OFF TO THE WITCH with Christopher Garetano

It’s that time of year again and Off To The Witch has a new Halloween special! What better guest to have than artist, author and grave stone robber, Shane Bugbee. He’s here with us to discuss October memories, horror movies, odd experiences visiting a family owned funeral home and his obsession with the little monster from Plainfield, Wisconsin, Ed Gein. There’s a fine borderline between slasher f...

The State Of The Weird Address: Did you miss me? Our last chapter was the 2024 Halloween Special and since then, I’ve been inspired and immersed in the creation of my new TV series. On this forthcoming episode I’ll talk some details of what I’ve been up to, all things to come and of course a few tales of the arcane, supernatural and the mysterious.

The Off To The Witch podcast returns with our 2024 Halloween Special! And the best way to celebrate the most wonderful time of the year is with a psychic medium. So join me (your host Christopher Garetano) and psychic medium, Jenson Smith as we discuss her experiences with the unknown, voices and shadows beyond the grave, Halloween, a possible extraterrestrial connection to the spirit world and pr...

On tonight's newsletter I give a few updates on the new "Off To The Witch Presents" series of documentaries and other forthcoming projects. We're going on a brief hiatus until the Halloween Special in October - this is to properly complete A Haunting We Will Go and dedicate my full attention to that and my new TV network miniseries. Stay tuned for so much more as this is only the...

EPISODE #83 Things are getting weirder out there . We undeniably live on the borderline between fiction and reality. To celebrate, tonight’s episode of Off To The Witch is an anthology of tales from people who claim they experienced what most of us have only witnessed in movies, literature and campfire folklore. Join me tonight, beginning at 8:00 pm ET for a celebration of the strange, unexplained...

OFF TO THE WITCH returns this week with a our latest newsletter. I’ll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode and guest. On this week’s newsletter I’ll give you an update on some of the projects that I’ve been burning the midnight lamp to forge and also to discuss a subject that’s all at once fascinating and disturbing. In 1990, author Bret Easton Ellis wrote a first-person, macabre satire o...

EPISODE #82 Twenty years ago, I completed a little documentary, shot on video tape, regarding the struggles and dreams of various independent horror movie makers. I knew then the term “independent film” was a bit of a misnomer in the popular zeitgeist as the movie makers I profiled didn’t have benefactors in the industry. They weren’t praised or beloved. They were unknown to most. Almost all of th...

On Tonight’s Off To The Witch newsletter, I rant about the current state of paranormal TV programming, how it can be elevated and also I discuss how I adopted a completely different perspective while making the first feature length chapter ( A Haunting We Will Go) of my new series. Part of that perspective is that of the spirit. One day we’re all going to cross over. What do you experience when yo...

EPISODE #81 Off To The Witch returns tonight with a brand new episode! The devil has been a portrait in cinema from its inception. Beginning with the magic of the silent era - with movies like Benjamin Christensen’s Haxan and the Georges Melies “Faust In Hell” to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and William Friedkin’s the Exorcist. As it’s displayed in art it also mirrors real life. Many of the de...

While I’m busy in post-production on the first feature length episode of my new series - A Haunting We Will Go, I’m reflecting while editing a segment where I regard the impact that The Amityville Horror (both the tragic murders and subsequent ghost story) had on me as a child. A haunting is not only of paranormal activity. It lives in the mind. If introduced in your formative years, it will alway...

EPISODE #80 I was filming scenes (for A Haunting We Will Go) with Dave Spinks and Serenity Jenny in a cemetery. Something quickly came over Dave. He felt a psychic pull in a particular direction and ultimately he realized there was someone calling him from beyond the grave. It was a young teenage girl whose final resting place represents a life taken too soon from a car accident. On the grave was...

Wrongful persecution and prosecution in the name of heresy has been a plague on society throughout history. There is no human being who owns the right to dehumanize another person for their own grievances and agenda. Even alleged murderers deserve a trial and a full, unbiased examination of the facts before they are entirely condemned. Facts are often manipulated and people are wrongfully accused....

Do you remember your first experience at the movies? Can you recall how magical it was? The power of motion pictures and all their beauty, wonder, emotion, thrills and imagination is what inspires us. It often shapes the direction of lives and the world at large. Even though it’s an art that’s just slightly over a century old, there’s so much more to be explored. My special guest this week is auth...

