The mid-aughts were the golden years of reality TV, a time when Laguna Beach, The Simple Life, and The Hills ruled the airwaves. One of the breakout shows from that time was E!'s unexpectedly wholesome peek inside the Playboy Mansion, called The Girls Next Door, featuring Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and his three main girlfriends at the time: Holly Madison, Kendra Wilkinson, and Bridget Marquardt.
The show focused on life inside the mansion and the relationships between Hef and the three blondes, as well as the dynamics between the women. It ran from 2006 to 2010, though Madison, Wilkinson, and Marquardt didn't appear in the final season. By then, Hefner had replaced them with new women—then-19-year-old twins Kristina and Karissa Shannon and 23-year-old Crystal Harris, who went on to marry Hefner and was with him until his death in 2017.
Interest in the original faces of The Girls Next Door piqued again recently when Madison and Marquardt were spotted out in Calabasas together on Sept. 23, as E! reported. And though Madison and Wilkinson have stayed in the spotlight somewhat, Marquardt has had a quieter post-Playboy life. But that doesn't mean she's not busy. Read on to find out what Bridget Marquardt has been doing since she moved out of the mansion and to see her now!
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After she left the mansion, Bridget Marquardt hosted Bridget’s Sexiest Beaches on the Travel Channel.
Discovery via AmazonWhen she left The Girls Next Door, Marquardt went on an extended vacation—with a twist. For a year, she hosted a travel show called Bridget's Sexiest Beaches, where she traveled around the world searching for the best sand and surf.
The show only lasted for one season in 2009, and after that, Marquardt then attempted to follow in the footsteps of Madison and Wilkinson, both of whom had launched their own reality TV shows, but hers never got off the ground. The show featured Marquardt navigating her post-Playboy life with new boyfriend, horror film director Nicholas Carpenter, whom she began dating in 2009. Unfortunately, the show was never picked up, but Carpenter and Marquardt remain committed to each other. The two got engaged in 2015. He proposed with a Halloween-themed diamond spider engagement ring.
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Marquardt turned to another longtime interest of hers for a new career path: the paranormal.
Harmony Gerber/Getty ImagesMarquardt often expressed her interest in all things spooky during her time on Girls Next Door, and she appeared on a 2006 episode of The Celebrity Paranormal Project. She also was on an episode of the A&E show Celebrity Ghost Stories.
In 2020, Marquardt was on an episode of the podcast The Glitter Cast to discuss how she was drawn to the paranormal at a young age. "I think I was born spooky," she told host Renee Watt. "From a really young age, I loved Tales From the Darkside."
An intense experience with an Ouija board as a preteen further piqued her interest, she said. Now Marquardt travels with a "ghost kit" that includes thermal cameras and a spirit box so she can hunt ghosts.
"While I was at the mansion, I was taking online courses, but I felt like I really wanted to learn how to use this equipment properly. I want to know the science behind it, and I want to know the history behind it," she told Watt. For her final project for the course, she did a research project to see if the Playboy Mansion was haunted, and brought a paranormal investigator in during the first season of the show. (Spoiler alert: It was, according to her findings).
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She parlayed her interest in ghosts into a podcast called Ghost Magnet.
Albert L. Ortega/Getty ImagesMarquardt began her own podcast called Ghost Magnet in 2019, and has produced nearly 130 episodes. The episodes focus on different elements of the paranormal, including poltergeists, haunted objects, and allegedly haunted locales.
The show, she says, is "an exploration of self-described ghost magnets and the spirits, poltergeists, and pookas they attract. When, where, and how did they realize that they had this spiritual magnetism? What’s it like living with the specters of the dead?"
Ghost Magnet often features other paranormal fans, researchers, and historians, but occasionally includes some of Marquardt's famous friends, too, like Mario Lopez, Elvira, mistress of the dark actor Cassandra Peterson, and fellow playmate Madison, who was on an episode in 2019.
Marquardt and Madison bonded over their interest in the afterlife.
Marquardt and Madison did an interview with Nylon in which they talked about spooky experiences they had at the Playboy Mansion.
“You definitely felt the nostalgia and the old energy,” Marquardt told the outlet in August 2021. At one point, she said, a ghostly figure with "long, black, stringy hair, very pale, very thin" appeared in the doorway to her closet. Marquardt believed it was a woman named Joanie, who lived in the mansion before her and had died of cancer several years back.
For her part, Madison told the magazine: “For me, it took a bunch of different experiences before I thought, ‘OK, there’s something weird going on here.’ I said, 'I wish I had more proof it was real,' and right away when I said that, [Marquardt's] TV turned on by itself, and the volume went all the way up.”
“I think that people, especially younger people, are so much more into the paranormal now than ever before, and in general, society is waking up to a more spiritual nature on all levels," Marquardt said.
On Marquardt's birthday on Sept. 25, Madison posted the above photo and wrote, "Happy birthday @bridgetmarquardt! Leave your favorite spooky emoji below." Marquardt, who's now 48, responded with a coffin, gravestone, and a teddy bear.
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