Offutt makes guest appearance on ‘The Dead Files’
Jason Offutt
While most kids wanted to read books about their favorite baseball players or athletes, Jason Offutt was more interested in Bigfoot, ghosts and time travel. The Northwest Missouri State University journalism professor has written countless articles and more than half a dozen books about the paranormal, but this past Saturday, Offutt made an appearance on The Dead Files on the Travel Channel.
“They just contacted me and someone with the show was looking for regional people that had written about ghosts and things like that and they found me,” Offutt said. “So they contacted me and asked if I’d be interested.”
Saturday night’s episode was based on a movie theater in Marshall, Missouri and Offutt was brought on as an expert about the possibility of a ghost staying in the theater.
“For my part in the show, there was a young woman that was going to a dance and never showed,” Offutt said. “About two weeks later, they found her with her arms and legs bound and dumped in the river. My part was to go over the old newspaper files of this case and when I watched the episode last night, there was another murder they didn’t tell me anything about.”
While the episode aired over the weekend, Offutt’s part was actually shot last winter. He made a special trip to Kansas City for the interview.
“They said they wanted me to come to Marshall or to Kansas City for a location shoot,” Offutt said. “They wanted me to meet in Kansas City at the library to give it a more scholarly feel with all of the books. I met them in Kansas City and I was the expert that they called in. They wanted me to go over the background of the disappearance and later murder that they think may be the reason for the haunting of the theater.”
Offutt’s fascination with the unknown is nothing new, he’s always been interested in ghosts and other paranormal activity. When he was younger, the books he read were probably considered odd and so were the types of shows he watched.
“I’ve been really interested in everything weird ever since I was a kid,” Offutt said. “Instead of watching Sesame Street, I remember reruns of Lost in Space were on at the same time, so I watched that. In school, we had those scholastic book club forms and my friends were getting biographies of baseball players and I was getting books about Bigfoot. I’ve just been interested in this stuff for a very long time.”
Offutt didn’t start writing about the paranormal until after he left a lengthy career working as a reporter and photographer. He said that for some reason, the journalism community as always frowned upon the paranormal.
Offutt’s first book was published in 2007 when he had already been working as a professor at Northwest for two years. He said having his first book published was an amazing experience and that he got a little bit lucky.
“It was really accidental, I had written an article for Missouri Life magazine about the six most haunted spots in Missouri and they published it in 2004,” Offutt said. “A company had read the article and contacted the magazine and the magazine put me in touch with the company. It was pretty easy for me, but there’s a lot of horror stories about authors trying to publish their first book, but I was lucky to walk right into it.”
He has written eight books with four of them about the paranormal, one a collection of essays about parenting and another about all of the weird places he saw while traveling on U.S. Highway 71 to Canada. Offutt also has a book called How to Kill Monsters Using Common Household Items and his first novel was published last December, The Funeral Story.
When it comes to the paranormal, people flock to it for one reason — the mystery.
“It’s unknown, we don’t know for sure if any of this is real or not,” Offutt said. “All of us either personally or family members have encountered something that they can’t explain, some bump in the night or a weird shadow. It’s something that most people have a grasp on, but we still don’t know what it is and we want answers. We now know that other people have experienced the same thing.”
Offutt’s written several articles about ghosts and monsters, but he says his favorite part of the paranormal or the unknown, is time traveling.
“I’ve always been interested in time travel, time travel movies,” Offutt said. “My favorite Star Trek episodes when I was a kid were about time travel, but my favorite time travel story took place in the 1990s in Stanberry. This story made national headlines and I listened to the late night radio talk show, Coast to Coast AM, and they were interviewing a guy named Michael Marcum. He tried to build a time machine in Stanberry and knocked all of the power out of the town and got arrested.”
After Offutt moved to Maryville, he decided to visit Stanberry and wrote a lengthy story about Marcum and the attempt at creating the time machine. However, that’s not the only case of paranormal activity in the northwest Missouri area.
“When I first started working here, I interviewed Lester and Daisy Workman, who own Workman Chapel, and Lester’s no longer with us, but I interviewed them and got permission to be out there,” Offutt said. “It was fun for a while, but unfortunately it’s in too much disrepair and I don’t go out there, but it used to be a pretty fun place to go.”
It’s been a busy couple of months for Offutt. He’s been working on his second novel since school ended at Northwest in May.
“It’s going really well. I’m about 32,000 words into a horror novel I’m working on,” Offutt said. “It takes me back to the paranormal and my enjoyment of horror writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King and Dean Koontz. I’ve just always wanted to write one.”
Just like any other author, Offutt sometimes gets writer’s block, but when he does, he follows some direction that King once said.
“I wrote a novella, which is a long short story, over Christmas and it’s about matriarchal cannibal Nazis,” Offutt said. “It’s a horror and humor story and I ran into a problem with the direction because I didn’t outline it. I go by Stephen King’s recommendation, which is whenever he gets stuck in a book, he just kills one of the characters.”
Overall, Offutt has been busy this summer with his newest novel and his appearance on the The Dead Files. Offutt said it was a fun experience and learned quite a bit about how TV shows work, and would be willing to do it again.
“I was on TV, man, of course I’d do it again,” Offutt said.
