4 May 2025
Shawn Ashmore stayed in a haunted hotel in Romania.
Shawn Ashmore believes in ghosts
The 45-year-old actor stars in the new horror movie ‘It Feeds’ – which centres on a young girl who insists that a malevolent entity is feeding on her – and he reflected on a ghostly encounter he had while working on a movie in the European country.
Shawn told The AU Review: “I do happen to be a believer. I’ve had two very strange, let’s call them ghost stories.
“One of them was at a hotel in Romania. I was shooting a movie there and the hotel was 1000 per cent haunted. Everybody that was there on the crew, and there are a bunch of younger actors, we each had unexplainable events happen in different rooms.
“In my room, there was somebody walking around my bed every night. I deduced that it was probably like a housekeeper that was just doing their job. My pillows would fluff. The glasses would clank. I’d hear feet shuffling around my bed every single night. There was nowhere to go. I wanted to move rooms.”
The ‘X-Men’ actor continued: “I remember one night we were all hanging out in someone’s hotel room, having a few drinks and listening to music, and I said in passing, maybe after two weeks of us being there, I was like, ‘Has anybody had any weird experiences in the hotel?’ And it was like in a movie when the record scratches, like, everybody said yes. Everyone had a story.
“There’s not enough time to explain all the stories, but they were all different and mine was actually quite light compared to some of the other experiences. So I’ve had strange experience that I can’t explain. Maybe I’m not 100 per cent, but I’m also not a sceptic.”
Shawn plays the father of the tormented girl in ‘It Feeds’ and spoke of the difficulty at having to act out extreme emotions in a limited timeframe.
He said: “In this film there are moments where I have to literally break down and sob and cry, and probably go through the worst grief a person can possibly go through.
“Can I do that in the 10 minutes they need me to? This is an independent film. We have a huge day. We have 10-15 minutes to nail this close up. Can I do that? Can I get there? It’s scary.”
