from the oldest burial rituals up through modern times. We explore funerary art throughout the ages, see funny and memorable epitaphs, funeral customs, cemetery oddities, and throw in the stories behind a few haunted boneyards for good measure. The program is funny, entertaining, and uplifting!
Did Battle of Bennington P.O.W. Hendrick Roddemore put up the first decorated Christmas tree in New England in a tiny shack in Windsor Locks, Connecticut in 1777? Jeff Belanger finds out the real story in this holiday episode of New England Legends.
Last night I gave a program at the Derby Public Library in Connecticut. Before we got started, the director, Scott, showed me around the 120-year-old building. When he brought me into their History Room, he gestured toward this large painting and my jaw dropped. “That looks like Leatherman!” I said. And sure enough, it is. I’ve covered the story of Leatherman in my New England Legends television series, on my Web site, and I’ve been to multiple Leatherman caves in Connecticut. But I had only ever seen grainy black and white photos of the vagabond. Never have I seen the Leatherman captured like this painting. The Leatherman was likely Jules Bourglay of Lyon, France. Jules had fallen in love with the wealthy daughter of a leather merchant. Her father at first objected to the match because Jules was poor, but then offered him a job in his leather business. Jules made a bad financial decision with the company that left them ruined. Disgraced and ashamed, around 1862, someone matching Jules’s description shows up in New England and started walking a loop between the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers. He’d walk about 10 miles per day, every day of the year in a 365-mile loop. He slept in caves or sometimes a generous person’s barn. The vagabond lived on handouts and sometimes did odd jobs. But he kept walking that loop until 1889 when he was found dead in Ossing, New York. This was painted by A.V. Durand in 1892. It’s breathtaking, and so fitting that this New England legend is still with us in such a tangible way. If you’d like to see it for yourself, stop by the Derby Public Library, 313 Elizabeth Street, Derby, Connecticut.
Jeff Belanger will again appear on the Discovery networks new series: Shock Docs. If you’ve seen the Conjuring 3 movie, this is the real story behind that case. Jeff grew up in Newtown, Connecticut, where this all started. He knew Ed and Lorraine Warren since he was a kid, and remembers them talking about this case. This was the big one. The goal was to put the devil on trial in Danbury court. No matter what you believe, a man died, and a community was shaken to its core. Jeff has also appeared on other Shock Docs in the series: Devil’s Road: The True Story of Ed and Lorraine Warren, Amityville Horror House, and The Exorcism of Roland Doe. The Devil Made Me Do It premieres June 11, 2021 on Discovery+. Check out the trailer below:
From The Newtown Bee in Newtown, Connecticut. Jeff Belanger’s latest book, The Call of Kilimanjaro: Finding Hope Above the Clouds, was published March 9 by Imagine, a division of Charlesbridge Publishing. After losing his brother-in-law Chris to cancer, Belanger made the decision to summit Mount Kilimanjaro as a testament to his memory. But this experience was just as much to test himself and find clarity about his own life and goals. The Call of Kilimanjaro is a day-by-day record including dozens of stunning full-color photographs of Belanger’s ascent to the peak of Africa’s highest mountain… Continue reading the article here.
It is absolutely fine — completely understandable, in fact — if someone does not feel all bright and bubbly just because it is the holiday season, says Jeff Belanger. Belanger, who lived his formative years in Sandy Hook, knows that some of the oldest traditions surrounding Christmas date back centuries. Many of those traditions have very dark starting points, he has learned in recent years. Thinking about stringing up some cranberries and popcorn to hang as garland on your tree? Most would reconsider after the root of that tradition is explained… Click here to read the rest of the article by Shannon Hicks at the Newtown Bee.
The Belsnickel is an old world Christmastime legend, but unlike Santa, in addition to rewarding the good children, he punishes the bad ones. Once relegated to history, the Belsnickel is making a comeback, and Legend Hunter Jeff Belanger visited him at the historic Smith-Harris House in East Lyme, Connecticut, for a very different kind of “Christmas in Connecticut”!
