General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Hellier

Hellier is an independent paranormal documentary series directed by Karl Pfeiffer and produced by Planet Weird, a media company owned by the paranormal researchers Greg and Dana Newkirk. Across two seasons and 15 episodes released in 2019, it follows a small team of investigators pursuing a 2012 email from a man who claimed that goblin-like creatures were emerging from an abandoned mine near his home in Hellier, a small coal town in Pike County, eastern Kentucky.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Format	Independent documentary series, 2 seasons, 15 episodes total (5 + 10), roughly 51 minutes per episode³^•⁴
Release	Season 1 premiered January 18, 2019; season 2 ran from November 2019, with the last episode airing November 29, 2019⁵^•⁶
Origin of the case	A 2012 email from a man calling himself David Christie, who claimed unearthly creatures terrorized his family at night; the sender then disappeared²
Setting	Hellier, Pike County, Kentucky, a town of just over 2,000 people where the 2017 investigation began; the town of Somerset plays a larger role in the story overall³
Core team	Greg Newkirk, Dana Newkirk, Connor Randall, and Karl Pfeiffer; occult researcher Tyler Strand joined in season 2, episode 6⁷^•³
Reach	Over 3 million views since 2019 and numerous awards, according to Planet Weird; an IMDb rating of 6.0 from about 1,300 users⁸^•⁴

Spoilers

The case

In 2012, Greg Newkirk received an email from a man calling himself David Christie, who wrote that he and his family were being terrorized at night by unearthly creatures. After an exchange of emails, David disappeared. Over the following five years the case grew stranger in the team's account, with further mysterious emails and connections arriving, including messages from a figure calling himself Terry Wriste. In 2017, spurred by what the team describes as a flood of synchronicities, filmmaker Karl Pfeiffer proposed reviving the cold case, and he, the Newkirks, and paranormal researcher Connor Randall traveled to eastern Kentucky.²^•⁹

The alleged creatures were small humanoids, and the emails included photos of three-toed footprints, claims of noises at night, and the suggestion that the beings came from an abandoned mine or tunnel on the property. Commentators note that the description cuts across several strands of American paranormal lore: an appearance resembling extraterrestrial accounts, poltergeist-style noises and window tapping, and cryptozoological footprint evidence.¹⁰

The investigation found no confirmation of the correspondent. By the end of the team's time in Hellier, the series states that no one by the name of David Christie had ever lived in the broader Pike County area, and no legal trace of him or of the mine he described could be found. Terry Wriste also never emailed again after sending coordinates and a note asking why the team had stopped investigating.⁹^•¹¹

Connections to older legend cycles

The series ties its case to two well-known twentieth-century legend cycles. The first is the Hopkinsville Goblins: on August 21, 1955, a household in Kelly, Kentucky reported that small humanoid creatures had besieged a farmhouse. The Hellier emails echoed themes of that case, and the series develops the idea that the 1955 creatures might still travel through Kentucky's caves and abandoned mines.¹²^•¹³ The second is the Mothman case of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1967, and in particular the entity called Indrid Cold; the team reports uncanny connections to both during the investigation.⁹

This layering reflects the crew's intellectual debt to the writer John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies (1975), and to the broader Fortean (Relating to Charles Fort: paranormal anomalies treated under one unifying theory) approach associated with Keel and Jacques Vallée, which gathers many kinds of paranormal phenomena under a unifying theory rather than treating each in isolation. Folklorist Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby of the University of Kentucky, writing in the journal Contemporary Legend, describes the series as an example of how disparate legend cycles can be combined into a coherent narrative about the paranormal in the southeastern United States.¹⁴^•¹⁵^•³

Production and release

The first season was assembled on a shoestring budget using prosumer DSLR cameras that director Karl Pfeiffer and his friends could gather. The team declined television development deals, saying that a network version would have imposed a three-act structure and a clean conclusion that did not match how investigations actually unfold. Season 1 was released free on YouTube in January 2019 and later appeared on Amazon Prime Video; season 2 was self-funded, almost entirely with the money season 1 earned, and returned ten months later in November 2019 with ten full-length episodes.²^•¹⁶^•⁷

The series is available on Amazon Prime Video, the Screambox Amazon Channel, and other services, and can be purchased as a download; it is not currently on Netflix.⁴^•⁶

Method and reception

Hellier departs from the formula of paranormal reality television, in which a team arrives, investigates, and leaves with a tidy conclusion. Instead it shows open-ended research: reviewing public records, exploring caves and abandoned mines, and following chains of coincidence. One practice associated with the series is the Estes Method, a ghost-box technique whose renewed popularity is credited to its introduction in Hellier.⁷^•¹⁷

Academic writing on the series has treated it as a case study in contemporary legend and in the aesthetics of investigation. Rouhier-Willoughby notes that the show draws on a wide range of sources, including material on Wicca, Greek mythology, Jungian psychology, geology, cryptids, and UFOlogy, and that its narratives are shaped partly by stereotypes about Appalachian Kentucky; she also observes that there is no known older local tradition establishing "Hellier Goblins" as a longstanding Pike County folk belief before the 2012 email story.³^•¹⁸ Media scholar Mateo Polato of Manchester Metropolitan University analyzes the series' "atmospheric Forteanism," arguing that sound and listening practices are its main epistemological tools.¹⁰

Audience response has been divided in a characteristic way. Greg Newkirk has noted that about 40 percent of the first season's Amazon reviews were five-star ratings from viewers who appreciated the open-ended approach, while other reviewers objected that the team never found a goblin. Some early viewers took the polished production for fiction or an alternate-reality game before concluding that the investigators were real people.⁷^•¹⁹

The same team later produced the documentary The Unbinding (2023), with the Newkirks as executive producers, Pfeiffer as director, Randall as co-producer, and Tyler Strand among the researchers.²⁰

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Documentary, docudrama, and lifestyle series › True crime and investigative docuseries

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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