“Almost everyone has had a run-in with the ghost at LTV,” one staffer told a curious visitor to East Hampton Town’s public-access television provider.
While there is no ironclad proof that this phenomenon is supernatural, skeptics and believers alike can see for themselves an eerie piece of evidence archived on YouTube. Around 11 p.m. on November 7, 2023, nearly three hours into a livestream in which LTV’s Jason Nower and Zach Minskoff were discussing the local elections that had taken place that day, both abruptly stopped mid-conversation, their eyes darting to the same point in the studio.
“Do you hear that?” Minskoff asks.
“I do hear that,” Nower answers.
“I’ll go check,” Minskoff says.
Nower tells him not to bother. “But it’s just kind of funny though, isn’t it? . . . We’ll keep an eye out.”
“That’s kind of scary,” Minskoff says. “It sounded like someone was walking, right?”
Nower agrees. “That’s really bizarre,” he says after a long silence in which the two listened intently while staring at the otherwise-empty room.
Minskoff voices the possibility of an otherworldly presence before asking, “What if someone’s here?” quickly reasoning that if someone were there, surely he and Nower would have heard a door opening. No one else was in the building, Nower says.
“What do you think it is?” Minskoff asks. “I don’t know,” was the reply. “A ghost?” Minskoff again suggests.
“I don’t know,” Nower repeats, and, after a pause, “People get freaked out from this building sometimes.”
Addressing the camera, he tells viewers that “sometimes people believe that LTV has ghosts, and I don’t necessarily try to disagree with them.”
“I’m freaked out a little bit,” Minskoff says. “That’s spooky, guys.”
“I am not really into ghost stuff,” Minskoff said last month, almost two years after his and Nower’s encounter was captured on video. But “a lot of times you’ll feel things. . . . We’ll just feel a presence.”
Along with doors opening and closing, for no apparent reason. Not only did they hear footsteps, Nower said last month, but “we looked over on the carpets, and we saw the depressions of the footsteps as they went. The cameras, of course, were pointed in the opposite direction.”
“A lot of people are scared to be here at night,” Minskoff said, admitting that locking up the building at the end of the day can be a harrowing experience. “The biggest presence I have felt was when I’ve been leaving,” he said. “It was something like a force that was trying to get me out. My hand was shaking, trying to lock the door.”
He is not alone. “You feel like something’s hanging over you to leave,” Juliana Lopez said of securing the building at night. “You check the doors before you key in the alarm. If the alarm doesn’t arm, it’s because there’s something, like one of the doors is open. But the one door that it’s saying is open, isn’t. And it’s not a faulty trigger or anything like that.”
Working during the day, Lopez might be wearing headphones, one side over an ear and ;the other off-ear “so I could hear who was coming and going. I’ve had it happen several times where it sounds like somebody’s walking around at the other end of the office. At the beginning, I’d look back, like, maybe somebody came in and went out. I’d turn around and just watch, and I wouldn’t see anything, but I would hear somebody pacing at the end of the room.”
If she tries to ignore it, both sides of the headphones covering her ears, “then I’d have the feeling of it walking up behind me and just watching what I was doing. Then I’d get a little more freaked out. I’d turn and there is nothing there. Then I’d leave it off my head and I would hear the pacing again. I didn’t say anything for a while.” There’s more: “There are times where I’ll walk into Studio 3” — LTV’s largest studio — “to turn on the light,” Lopez said. “I’ll see something in my peripheral vision, like somebody walking by. That’s happened a couple of times, too.”
Antoinette Lanza also feels, and hears, a regular presence. “Mainly it feels and sounds like somebody’s walking around behind you,” she said. “I’ll be sitting at the computer alone in the room. I’ll turn around expecting to see Jason, and there’s nobody in the room. That happens quite often.” She also heard a sound that she likens to someone rhythmically tapping on a desk.
Another staffer who wished to remain anonymous recalled one of the most vivid of the unexplained phenomena. Late last winter, in the kitchen studio, she and another staffer stood at a whiteboard, writing out ideas. “We heard a noise,” she said. Metal coat hangers had fallen from a coat rack for no apparent reason. “We didn’t know how it happened,” she said, likening the commotion to someone striking the hangers with their hand. “It freaked us out,” she said. “I exited the room.”
In the same room, “one of the photographers we use was trying to test out his camera,” Lopez recalled, “and he caught a picture of this weird looking cloud, some ‘ectoplasm’ thing in the picture.” Pictures taken elsewhere in the building did not have the cloud-like form, she said.
Staff have various theories, such as one or another former LTV official, now in a spectral state, remaining onsite, perhaps unaware that they are deceased. Despite an innate fear of the unknown, though, staffers seem united in a belief that the ghost, or ghosts, mean no harm. “It’s never felt sinister,” Lanza said. “It doesn’t feel eerie to me. It feels like part of the team. I just can’t quite see them.”
“We think of it as a friendly ghost,” Minskoff said. “It seems like someone who’s kind of here, going through their day and just existing with us.”
“I spent a lot of time here alone, during Covid especially,” Nower said. “I have a great working relationship with all of the spirits that are here. I don’t discriminate. If you want to be at LTV without a body, I’m not going to hold it against you.”