“I grew up in an old New England town…” You know how many lectures I have begun with those exact words? Each time some radio talk show host asks me how I got started in the paranormal, I start with those nine words. I’ve said them in that order thousands of times now. I say that phrase because it sets the stage that I grew up around historic locations and old buildings with tales of ghosts. I specifically say “old New England town” because nobody has ever heard of Newtown, Connecticut… My heart broke completely on December 14th as I watched with the rest of the world as we learned the horrific details of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. It hit me particularly hard because I’m a dad to a little girl who is only a few months younger than most of the victims, it struck me so profoundly because I went to Sandy Hook Elementary School in fifth grade and I felt like part of my childhood was attacked that day, and it hurt more because my family still lives in Newtown—the house I grew up in and where my folks still live is less than a mile from the school. What has happened to humanity? What kind of monsters walk among us? How could something like this have happened? I asked all of those questions too. I’ve cried over this… a lot. I’ve felt rage and anger because of what happened. While the event was still unfolding that Friday morning, I was emailing and texting with local friends. “We have to do something,” was the tone of each of those messages. Something had to change. I had to change. On the morning of Christmas Eve, I spent some time down at the makeshift memorials in Sandy Hook Center and by the firehouse. TV cameras and photographs did them no justice. There are a million details that could only be seen in person. The notes left in a child’s handwriting that said, “I hope you are okay,” the thousands of teddy bears, the cross made from Legos, the candles, the trinkets, the flowers, the toys, the hand-made Christmas tree ornaments that featured the victims’ pictures, the handwritten notes of support offered to anyone who read them, and the profound sense of sadness and loss that hung in the air. It took a community to create those memorials in a matter of days. Everyone was building something, though they didn’t know what or why. But it mattered. They did something. One little gesture, then another, and another turned into something powerful. This is where it gets paranormal: intent is everything. You really can change your outlook, then the world, then the universe. It’s been proven again and again. I know it sounds daunting. I mean all of the baggage we all have from our past, and all of the trouble the future will no-doubt bring: bills, broken cars, bad relationships, horrible bosses, and so on. But we can focus on right now. I’m mean this second. We can easily change this second. It’s right in our hands, after all. It’s tangible. New Year’s is a time for resolutions and change. I’ve found that any resolution with a start date other than right now has little chance of success. So right now, do something. Make a choice, and do it. Change this second, then another. You’ll inspire the person next to you to do the same. Slowly those seconds will compound and build something bigger and powerful—the same way those memorials were built in Sandy Hook Center. Those emails and text messages I was sending on December 14th have turned into a new non-profit organization called the Newtown Memorial Fund, Inc. I’m proud to serve on the board of directors along with other locals who are volunteering their time to change the world around them. Our goal is to raise $26 million that will be used to assist victims’ families immediate needs, to build an appropriate memorial, and to establish a sustainable fund to provide academic scholarships in the victims’ names for generations of Newtown students to come. We’ve already raised over $450,000, but we still have a long way to go. I have no doubt we’ll get there, though. There are mountains to climb to get to that goal, but we’ll climb them one step at a time. To learn more, or to donate please visit: http://newtownmemorialfund.org/ The reason tragedies like the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting hurt us is because we are all connected. There’s a fabric that binds one person to another, our past to our present, and our present to the future. It’s the same reason we sometimes know something before it happens, and why we feel emotions like love, joy, rage, and sadness. Because we tap into this global thing called humanity. I hope and pray that 2013 will be a year filled with love, laughter, and more humanity than we have seen in a long time.
