We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brett Lay a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Brett thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?
Crystal and I moved to Savannah Georgia several years ago. We were awed by the beautiful and historic city, and one of the things we found out was that it is considered by many to be the most haunted city in America. We’re both big fans of the paranormal, so it was natural to be drawn to talking about just that in our podcast. And since Savannah’s the most haunted city in America, it only made sense to name our podcast after it.
We didn’t want to be tied to just a niche, however, and knew eventually we would exhaust the supply of Savannah stories (although it will take a long time, so we wanted to be able to cover more than just Savannah.
So that’s how Scary Savannah and Beyond was born.
Brett, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
We are an audio and video podcast based out of Savannah, Georgia, the most haunted city in America. Our podcast started when I was a musician playing with a band in Savannah named Spare Parts 912. We were in demand and played multiple times a week. I was getting burnt out on the music, and really wanted to do something that involved my wife Crystal, who is a phenomenal writer. I’ve always enjoyed talking and working with audio, so a podcast just made sense. We started working as a team with Crystal writing the majority of our scripts, (she still does), and I produce the podcast.
We started on Halloween of 2021 with our first episode (we thought it to be a fitting date to do so).
We cover stories about the paranormal in Savannah (and beyond), true crime, and oddity stories from all over the world.
Shortly after starting the audio podcast we started to grow in popularity and decided to do a video version as well to coincide with the audio episodes.
We’re quickly approaching our 1-year anniversary and have well over 28,000 listens in this short span without any marketing to speak of.
We have many people reach out to us and let us know how entertaining our podcast is, and it feels good to be able to entertain people the world over with our stories.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
I would say it’s the satisfaction of creating something of value out of nothing. The process to create each weeks’ episode involves research, scripting, recording, and post production. We spend at least 20 hours a week on each episode. Getting the response from our audience letting us know that we bring some joy into their lives is a great reward. We’ve had many of our listeners reach out and tell us about how we help get them through the day, and that they always look forward to our new episodes.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
Our goal, like any podcast, would be to grow our audience and reach. And to do this we have to continue to work diligently on our craft. We’re doing this by adding more and more content, including bonus material covering specialty topics, such as cryptids. Our mission is to be the best podcast we can be, and we strive for excellence in all aspects of our process. We won’t be satisfied until we’re number one on the charts, and even if that happened, we’d still be putting in the work.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.scarysavannahandbeyond.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scarysavannah
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scarysavannah
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/scarysavannah
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/scarysavannah
- Other: https://www.patreon.com/scarysavannah