Boo Business: Meet Chris Soucy, Savannah’s spooky Renaissance man and storyteller
There are many people in Savannah who work in something related to the paranormal: ghost tour guides, paranormal investigators, psychics, etc. But there are few people who have had as diverse a career as Chris Soucy.
While some may know him through his theater projects like Odd Lot Improv or Savannah Shakes, Soucy has done everything from ghost tour guide to podcast host.
He moved to Savannah in 1993 to be closer to his sister after leaving the Army. He had briefly lived in Hinesville when he was younger and hadn’t intended to move back here. Life, as it happens, had different plans. In the last 29 years, he has done so much here that it becomes a question of what he hasn’t done yet: Chris Soucy is Savannah’s spooky Renaissance man.
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I had a chance to speak with him recently before he flew off for a stay at the Lizzie Borden House.
When you first moved here, was your intention to work with the paranormal, or was that something that you also just kind of fell into?
Soucy: "There was no real industry when I moved here. I think there was only one ghost tour around that I knew of and I knew the operator, Jack Richards. It was never something I thought about as a career path. But my entire construct of who I wanted to be was a storyteller.
"One of the things I was drawn to at an early age was this notion that one of the most important functions as a person, as a human being is to be able to relay ideas to other people. And that's been the driving force of every project I've ever done is the idea that we are all storytellers, and we're all story listeners."
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So how did the paranormal start to leak its way into your career path?
"Since I was six years old, I have been drawn to look for and find the ghost stories. And the funny thing is I'm actually quite afraid. I'm a highly phobic person, but one of my phobias is not knowing something like a fear of being confronted by something that I don't understand or don't know. So I formulated a ghost trap for myself. A ghost trap, for me, is a story. Once I know the ghost story, I feel more at ease.
"Because of my interest, I would be asked if I would walk around and tell ghost stories, and as these [ghost tour] companies became more solid… I would just pick up work here and there.
"I found myself filling in as a guide and going around telling stories. And what I found most compelling was I would tell my stories which were my experiences, what I've done, and who I've spoken to."
Did you ever have your own company?
"I helped found Ghost City Tours, and there was a time when I worked very heavily with Sixth Sense, and then there was just me. There came a point where it was just Chris Soucy.
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"Around that time, I was doing ghost storytelling at the Savannah Theatre. I had a collection of ghost stories that weren't Savannah-centric, and it was a shame that I didn’t get to really tell those stories in any forum. I have a great ghost story at the Savannah Theatre itself. And being a long-time theater veteran and knowing the wonderful people at Savannah Theatre, we kind of just concocted a late-night, ghost story show.
"What if we just brought people in and told them ghost stories? That was very fun, and I enjoyed it."
So you've done the ghost tours, you’ve done the spooky stories at the Savannah Theater, what came after that?
"I had Odd Lot Improv. The whole birth of Odd Lot was just a place for us to have a creative outlet. There was no business model. We were not trying to have a company or business. We have these resources and we should use them. We had the Muse Arts Warehouse, lots of performers who are just so incredibly talented, and we did it out of love. It blew up, and it had a great run. We ran for ten years and we're not done. But with the pandemic, we just kind of have put that on a back burner until we can find another location.
"Savannah Shakes came along around that same time. Savannah Shakes was a big passion project where we produced two productions a year, and we did that for five years.
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"Whenever I find myself idling at all, I just tilt towards some new venture, and since the mid-nineties, I've been writing scripts and screenplays and stage plays, and I worked for a number of years as a ghostwriter and script doctor for producers all over the country. I find that writing… feels so satisfying to that storyteller in me.
"This past year, Drew Hunt [a local director] and I had gotten into a long conversation about how we're always writing, we've shot a few short film pieces together, and we do the 48-Hour Film Festival. It kind of dawned on us that we do have the resources, we have the talent, and the crew within our reach. We should start producing features.
"We filmed our first feature in August, and that became the model of an idea. Can we produce regularly without it being a detraction or stressor to the lives that were leading? We found out that ultimately the answer is yes. So we're gearing up for our second feature."
When did your involvement with the Savannah Underground start?
"JT and Maddie and Kewaan appeared in our orbit as filmmakers and as creatives. Early on, we were making little shorts. I think the way I ended up meeting them was they held an online screenplay competition. They wanted to film something that featured the Stone Stairs Of Death. I wrote a script, and they wanted to produce it, and that's how we met. After that, we did all kinds of fun little projects.
"As their Red Eye Productions moved into the Savannah Underground, it became a convenient relationship. Anybody who has casual contact with me will know that I have kind of an encyclopedic knowledge of ghosts and anything dark and spooky. So I was always up for that conversation.
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"JT actually came to me because he wants to do like a TV series in Savannah and utilize actual haunted places, go in, and do recreations. That's a big order. Why not do a podcast first? Why not get attention and get eyes on who we are? So we don't just show up out of the blue. That is kind of where the podcast came in. It was this idea of let's introduce ourselves to the public as paranormal enthusiasts and move from there. That’s where the podcast [The Most Haunted City on Earth] came from was this idea that we wanted to share our enthusiasm and share our love of all things paranormal in a way that could reach a wide audience."
And during that time, you were also doing the immersive dinner theater experience at New Realm Brewing?
"Savannah Underground is an idea machine, so they're constantly firing on these ideas. And the New Realm thing was let's do this dinner theater experience. I guess it's a dinner haunted experience. It was just basically I would tell stories while you're eating and then there would be an interactive portion to it.
"We tried to find stories that were somehow linked to the food. We had a bone-in pork chop for the [Civil War] amputations at the Marshall House. We did it every other month for a while there, but I'm not sure where we stand right now."
If that sounds like a lifetime of activity, it’s because it is, but Soucy isn’t slowing down any time soon. He still has to decide what to do with a shed filled with haunted objects he’s collected over the years. He told me his wife will not let him bring them into the house. Having boundaries in relationships is important, especially when it involves a haunted doll or bone saw.
You can listen to more of Chris Soucy’s stories on the podcast The Most Haunted City on Earth available on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah haunted: Chris Soucy on stories, paranormal experiences
