Daughter of the Paranormal: How Alexandra Holzer Is Keeping Her Father’s Legacy Alive [Interview]

Welcome back to DEAD Time. Did you know that the iconic movie Ghostbusters (1984) was inspired by a real person? In an interview in 2013, actor and screenwriter Dan Aykroyd said, “I became obsessed with Hans Holzer, the greatest ghost hunter ever. That’s when the idea of my film Ghostbusters was born.”

Born in Vienna, Austria in 1920, Hans Holzer studied archeology and history at the University of Vienna before his family moved to New York City in 1938. Holzer was a parapsychologist and the author of over 120 books on ghosts and life after death. He married Countess Catherine Geneviève Buxhoeveden, a sixth-generation descendant of Russian Empress Catherine the Great, and the couple had two daughters. He eventually became known as the Father of the Paranormal and America’s first ghost hunter. His most famous investigation was the Amityville Horror case in 1977.

Hans Holzer’s daughter, Alexandra Holzer, is a paranormal investigator, sensitive, journalist, and author. In 2008, she wrote Growing Up Haunted: A Ghostly Memoir about what it was like growing up the daughter of the most famous ghost hunter in the world. She has been a contributor to the Huffington Post, UK’s Haunted Magazine, and Canada’s UFO Digest. Holzer has appeared in several documentaries and television shows as a paranormal expert and contributed to the creation of the TV series The Holzer Files on Travel Channel. She is the co-founder of Generational Ghost Hunting and Scientific Team Hunt With Holzer, a global organization that uses Dr. Hans Holzer’s research and methods to investigate private cases.

Bloody Disgusting was delighted to have the opportunity to talk with Alexandra Holzer about her work in the paranormal field, keeping her father’s legacy alive, and a new film she’s working on to tell Hans Holzer’s life story.

Bloody Disgusting: Your father was Dr. Hans Holzer, who was considered America’s first ghost hunter. What first sparked your interest in the paranormal?

Alexandra Holzer: Growing up in that environment, one really can’t escape it. I tried. When I graduated high school, I went into art school. I was actually following in my mother’s footsteps attending the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. I was really all about art at that point and I was always a writer. In terms of the paranormal, I had so many moments and experiences growing up in the apartment because he would invite these people in, or characters as I liked to refer to them, not really understanding who they were or why they were there. When you’re a teenager you think you know everything, and you think things are not interesting, but they are. It’s like a whole evolution of going into your young twenties. I had a lot of things happen and it was really my mother’s mother, my grandmother, who I would have conversations with when I was little about experiences, because my entire family were very intuitive and had their own happenings. That’s why I wrote Growing Up Haunted: A Ghostly Memoir, as an ode to both sides of the family, the Holzers and the Buxhoevedens.

It wasn’t really until I was done with FIT that I kind of felt lost and I had an experience where my late aunt, my mother’s sister, had passed. It was the first time I personally lost anybody, and I was in my early twenties. I was folding laundry and at the time I was a young mother of four. I had what we call clairaudience, which is when you hear the disembodied voices. And I heard my aunt come back to me and tell me what she couldn’t tell me when she was passing. We went to go see her and I had never seen someone dying. I tried to hold up my third daughter, who was only six weeks old at the time, so she could try to hold her, and the hospice was there. She never had children, so my children were such a joy for her that she could live through that and enjoy them. She couldn’t speak, but I had spoken to her and the last thing I said to her was, “I love you and I’m so sorry.”

Later, when I heard her voice whisper to me, she said, “I love you, too.” I was the typical housewife and when that happened, I stopped, and I took point of it, and it pulled me back full circle to my father. So, I called him, and I said, “Daddy, I need to talk to you.” That really opened up the flood gates because he was waiting for that moment, and he wasn’t surprised. When I told him, he said, “Of course!” with his Austrian accent. He said, “You’ve always been psychic since you were a little child.” So, I was fascinated from that point to understand where she went, how she was able to communicate with me without physically being there, and that kind of really started that process for me. I’ve always had experiences and was always aware that things existed whether they were human or non-human and could infiltrate an environment, but if you’re not going to look at it, if you don’t want to understand it, you kind of go away from it.

