Is this York County haunted attraction actually haunted? Paranormal TV show investigating

Kim Yates was leading the production crew of "Dark Echoes Paranormal," a TV series that investigates ghosts, through her haunted attraction at Menges Mills near Spring Grove.

The mill contains a maze-like, theatrical horror house, replete with vampires and zombies and dragons and severed human heads on tables, in refrigerators and just cast about what’s known as Kim’s Krypt Haunted Mill.

As they wound through the mill’s dark corridors and inspected a pneumatic dragon, its tail having been removed to allow for maintenance for a fog machine, Stacy Reed, one of the investigators for the show, turned to Tammy Lee, an assistant director and investigator and asked, “I’m not feeling anything. Are you?” Lee responded, “Nope.”

They continued the tour. Their initial feelings didn’t matter. What mattered is what happened later − after dark.

She's heard stories

The show began its streaming run in 2023 on Amazon Prime and PARAFlixx – the producers are working on a distribution deal with Apple TV – with an episode about the Ansonia Opera House in Ansonia, a small town on the Naugatuck River in Connecticut. The historic theater, which opened in 1870 and has been mostly abandoned since closing in 1971, is the source of a number of paranormal tales, from homeless people spotting glowing orbs to some paranormal investigators reporting seeing a goat-like humanoid creature in the balcony to those who believe it is an interdimensional portal.

"Dark Echoes" is among the number of shows on streaming and cable networks that carry on a tradition that is as old as American literature. One of the earliest examples predated Amazon by centuries, a 1705 pamphlet titled “A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal” by Daniel Defoe, better known as the author of “Robinson Crusoe.” The television genre has been around pretty much since the advent of the medium. Now there is a proliferation of paranormal shows on streaming services and cable.

Matthew Ryan Kondracki, owner of Dark Echoes Productions, who also serves as the host of the show, said his show is different, focusing on history as much as the paranormal. “We like to tell the history of the location,” he said. “We like to hit places that have been underexposed. It’s legit. It’s all real, not scripted like on TikTok or YouTube.”

"Dark Echoes" learned about the mill “by word of mouth,” said Lee, the assistant director who also serves as location manager. They were attracted to the old mill outside of Spring Grove because of its history – it dates to the 1700s – and the notion that it might be infested with paranormal spirits. The mill does have paranormal tours and claims a history of some ghostly, or unexplained, or inexplicable, events over the decades.

That it is billed as a haunted mill may, or may not, help.

But its owner says she’s heard stories.

'A lot of history here'

The mill, a 50-by-60-foot, three-story fieldstone structure, was built in 1773 on the bank of the West Branch of the Codorus Creek. Legend has it that a number of deaths occurred at the sawmill, including a girl whose hair got caught in the millstone, dragging her into the mill’s maw and grinding her to death. Another story is that two young boys who were swimming in the creek while their parents worked in the mill drowned.

“There’s a lot of history here,” Yates said.

It may not exactly be history, but the website for Kim’s Krypt tells a mythical origin story of the mill that involves a German immigrant named Menges, his two sons named Hans and Christian, a clock that strikes 8 o’clock and a caped, one-handed pirate whose ghost haunts the mill. Menges, the story goes, wrested the pirate’s sword from him and cut off the pirate’s hand, burying it on the property, which led to the gruesome slaughters that followed.

Yates purchased the property at an auction in May 2014 with the idea of expanding her Maryland-based business, Kim’s Krypt. Her horror attraction began when she was 9 and her parents took her to Disney World. She loved the Haunted Mansion, and her folks bought her a horror mask in the gift shop. “I wore it all the way home,” she said. “I was scaring people on I-95 the whole way home.”

She started decorating her parents' house for Halloween. When she moved out and got her own place, the decorations became more elaborate. In 1994, she started Kim’s Krypt in Rosedale, Baltimore County, just northeast of the city. When she saw that the mill was up for auction, she jumped at it. The sprawling property covers 62.5 acres along Colonial Valley and includes a number of residential properties and the site of a former notorious swingers club called The Farm.

The mill is the centerpiece of the property, but it is not the epicenter of the tales of the paranormal surrounding the place. The House of Eyes – a large structure across the road from the mill – is. “My old manager was working in the House of Eyes when he had a two-by-four thrown at his head,” Yates said. “It put a hole in the wall. He didn’t hear the pitty-patter of feet. He looked around and nobody was around.”

A paranormal investigator told Yates that she got “a real sense of wood” in the House of Eyes. “I told her that story and she said, ‘That’s weird,’” Yates said.

Another time, she said, one of her staff was working in the house when a pneumatic prop went off. It hadn’t been turned on and nobody else was around, she said.

One of her tenants who works for her part-time told her he won’t go into the House of Eyes alone. “And he’s a grown man,” she said.

She said, “You just can’t explain it.”

'An awesome episode'

And that’s where "Dark Echoes" comes in.

The show doesn’t purport to explain everything. Kondracki said, “We don’t say its haunted. We tell the story and leave it up to the audience to decide.”

The production crew toured the mill and set up for interviews on a recent Friday afternoon. At 9 p.m., the crew began filming with a medium. The show works with a number of mediums, Kondracki said. Going into filming, he said, the mediums are not told anything about the property or its legends.

The filming, on a closed set with just the medium and a small crew, continued until 3 a.m.

Reed, who serves as public relations director for the production company, said the filming and investigation went very well.

“It’s going to be an awesome episode,” she said.

Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Is Kim's Krypt in York County PA actually haunted? Show investigates