I love a good ghost story and have since I was a kid.
The house I grew up in was a Victorian built in 1911. My grandmother had the room at the top of the winding staircase. When you walked in, if you let your eyes relax, you might have seen a shadow on the wall. It might have been in the shape of a woman with elaborately upswept hair. According to my middle school best friend — a self-professed psychic — her name was Micheline. If you’ve been to middle school, you know the number one rule of survival is that you do not bring attention to yourself in any way that might be considered “weird,” so that information stayed between us. But my love of a spooky secret has only grown.
One good thing about being an adult is that you can revisit your childhood obsessions with a certain degree of freedom. So, as soon as I became aware of the genre that is ghost-hunting television, I was watching the proverbial crap out of it.
If you’re not familiar with ghost-hunting reality TV — whether it’s Ghost Adventures, The Holzer Files, Ghost Brothers, or my latest discovery, Ghost Moms (literally a group of moms from Oklahoma who morph into ghost hunters in their free time), there’s a pretty standard format to the goings-on.
A family or someone who owns or works at an allegedly haunted location — a house, tavern, theater, a former psychiatric hospital, and so on — thinks Something is Up (i.e., they’ve noticed voices, footsteps, shadows, objects moving, temperature changes, or people having mood swings, being pushed or scratched, or the like).
They call a paranormal research group or teams (i.e. TAPS; Steve and Amy/Cindy from The Dead Files; Dakota, Chelsea, Tanner, and Alex from Destination Fear; the Ghost Hunties of Living for the Dead), who are often filmed on the way to the location in their car updating the rest of the team on the latest case: “Mom called us because the walls are bleeding, her kid is levitating on the regular and talking to their imaginary friend who has no eyes, but Dad thinks everything is chill and she just needs to do more yoga.”
Upon arrival, the team is given a tour of “hot spots,” or places where people have experienced paranormal activity. Someone might claim to hear or see something supernatural during the tour. (At this point, I am intrigued and hoping it’s not just that someone left a window open, causing a pesky draft. I’m rooting for a poltergeist.)
With the civilians urged to leave the team to their own devices, the investigation begins. This almost always happens at night. Sometimes the team gets locked into the location until dawn. A dramatic shot of a key turning or actual padlock being placed on the door really drives the claustrophobia home. How I feel at this moment (giddy and nauseous with anticipation) is how I imagine other people probably feel watching sports.
From here, variations pop up, depending on the style of the ghost-hunting show. If it is of the bro variety (Ghost Adventures), there will be lots of yelling and shouting “dude” at one another, running from demonic presences, and taking on ill-advised stunts, like sleeping in a morgue drawer or going alone to the basement to use a Ouija board while viewers scream into their couch pillows. It can also be of the softer variety, in which a departed family member or a historical event has triggered the haunting, nothing is evil, and everyone can eventually relax. In these scenarios, séances or other forms of cross-the-veil communication can be more healing than haunting.
After the investigation, the team might sit down and reveal their findings to their haunted clientele. From there, the options are expelling the spirits, learning to co-exist, or the family should move out because there’s no hope of rescuing the house from the demons that live in the bathroom. (It’s unclear what they’ll tell the next owners about what has gone on at the location.)
I don’t need spooky season as justification for viewing ghost-hunting shows. I watch this kind of TV year round, and I watch it alone, because I don’t really know anyone else who watches it, and also because whenever I have watched it with someone else, they’ve felt the need to comment throughout about the absurdity of the premise, continuously reminding me that what’s happening is not real. Let’s be clear: I don’t care. I am fully aware that I am watching television, which means people on the show will do things so that they can keep viewers’ attention and get ratings and therefore new seasons. I don’t care if what I’m watching on this reality TV show is “real.”
If you can easily debunk a shadow by establishing that there were lights outside from a passing car, or unexplained sounds being due to a team member walking around upstairs or breathing next to the microphone, good for you. I’m looking for a good story, and for me that means someone feeling malevolent energy in a hallway, a claim that can’t be substantiated — despite much paranormal patter and flashy gizmos — but is creepy enough to make me get up from my nest to turn a lamp on. I like a what-the-hell-is-that!? moment. I relish the rabbit hole I’ll descend into after the show, researching the history of the location, and, at the same time, the strange comfort that comes with the predictable format.
For those who don’t share my pleasure in this paranormal pastime, I understand the attraction to logic, the need for scientific explanation. Most people don’t want to believe that their apartment could be haunted, or that they could stumble into a vortex on their way to the bodega. If that actually happened to me, I would be mad! Of course, watching all these ghost-hunting shows is probably the best way to prepare for something like that. In the meantime, I’ll be here in the dark with my snacks watching every ghost-hunting show I can, and feeling good about it.