BD: Do you have a favorite memory of growing up with your father being so well known in the paranormal community?

AH: There’s a lot! As we get older our brains kind of malfunction with the aging process and what we think we remember is not what it might have been, but I do have quite a bit of it still intact. Growing Up Haunted is really the norm for someone like me, so a lot of memories are still around for me. One of the most interesting ones was when he would have a group of people over and I distinctly remember they were all so frightening to me because they would be dressed oddly. One would look sort of like a high priestess and the gowns, and the clinking of the jewelry and they smelled like incense. There were very well-known people in the apartment. He would call me in and ask me to come and join the group and he would show me off. He would say, “This is my daughter, Alex,” and I would hide in my room. But I came out because I was very respectful of him, and I didn’t want to be rude. It was a very weird feeling because they would start reading me and they would say, “You’re going to become this and you’re going to become that. You’re such a beautiful soul and you’re so giving.” It was almost like being on display almost to the point where it became frightening. When you’re young as a child, you don’t really understand.

So, that was a moment where my curiosity got piqued a little bit more because I didn’t really understand what these roundtable discussions were and who these people were. That kind of kept me interested. I had a lot of things happen in the apartment growing up. He would go away for business a lot during that time. He went to California and Europe; he was always traveling. I always looked at him kind of like Raiders of the Lost Ark meets the paranormal with the fedora hat and the raincoat and briefcase in hand and he was out the door. When he came back, the apartment would change; the vibe; the frequency. It was almost like if you feel like a room is very warm and there is all of the sudden a cold spot, and there’s no reason for it, you can deduce scientifically, intelligently what it could be. A lot of that would start happening and it was frightening at times.

I remember one morning when I was probably in middle school. I had an older sibling, and she would get up earlier to get ready for work. I remember the sun was just starting to come up and my entire room took on a life of its own. I had a Lifesavers candy coin can to collect coins up high on a bookcase, and it would start rattling and then it would stop. I froze in my bed, almost like when people say that they are frozen, but they are aware of their environment, but they can’t wake up, they can’t move, it kind of felt like that. I felt something put hands over me like a radiating feeling. I hid under the cover because I was petrified, and I didn’t move. Then I heard the shower turn on in the hallway with my sister, and then everything stopped. It was quite frightening. I have a lot of different stories like that.

BD: You helped create The Holzer Files on Travel Channel, which investigates some of your father’s case files. Why did you decide it was important to reopen these cases after all these years?

AH: The truth of it is that I had always wanted to do a series long before The Holzer Files. The point of the show was the same in terms of reopening his cases, except I was going to be the one to reopen them. We got very close over the years pitching to the different networks before streaming was a thing. It was very difficult because like my father, when he would send a pitch out everything went through the mail. You would wait and then pick up the phone and inquire. So, I kind of came off the heels of the tradition before it ended, before where we are now, and it was very grueling. There were a lot of executives who wanted this show to go forward as strong female lead, continuing the legacy, and then one person above them says, “No.” I had to deal with that for about 10-15 years of trying to get this show off the ground because nobody wanted the female lead; they couldn’t grasp it, they couldn’t invest in it. So, that began my plight of dealing with the fact that I’m up against the men, regardless of who I am, where I come from, or what I could bring to the table, and maybe for viewers who want to see a female doing this who is a wife and a mother. Having this other side of me to give back to the audience and doing it with empathy and with validation and truth, not hiding anything, and I guess I was just too honest, and they don’t like that.

