DESTINATION TRUTH - Haunted Mining Town & The Taniwha

Syfy Channel - Original Air Date: 4/7/10

First, Josh and crew head to Chile, to check out two rumored ghost towns - La Noria and Humberstone.  (Again, we have a guest helper, a new trend with the show - but not of interest to anyone but fans of the guests.)  Locals believe the mining towns are haunted because of the rotten way they treated their workers.  The towns are tough to find, but they do some aerial reconnaissance using para-gliders and locate them.   They then set up camp with cameras and motion detectors, etc.  They find the very grizzly local cemetery, stake it out, and start to see things.  Yet, they speed off to investigate the other city, which is in better repair.  They poke around, get scared by random sounds and shadows, take photos, and do some EVP sessions.  But all they get is a shoulder through a window - that looks to me like it might be a reflection - and the usual fuzzy EVPs (which strangely seem to be in English, as usual).

From there, it's on to New Zealand to look for a fearsome Maori water serpent, the taniwha.  After some whitewater searching, they head to a traditional Maori village to seek experts in the monster -- whom the Maori see as a guardian spirit.  They follow a lead to a local lake with a sighting within the week.  Naturally, they set up night-vision, IR, and underwater cameras.  Almost immediately, they start seeing things in the water, including something very large on the thermal.  They also go wading in a cave where the monster supposedly lives, and something unseen brushes past their legs.  Finding nothing more, they return to the US and analyze the footage. The US expert thinks the sightings may be the long-fin eel, a local oddity.  Josh concludes that the taniwha is most likely the local eels combined with legend and ancient spirituality.