The show was created by Josh Gates as both a paranormal and psychological experiment. Each episode features a three-person team made up of paranormal enthusiasts and skeptics from various walks of life who spend several days alone together at some of the most allegedly haunted locations in North America. The teams create their own video footage with hand-held night-vision cameras, along with dozens of fixed cameras, that document their reactions to the ever increasing anxiety, paranoia and desolation of being trapped inside a terrifying place. The show concludes with a review of the footage and personal interviews of each member's experience.[1]
Opening Introduction:
Real People. Investigating Real Haunted Locations. Five Days. No Camera Crew. They. Are. Stranded.
Message (before each episode):
Everything you are about to see is real. The following footage was shot entirely by the participants or by unmanned surveillance cameras.
Reception
Mark Perigard of the Boston Herald gave an overall negative review stating, "'Stranded' shows that boredom, isolation and the power of suggestion—along with some careful goosing by off-screen production assistants, no doubt—can produce, ultimately, a horribly predictable show."[2]
TV by the Numbers announced the show with a more positive review stating, "Over the course of the confinement, the subjects contend with increasingly pervasive feelings of fear and desolation, resulting in an experiment that represents a unique combination of psychology and the paranormal."[3]
An ex-couple and their friend spend five days inside the historic and reportedly haunted, 200-room, Oceanic Hotel on the remote Star Island, which is 10-miles off the coast of New Hampshire.
Three friends from Brooklyn spend five days inside the 40,000 square foot gothic seaside mansion, Seaview Terrace, which was once the setting of the original Dark Shadows television series.
Three family members spend five days behind the walls of the abandoned West Virginia State Penitentiary, (also known as Moundsville State Penitentiary), a prison that was home to nearly 1,000 documented deaths and executions.
A couple and their friend spend five days inside the 50,000 sq. ft., Three Valley Chateau, a reportedly haunted hotel in the snowy mountains 12 miles outside the old gold rush ghost town of Revelstoke, British Columbia.
Three individuals spend five days in an abandoned and allegedly haunted Yorktown Memorial Hospital in Yorktown, Texas. During their stay, they try to connect with a deceased family member who died at a young age.