Unlike other paranormal investigators, Jack Osbourne and Katrina Weidman are afraid of the ghosts they’re busting.
“You get scared, but you also have a job to do,” Weidman says. “You’re not going to be a very good investigator if you can’t push through that fear, right?”
Weidman, 36, and Osbourne (yes, that Osbourne), 33, are pushing their heart rates up on the ghost-hunting show “Portals to Hell,” premiering at 10 p.m. Friday on the Travel Channel.
As Osbourne explains it, he’s more of the paranormal “hobbyist” to Weidman’s expert. If they were photographers, he tells The Post, “she’s the pro and I’m the guy who takes cool pictures on his phone and posts them on Instagram.”
Both say their interest in the supernatural springs from early encounters with something ghostly. Weidman recalls how her sister saw her in her room upstairs while Weidman was sitting on the downstairs sofa. Osbourne remembers the time he and his sister, Kelly, were home alone when they heard loud footsteps coming from the top floor. “The footsteps were getting so close to me and my sister [that] we opened the window and considered jumping out,” he says.
Now, they travel around the country investigating haunted locales, armed with gadgets that detect movement, temperature changes and fluctuations in electromagnetic fields.
But even they’re skeptical. “It’s important to remember that it’s all fringe,” Weidman says. “Nothing can definitely say, ‘There’s a ghost next to me.’ ”
Nevertheless, they contend, people do have experiences that are hard to explain. “If you didn’t have a nose, you would have no idea what smell is,” Osbourne says. “So what’s to say that there’s some energy source out there that we just don’t know [how] to detect.”
