Adam Berry arrived in Provincetown 20 years ago as a Boston Conservatory sophomore to star in the Provincetown Theater Company’s production of Hair. An Alabama native, he didn’t know anything about Provincetown. But he remembers distinctly a get-acquainted potluck for the cast at a West End house that John Thomas, one of the directors, was renting.
“Surrounded by the people who were going to be in the show, in a house overlooking the bay, I immediately fell in love,” Berry says. “And I’ve never been able to shake it.”
Since then, Berry has performed in plays, musicals, cabarets, and drag shows at nearly every Outer Cape venue. He met actor and singer Ben Greissmeyer here in 2006, and the two were married at Provincetown Town Hall in 2012. Last spring, Adam and Ben Berry bought their own place in North Truro after years of renting.
The couple cofounded the Peregrine Theatre Ensemble in 2014, partly to introduce other young performers to Provincetown. The troupe also anchors them to the town they love.
Peregrine “was a way to be here and do something that we love to do,” Adam says. “I got pulled into Provincetown by a siren song. It was life-changing.”
Another big change happened in a cemetery (he won’t say which one) after Berry appeared on Ghost Hunters. He says he was visiting tombs and crypts one night with Ben and two friends when they heard a voice ask for help. Berry had brought a recorder. He knocked twice on a copper door where he’d heard the voice coming from, and called out “Hello?” He heard no response. But later, when the group listened to the recording, they heard “Help me,” in a voice he says was clear and gentle.
Ben Berry has called that recording “undeniable evidence” the group had made contact with a ghost. It gave him the first inkling, he says, of how he might have a career investigating haunted houses, trying to understand spirits, and helping the people they haunt. His exploration of the paranormal and what happens after death has led to a number of television series, including Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters Academy, and Kindred Spirits,with coproducer and costar Amy Bruni.
Berry’s ghost-hunting career keeps him busy — there are events around the world, a magazine, and, of course, there’s merch. (From Oct. 20 to 23, he’ll be at the Orleans Inn for a weekend of ghost hunting, tours, talks, and investigations.)
“As an actor, when a show ends, your job ends, so you’re constantly reinventing yourself and thinking of the next thing,” he says. “I’ve never stopped doing that.”
That night in the cemetery is one of many personal stories Berry recounts in his first book, Goodbye Hello, Processing Grief and Understanding Death Through the Paranormal, out this month from Regalo Press.
Berry writes about his own experiences, including hearing the sounds of unseen beings as a child, feeling himself surrounded by ghostly soldiers at Gettysburg, and dozens of paranormal encounters in private homes.
The book is more than a series of ghost stories, though, with chapters on dreams, visitations, and “crossing over.” It includes conversations with a range of professionals who deal with death and dying: a theologian, a psychotherapist, and a doctor who directs a critical-care unit. The book’s aim, Berry says, is to help the living better deal with grief and the fear of mortality.
“Yes, it has a good spooky story every once in a while,” Berry says, “but I want people to learn something, or have a different viewpoint on the afterlife. I wanted to help people and not just be entertaining.”
Not that Berry always knew how to deal with grief himself. “The book was a journey,” he says.
In a chapter on religion, Berry writes about his struggle to reconcile the Southern Baptist teachings he grew up with — and broke away from, largely because of the church’s views on homosexuality — with his interest in the paranormal. He sees a parallel: “Religious practice is completely grounded in belief and faith and so is the exploration of supernatural phenomena.”
Berry wrote Goodbye Hello last fall and winter while living in a house formerly owned by his friend Tim McCarthy, the Provincetown activist and documentarian who died in 2018. “What better way to write a book on grief, loss, and the paranormal than being surrounded by the energy and memory of someone who meant so much to me?” Berry writes in a section on grief.
His book also mentions Provincetown musician Casey Sanderson, who died in September 2022. Berry believes Sanderson has since reached out to him and other friends through a monarch butterfly — an encounter Berry describes in the book — and through a piano that played mysteriously during this summer’s Peregrine show.
Berry is an expressive storyteller, and his approachability and empathy come through in the text. He designed it as a conversation, he says, and recorded the audiobook this summer in Boston using multiple voices and acting skills he hasn’t often had time to use.
Berry says an experience at a 2011 conference on the paranormal influenced the creation of Kindred Spirits. At the gathering, a woman told Berry she had a terminal illness and asked for his advice on how to communicate with loved ones after her death. He wanted to help her but realized he didn’t know how.
Berry thinks about what it would be like to be dead and unable to be seen. “I would hope that if I were reaching out,” he says, “somebody would have that compassionate viewpoint instead of just taking out the holy water and spraying it in my face or ignoring me.”
Compassion has also been key to Berry’s responses to messages from struggling gay teens seeking support. He has mentioned being gay on social media but says LGBTQ politics rarely enter the conversation during investigations or conferences on the paranormal.
He has been asked whether there are gay ghosts. “Of course!” he says, though he’s not sure he’s encountered any: “You don’t walk in and say, ‘Hey, Ghost, are you gay?’ It doesn’t come up.”
