Through Our Doors
Paranormal investigator and jazz musician Eric Mintel spent two evenings investigating the Lake House Hotel of Horror in Spring 2026, bringing together two seemingly different parts of a life shaped by curiosity, listening and the unexpected.
In spring 2026, Eric Mintel and members of the Eric Mintel Investigates team came through our doors for two evenings inside the Lake House Hotel of Horror.
It is an unusual place to investigate.
For more than three decades, Hotel of Horror has deliberately frightened people inside an old Pocono Hotel using theatrical lighting, immersive soundscapes, highly detailed scenery, wildly talented performers, and special effects.
Beneath all of that, however, the Lake House remains.
Long before anyone began building nightmares inside it, there was already a building here with a history of its own.
That distinction matters when you arrive looking for something you cannot readily explain.
Over two evenings, Mintel and his team encountered several things that stayed with them after the equipment was packed away.
But Eric Mintel’s story did not begin in a darkened structure.
It began with a record.
A Dave Brubeck Quartet album sitting in his parents’ collection.
In retrospect, it was an interesting place to start.
Brubeck built much of his reputation by pushing against expected musical patterns, experimenting with odd meters, overlapping rhythms, and multiple tonal centers. Familiar musical language could suddenly behave in unfamiliar ways.
Mintel put the record on and connected immediately.
That discovery would lead to a professional jazz career spanning more than three decades.
It also began a lifetime spent listening closely.
In jazz, that means understanding structure while remaining alert to improvisation, knowing the pattern well enough to recognize when it changes.
Years later, Mintel would find himself doing something not entirely different in shadowed buildings and unfamiliar rooms.
Listening.
Watching.
Waiting for something to interrupt the expected pattern.
The paranormal had fascinated him since childhood.
Over time, that interest grew from stories involving the ghosts and history of Bucks County into something considerably larger. His work eventually carried him beyond Pennsylvania and into investigations involving ghosts, UFO sightings, Bigfoot, Dogman, and other unexplained encounters.
To Mintel, those subjects are not as disconnected as they might first appear.
“I believe that ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot and Dogman encounters are all interconnected in some way through the people who experienced them,” Mintel said.
The people matter.
So does the place.
History, testimony, and environment all become part of the work.
And when that work brought Mintel to the Lake House Hotel, the building presented a particularly unusual situation.
Investigating a Haunted House Built to Haunt You
The Hotel of Horror occupies two realities.
During the Halloween season, guests enter a carefully constructed nightmare. Sound, lighting, scenery, and performance are all used intentionally to alter perception and instigate fear.
For a paranormal investigator, that complicates things considerably.
How do you identify something unexplained inside a building specifically designed to make strange things happen?
Mintel and his team began with the obvious.
They turned it all off.
“I really appreciated that we turned off all electronics during the investigation, and still captured incredible activity on the second floor, throughout the building, and especially in the basement,” Mintel said.
But before the equipment recorded anything unusual, Mintel says the building itself had already made an impression.
“When we walked into the Lake House at Hotel of Horror, I was immediately struck by the immense energy,” he said. “Even as someone who doesn’t typically feel that kind of atmosphere right away, it hit me the moment I walk through the door.”
Then came an observation we particularly appreciated.
“It’s also a remarkably beautiful location.”
For a building whose autumn occupation is frightening people for a living, we’ll take it.
What the Medium Doesn’t Know
One of the more interesting parts of the Eric Mintel Investigates process begins before the team enters a location.
Mintel researches.
Dominic Sattele, the team’s spirit medium, often does not.
Mintel deliberately withholds historical and paranormal information from Sattele before they arrive. Sometimes Sattele does not even know where the team is going until they get there.
Only after Sattele identifies places or impressions he considers significant does Mintel begin comparing them with what he already knows.
The separation is intentional.
“I don’t tell Dominic anything about a location until we arrive,” Mintel said. “Once he locates the hotspots and shares his impressions, I’ll let him know he’s usually about 99% accurate, and then we dive into the actual history of what happened there.”
During the two evenings at the Hotel, several areas held the team’s attention.
The finished episode contains more of those moments.
Some are best left there.
One, however, remained with us.
A photograph.
The Basement and a Photograph
When we asked Mintel whether anything from the Hotel still resisted a satisfactory explanation, he pointed to two things.
“We can’t satisfactorily explain the energy in the basement or the photo that Dan captured.”
The team also recorded unusually high magnetometer readings in that area.
And then there is the photograph.
It is not lost footage, a screenshot passed around online, or a story remembered vaguely years later.
The image still exists as a physical print.
It remains here, in the Hotel of Horror collection.
We’re not going to tell you what you are supposed to see in it.
That seems more interesting anyway.
People Seeing Something
The Hotel is only one stop in Mintel’s larger body of work.
The Pocono Mountains themselves have given him plenty to investigate: old buildings, local stories, reported UFO encounters, cryptid sightings, and generations of unexplained experiences.
For Mintel, there is a simple reason those stories continue to deserve attention.
“At the end of the day, people are seeing something.”
What that something is remains the question.
Perhaps that is why these stories persist.
Perhaps it is why investigators keep entering old buildings, why witnesses keep retelling experiences they cannot quite reconcile, and why places collect stories long after the people who first told them have gone.
Years of investigating have not made Mintel less willing to believe.
Quite the opposite.
“I have certainly become more of a believer that a thin veil exists between worlds, and that people are connected to the spirit realm.”
There is something fitting about that conclusion coming from a jazz musician.
One part of Eric Mintel’s life began when he put on a record and heard something that immediately captured his attention.
Jazz taught him to listen within a structure- for rhythm, variation, improvisation, and the instant when something unexpected enters the pattern.
Decades later, another part of his life finds him walking into unfamiliar rooms doing much the same thing.
Listening.
Watching.
Waiting for the pattern to change.
In spring 2026, that search brought Eric Mintel through our doors.
And he left us with another story.