So, with The Holzer Files, half of it was what I already wanted to do and half of it was the production company asking if I had any footage or photography and that was what they brought to the table. They didn’t cast me in The Holzer Files and the only reason I was part of the show was because they couldn’t make it work without me. I just said, “Well, if I don’t do this, we’re not going to get anything going for him. People won’t know who he is, and I can’t let that happen.” So, I agreed to it, but it wasn’t with full, heartfelt excitement. I was definitely cut out of it; it’s not what I wanted, and we would have made it work as a family, I just wasn’t given the opportunity. I didn’t want to lose the opportunity, so I was kind of stuck in the middle and I was given that advice from someone who allowed to help manage me, which I really didn’t need in hindsight, but I thought that would sound better. I thought years ago, if you had a manager, it would sound better, that you’re more important. This is the game you play with networks.

It’s a shame, because it does not feel good for the family. We didn’t appreciate it; we didn’t have much respect for it. The only parts of my father in it are very limited and I’m hardly a part of that thereafter. It really wasn’t about my father’s cases so much as it was about a new group of people going to places that I would have liked to have gone to and actually experience the footsteps that he had placed that I could walk into, because I emulated that throughout my life with him. He wanted that with me. We even tried to get a show together a long time ago when he was healthy and cognitive. He and I had signed a contract with another production company in San Diego. I would go on investigations with him through Skype because Skype was what we had at the time to do these things, and my father would Skype in. So, it was just one of those things where you make a choice in life because you panic thinking you’re not going to get another deal. I had to make a decision, and I don’t think it was the right decision because it wasn’t him and what he stood for in the work. I’m hoping this year we’re going to be able to flip that around.

I have someone that I’m signed with that I met when I was filming Amityville: An Origin Story. The director and writer for that show and I are collaborating on a film about my father’s life. So, hopefully that will help start setting the record straight [laughs]. But those things take time. On social media, some people are accusing me of canceling The Holzer Files [laughs]. I was the lowest man on the totem pole in terms of that. If anything, there were a lot of people who were asking why I wasn’t even in it as a co-lead and I said, “Well, there is only so much I can say on social media because I don’t want to be that person.” The minute you say something they are going to defend the other people and think you’re jealous or competitive and it opens up that can of worms. So, I’ve been very respectful and grateful and moved away from that.

BD: That’s so unfortunate because your father was so important to the paranormal community.

AH: He was and that’s the Holzer Method. He made it okay to bring in people with different abilities, not talents, these people all have abilities, and I think everyone has abilities. He made it okay to bring in the other side of it, which is the metaphysical, because of parapsychology and the staunchness of it, they turn their nose up at that, which is why he was like a rogue investigator in the United States, who was European. It was unheard of; he went against all these people with their Ph.D.’s and trying to make it very scientific, but there is a lot of scientific data on metaphysics. So, he combined the two. Don’t forget, he himself started out as a skeptic journalist as a young man, so he had to evolve. When you’re dealing with the paranormal, the whole point is evolution. If you cannot evolve with it and see that you could have done things differently or that you were looking at it wrong, you’re not going to get the full data. You’re not going to get the comprehension that people seek.

BD: Can you tell me more about the movie you’re working on about your father’s life?

AH: Sure! I have a deal with the director who sees the investment is worthy of telling the story of who Hans Holzer was, who he still is. It’s basically telling his life’s story and where he came from and who he became. A lot of articles that I’ve written, like for the Huffington Post, I wrote “The Man Behind the Ghosts,” because there is more to him than that, which is unusual because when you look at what a ghost hunter is, or a paranormal investigator, none of them have the combined qualities or abilities that my father had because he was just multi-faceted. There is not much respect for that and awareness to it because the field itself has been so muddied over time because of reality shows. I don’t think it’s really a good thing all the time. I think everybody and anyone thinks that they can go and be this and if they get on a TV show, they forget it. They’re on a TV show, so they must be the experts and it’s ridiculous.

It downgrades people like my father and those that came before him, like Hereward Carrington, Catherine Crowe, and Nandor Foder, who were doing this. It really belittles someone like him. The film would be able to bring that back out into the light and really cover aspects of his life and the family and really kind of bring everyone back up to speed that this guy was no joke and he was born for a reason and brought here for a reason. So, hopefully that’s what it’s going to entail. It’s being written as we speak, so we’re in the very early stages.

For more information about Alexandra Holzer’s work, you can visit her website.