The ancient Mayans are right: The world ends this week. That doesn’t mean I’m not making plans for any event beyond December 21st. In fact, my family just decided that we will be spending Christmas in Newtown this year. But the world as we knew it must end. And I’d like to thank 26 heroes for showing us why. In 1985, my family moved to Newtown, Connecticut. I attended fifth grade at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I recall the giant green footprints that were painted on the street from Riverside Road up to the school’s entrance; I remember Mrs. Paige, my fifth grade teacher; and I recall my friends—carefree, learning, trying to be cool—exactly the way elementary school kids are supposed to be. I am forever a part of that school and town, and it is forever a part of me. I share a kinship with every person who was a student there, who taught there, who walked those halls, and who had a connection with the building. If you were to draw a line between all of those people and all who knew them, it would include a community of millions of human beings. I’m not only saddened by the atrocity that took place at my old grammar school, I’m broken… and ready to be rebuilt. It’s been surreal watching 24×7 television news plastering images of my childhood everywhere. The police press conferences are being held at Treadwell Park, a place where I’ve played in hundreds of soccer games. St. Rose of Lima Church is the church where I was confirmed. Sandy Hook center is an intersection I’ve driven through thousands of times. That firehouse and school—less than one mile from the house I grew up in, and the house where my parents still live—are landmarks that we passed almost every time we went anywhere. I can’t help but feel naked and vulnerable as the world peers into my hometown. But since the world is watching, that amazing community has an opportunity to make a stand and say something both comforting and profound here at the end of the world. It took 26 angels—most of them young children—to accomplish what no single person could have done alone. They made the world stop turning. They made all of humanity pause. They forced us to ask ourselves, “What’s really happening to us?” The ancient Mayans may have predicted the end of the world this week, but these 26 heroes fulfilled it. These angels all have names: Charlotte Bacon, age 6, Daniel Barden, age 7, Rachel Davino, age 29, Olivia Engel, age 6, Josephine Gay, age 7, Ana M. Marquez-Greene, age 6, Dylan Hockley, age 6, Dawn Hochsprung, age 47, Madeleine F. Hsu, age 6, Catherine V. Hubbard, age 6, Chase Kowalski, age 7, Jesse Lewis, age 6, James Mattioli, age 6, Grace McDonnell, age 7, Anne Marie Murphy, age 52, Emilie Parker, age 6, Jack Pinto, age 6, Noah Pozner, age 6, Caroline Previdi, age 6, Jessica Rekos, age 6, Avielle Richman, age 6, Lauren Rousseau, age 30, Mary Sherlach, age 56, Victoria Soto, age 27, Benjamin Wheeler, age 6, and Allison N. Wyatt, age 6. These fine human beings caused billions of extra hugs in recent days. They started dialogues that need to happen. They woke up a town, a state, a nation, and a world to what really matters. They did not die in vain. It’s our duty as humans to carry on their legacy. The person who won’t be named is the shooter. Names belong to people. He doesn’t deserve his. The 26 angels are all that matter. But the shooter also had his role to play. It took only one monster to remind me that people are good, kind, and selfless. Fred Rogers once said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” There was only one monster Friday morning, but hundreds of helpers who ran in—and those are just the first responders. As word spread, you had thousands then millions more who pledged prayers, support, and money to help in any way they could. Even in the darkest corners of this tragedy, we find light. The word “hero” is thrown around too much today, but already we have heard stories of true heroism from Sandy Hook. Victoria Soto, a first grade teacher, thought quickly when she heard shots fired in her school. She hid all of her students in closets and cabinets. When the gunman entered her classroom, she told him her kids were in the gym. The coward then shot the defenseless teacher. She was quick-thinking, brave, and selflessly traded her life for those of her students. That is a hero. We should name towns and streets after her. But no amount of honor will ever be enough. Each of her students will be greater people because of her. They will guide us into this brave new world. On Sunday, President Obama visited my quiet hometown to help console the victims’ families and a grieving nation. While it was right for him to do so, it saddens me that any United States president would have ever even heard of my little town. As one of my high school friends pointed out in his Facebook post, “The last time shots were fired like this in Newtown was during the Revolutionary War when Rochambeau’s army took practice shots at weather vanes.” This stuff doesn’t happen in Newtown. It shouldn’t happen anywhere. Of all of the human emotions, “helpless” is the worst. If there was something I could build, I’d build it; something I could fix, I’d fix it; something I could break to undo this, I’d break it. For now, all I can do is pray for those who need our support the most. When the prayers have been said, and the condolences offered, next I will focus this energy on myself, on my family, and
