The actress may have dazzled in her latest film, Tick Tick… BOOM!, but seeing her in a successful musical won’t come as a shock. Her breakout role was in High School Musical, after all. But she’s had another hidden talent that she kept under wraps for years, and now she’s finally coming forward with her eyebrow-raising paranormal ability.

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That’s right: the Princess Switch star can communicate with ghosts. During an interview with Kelly Clarkson, she admitted that ghost hunting wasn’t a “new” passion of hers, but rather something she’s experienced “a lot… over the years.” As for why she’s just revealing this ability now, she said:

“I feel like I’ve accepted the fact that like, I see things and I hear things.”

The 33-year-old explained:

“Like, even as a child growing up, like… I remember getting ready for school when I was 8 years old, and there was … You know those ducks, like, the duck thing that you pull, it’s a toy? There was one of those on the dining room table, and I started walking, and it just started going alongside me. And I was like, ‘…interesting.’”

Spooky!

She continued:

“I kind of shut it down for a while because it’s scary. The unknown is scary. … But recently I was like, ‘No, this is a gift and something that I have the ability to do, so I’m going to lean into it.’ And I recently did my first, like, real paranormal investigation, like, with equipment and everything.”

When a fascinated Kelly questioned what kind of equipment she was using, the Disney Channel alum said there’s “a lot on the market.” She elaborated:

“My favorite thing is called a spirit box, and it basically scans radio frequencies really quickly. … Something about the electricity that it creates allows spirits to speak through it.”

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The performer went on to describe sitting by a tombstone with her best friend communicating with a ghost named “Sam,” whom she claimed repeated her name back to her via the spirit box. She shared:

“I was like, ‘Cool, do you have anything else that you want to tell me?’ And I just hear, ‘shhhh, Nope.’ And I was like, okay cool, well, thank you.”

OMG, how strange and creepy! But Vanessa loves creepy, so we guess it works for her. (Her whole “queen of Halloween” brand is actually starting to make a lot more sense.) Now we just have to get her on her own paranormal investigation series, a la fellow Disney kid Demi Lovato’s alien show. We’d pay big bucks to see that!

Ch-ch-check out Vanessa’s full chat with Kelly (below):

[Image via NBC/YouTube]