’28 Days Haunted’ Ending Explained: Do the Investigators Prove the 28 Days Theory?

Welcome to the Ending Explained for 28 Days Haunted, a new reality TV show arriving on Netflix. The season arrives at the best of times, Halloween season is at hand and audiences are hungry for some ghosts, spirits, and demons. 28 Days Haunted is here to offer just that by gathering three groups of expert paranormal investigators to spend 28 days in some of the most haunted, and yet, least researched places in the USA. The teams will try to prove the 28-Day theory, proposed by the Warrens as a way to pierce the veil between life and death.

28 Days makes a lot of promises, but it doesn’t fulfill any of them. The show doesn’t end up being scary or interesting in any way. The “research” these experts do can be summarized with a lot of “trust me” statements in the place of evidence. The entire concept of the show is being contradicted by its own production team when not even the cameramen get scared when things start happening. If anything, 28 Days Haunted is one of those shows that ends up being an unintended comedy thanks to its exaggerated way of presenting the situations.

The following paragraphs contain spoilers for 28 Days Haunted. Read at your own risk.

Are These Places Truly Haunted?

From the moment the show starts, it is very hard to tell if the producers have done a good job of establishing the places where the teams are going to do their investigations. The premise of the show tells us that the participants don’t know the places where they are going to execute the experiments. This already sounds very weird, because, if these people are truly experts, it would mean that they already know these exact places. The paranormal community is a very niche one, which means they share their findings and knowledge very openly.

So, how is it that these “experts” don’t know anything about these places? That premise seems off, and it just adds a bit more fakeness to the entire production. The series quickly evolves into a Phasmophobia play session, but just worse as there aren’t actually any signs of ghosts, spirits, or demons captured on screen. Every major piece of evidence that the participants say they find feels completely staged, and that breaks the immersion completely.

To make matters even worse, the teams start relying mostly on themselves to make you believe something is happening. This means that most of the evidence that these places are haunted mostly comes from their declarations. How they are feeling bad, cold, nauseous, etc. You have to trust them when they say they felt something touching their arms or the back of their heads. Trust them. There is no other way to believe them because there is zero evidence provided throughout the entire series.

So, in the end, it is very hard to say if these places are truly haunted. Like everything in this show, the conclusions are inconclusive.

Do The Investigators Prove The 28 Days Theory?

The teams arrive at the same conclusions when it comes to proving the 28 days theory. This theory was proposed by the Warren family, the most famous paranormal investigators in the world, mainly due to being the protagonists of The Conjuring franchise. The real-life versions of those characters suggested a theory on how to pierce the veil between life and death and truly make a connection with the spirits. The participants needed to spend at least 28 Days in the places that are supposed to be haunted.

The series makes it seem at the end as if the theory was proven. However, the evidence presented by the show mostly feels staged or is completely nonexistent. This is a shame because it quickly makes you not take any of the participants seriously. Towards the end of their 28 days at the sites, the participants mostly decide to execute a ritual to purge the evil spirits from the places and help the victims move on to the afterlife. How are these people qualified to execute what is basically an exorcism? We are never told, we are just asked to believe it.

The teams discover, in one of the sites, evidence that a serial killer and rapist used to live there and used the site to kill people. Where is this serial killer right now? Do we have a hint about who he was? Not really. However, the participants are convinced that they helped solve a crime and also helped the trapped spirits to pass to the afterlife. The show presents these purifying rituals as fights between life and death. However, we never see any kind of battle going on at all.

In one of its cheapest moves, the show presents the results of the experiment as not enough to prove the theory, so they need to do this again in a second season. It feels very staged and quite sketchy. This is certainly not one of the best Netflix shows on the roster.