There’s a reality, that wherever you stand chances are highly probable that there are bodies beneath you. Unmarked graves are all around us. Many hauntings are suggested to be the result of desecrated ground. Even today, any geophysical and scientific analysis of what “ghost” activity actually is, has been sparse in comparison to what it could have been if the phenomena was taken seriously, more o...

EPISODE #78 I’ve spent years of my life researching and investigating the alleged happenings in Montauk. I created several documentaries & TV programs on the subject. I talked with dozens of people who claimed they were either victims or engineers of underground atrocities -Beatings, drugs, mind manipulation and murder…There’s no escaping this story until it’s proven to be true. There’s too mu...

We’ve all seen the fictional representation of the lone stalker in the woods. It’s celebrated in numerous slasher sequels - The deformed, masked creeper that covets your final breath…The reclusive mountain man who studies your every move. Thousands of people have mysteriously vanished or perished in national forests, throughout the years. I’ve personally investigated several missing cases in Mount...

EPISODE #77 What is outlaw art? It forever expands and evolves. It obeys no rules and follows no trend. It never aspires to be like everything else. It’s pure and speaks of authenticity. It often shakes the world. Shane Bugbee has lived an extraordinary life, speaking to our eyes and ears with controversy, energy, provocation, texture and color… His journey is from counterculture and obscenity to...

On June 11th 1963 Thich Quang Duc (a Buddhist monk) self immolated in protest of both the corruption of the South Vietnamese government and the violence they imposed. Within the beauty of our world is the inescapable nature of both beast and man. Both darkness and light. A paradox remains that often throughout history there are protests in society, art, cinema and music, against senseless violence...

EPISODE #76 I grew up with the fantasy horror stories of George Romero and Stephen King. As powerful as the subtext and metaphor of Dawn Of The Dead, Cell, The Stand, Day Of The Dead, and Maximum Overdrive was, I could not fathom it all being a possibility in our reality. The dead rising from the grave or hoards of mind controlled humans taking over the world was simply the work of fiction? It see...

On tonight's (OFF TO THE WITCH) newsletter I discuss my forthcoming novel, Montauk Boys - it will be released later this year. It’s the fictional tale of five juvenile delinquents who are the target of a nefarious, covert government mind control experiment. Set in 1987 (years after the alleged Montauk Project was said to have taken place) the book is partly based on over a decade of my own res...

EPISODE #75 In 1980, Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, The Shining, was released in theaters. It was and is forever a masterpiece of not only horror but cinema itself. It required decades of viewings to realize there is much more than meets the eye. It’s now known that Stanley Kubrick was intentionally hiding messages deep in the images and dialogue of the picture. Wh...

“Yeah, fairies wear boots and you gotta believe meYeah, I saw it, I saw it, I tell you no liesYeah, fairies wear boots and you gotta believe meI saw it, I saw it with my own two eyes, alright, now.”-Black Sabbath We live in extraordinary times. The world is in chaos and a mass exodus of minds have turned to the mystical and supernatural for answers. Much like humans from ancient times, modern mind...

Is there a formula for a perfect horror movie? What elements are consistent amongst the greatest cinematic terrors of all time? Perhaps it’s something deep within our subconscious and mixed with primal fears that are much older than recorded history. Join me and my special guest (“Horror Bob” Brodmerkel) for a discussion of terror movie nostalgia and why these motion pictures get under our skin. B...

The latest Off To The Witch newsletter premieres tomorrow night! Like many of you, my childhood was a dynamic spectrum of cinema, art, music, literature and folklore. The monsters that we saw on the page and screen were consistently asserted (by adults) not to be real. Everything from the creep cinema slashers, roaming the dark woods, to unknown creatures of legend, hiding in the shadows, were sai...

EPISODE #73 Get ready for the next episode of Off To The Witch! Tiffany Mac has not only interviewed numerous witnesses to bizarre phenomena but she’s also experienced a variety of inexplicable events in her life. Where once the unexplained and supernatural were limited to sparse encounters, throughout history, are now spilling into our reality like a broken dam. What’s real and what is disinforma...