Truth be told, Bryan R. Dattiilo (Lucas, DAYS OF OUR LIVES) is a tad envious of Jennifer Love Hewitt. Particularly, her starring role on the hit television series GHOST WHISPERER.
“It’s my dream to be on or star in a ghost-based show,” says Dattilo. “The paranormal and supernatural have always intrigued me. I’ve had so many experiences to prove that there is life after death. I’d love to do a reality haunting show where I go through old buildings and try to connect with the spirits. They do that a lot on GHOST WHISPERER.”
Dattilo’s interest in the paranormal dates back to his childhood. “I grew up in haunted houses. Every house we lived in was haunted and had spiritual activity in it,” insists Dattilo, noting that his mother, Peggy, embraced it. “My mom used to have seances, past-life regression sessions and hypnosis sessions with her psychic friends. So that’s always been around me. To see my mom’s astral-projections flying around the house was normal. To see things flying off the wall was normal. To see objects coming off desks, floating in the air and dropping. So was feeling cold spots throughout the house.”
So would Dattilo set foot inside that most famous of haunted houses, The Amityville Horror? “Yes, I would. I’m not really scared of any of that, now,” boats Dattilo. “I used to be petrified of it when I was growing up. To me, it’s just people who have passed on. The more fear you give a spirit, the more you enable it to manifest and come through. They feed off the energy you’re giving off. If you try to connect as a person to another person who’s passed on, the fear element goes out the window.”
Dattilo firmly believes there’s a message behind spirits attempting to contact people on earth, “whether they’re trying to latch onto a physical place, whether they’re trying to tell you something, whether they’re trying to just be heard, whether they’re trying to progress their soul, move on and enter the Light,” he explains. “When I was growing up, it was a normal thing for my family and I to get up in the middle of the night and be scared by something we heard, felt or saw,” continues Dattilo. “My sister, brother, mom and I would get into a circle and say the Lord’s Prayer or the Hail Mary. We’d cut white crosses out of paper and put them above our beds then go back to sleep like it was normal.”
Dattilo and his siblings learned to embrace the spirits rather than fear them, thanks to their mother. “We’ve all seen things,” insists Dattilo. “My sister remembers seeing little girls playing with toys under her bed. And I have this relationship with my grandfather, who passed away when I was 2. I see and talk to him quite often through dreams and half-dream/half-awake state. I’m really into that whole thing.”
Dattilo has vivid childhood memories of his mother’s keys going missing and her dealing with it without blinking an eye. “My mom would announce to the room, ‘I am in a rush. I have no time for this spiritual activity. Can you please just give me my keys back?'” he recounts. “Then she’d go look in the kitchen and the keys would be sitting on the counter, where she’d already looked for them 500 times.”
