We get asked alot if we watch the various reality shows on TV about paranormal investigations and ghost hunting. Well, sure we do. As the paranormal reality TV show craze is nearing its saturation point, we thought we’d scribble a few lines about what we think of them and invite your feedback and commentary.
Ghost Hunters
Ghost Hunters, which airs on the Sci-Fi channel here in the states, is the most popular of the current roster of paranormal reality shows. A couple of ordinary guys, plumbers, who founded a paranormal research group (TAPS) back in the early 1990′s, Grant Wilson and Jason Hawes are now media stars, frequently doing lectures and TV interview shows on the subject of ghosts and paranormal phenomena.
The program was an unexpected hit for the usually-struggling Sci-Fi channel and has spawned a couple of side-project shows.
We try to catch every episode (we’d call ourselves fans, if not quite obsessive ones) and have observed a few changes in how the show has evolved. Thankfully gone are the various inter-group drama diversions (who remembers Brian getting yelled at in the early years for losing a cord or showing up late to an investigation?), and the program now focuses a lot more on the investigations themselves.
Regrettably, though, the show has become desperately formalized, with more or less the exact scripting, pacing and needless cut-scene commentary week after week. There are times when the two principals – Jason especially – seem bored stiff by going through the motions and reading off the same script week after week (“So, you know what we did…”,”Let’s get DVR’s on those cameras and go ‘lights out’”, etc etc.) Investigations now seem to be punch card controlled, and anyone who does this with any frequency will tell you that every investigation is different.
Also, as a colleague pointed out, it has been several seasons now where the team has found absolutely nothing they couldn’t call paranormal – there’s an EVP or weird visual anomaly or a swinging door in every episode , and anyone who does engage in this hobby will tell you that most investigations yield pretty much nothing. We can’t help escape the idea that ratings are driving the show’s content and infecting the necessary level of skepticism required when doing a paranormal investigation.
As a last complaint, we also think there’s far too much camera time devoted to the individual investigators, than to the space they are investigating. Some of us watch the show to check out the haunted house, not the guys walking through the haunted house. We know that static cameras don’t make for very interesting TV, but this goes right to the problem that ALL the paranormal shows have.
Still, it’s the flagship, and we have been impressed on occasion by the quality of the evidence they seem to capture.
Most Haunted
Arguably the first weekly paranormal investigation series, Most Haunted is a British production that airs in the US on The Travel Channel.
Like an aging stage diva whom no one will tell can no longer sing the parts, wear the costumes or remember her lines, MH is probably the single most embarrassing ghost hunt TV show airing today. Yvette Fielding, who used to do kids’ shows in Britain, leads a team through some of Britain’s ancient castles and manor houses, leading fairly (and predictably noisy) seances, jumping at every little sound and interspersing investigation segments with laughably corny commentary about menacing spirits and demons and legends of murder most foul, etc etc.
The show is deeply and fatally formalized – their resident psychic medium conjuring feelings and impressions about the same historical characters the show’s intro just told us about. If they toss a rock into the darkness, it very nearly always gets thrown back (why don’t American investigators ever have pebbles thrown at them?), Ouija boards inevitably spell “get out” or “danger”, table tipping sessions always have tipped tables, and the camera’s ALWAYS on the investigators, and usually the camera-hungry diva Fielding herself.
There’s little in the way of real investigation that happens on any of their episodes, and one marvels at Fielding’s ability to conceal what must be her limitless cynicism about how predictably fake her show can be and still draw hefty TV ratings in England. We do reserve some respect for their resident researcher Dr.Ciaran O’Keeffe, who freely challenges some of the most hokey paranormal claims and cautions skeptical reservation about the whole notion of ghost hunting, but he isn’t taken very seriously on the program and seldom objects with much vigor to the clownish proceedings.
The real crime, though, is that these frauds get access to some genuinely historic and throwdown spooky locations in the UK, then ruin it with cheap and comically unserious investigations.
Ghost Adventures
Ghost Adventures began its life as an independent film shot by Zak Bagans, Nick Groff and Aaron Goodwin, during a weeks-long trip to Nevada where they captured some truly startling spirit and poltergeist activity in and around the mining areas of Virginia City in 2004. Anyone who is a fan of the program owes it to themselves to watch the original film – two scenes, which we won’t describe here, represent some of the most compelling evidence of ghost activity ever captured (and both have been analyzed heavily and deemed fakery-free – for what that’s worth, of course).
The three filmmakers got their own TV show in 2007, and it airs with some regularity on The Travel Channel. Their approach is a refreshing and, for the most part, successful departure from some of the other ghost shows – the three have themselves locked down in a haunted location for an entire night, with just their equipment. No film crews following them around, no scripts, no standard closing commentary. One of the primary effects of doing all the shooting themselves is that you get a lot more footage of the space, and less set-up footage of the principals.
In addition, they also do a lot of static media recording – setting up and running cameras and recorders for hours on end in empty areas of their investigation locations, and some of the footage they have captured – especially some of the video – is genuinely impressive.
Unfortunately, the nature of their investigation style tends to favor much larger locations – abandoned hospitals, prisons, factories, etc – and there are only so many of these locations to truly investigate. Also, very large derelict locations will ALWAYS have a lot of stray and unexplainable noises, as buildings disintegrate a little bit at a time and react to nighttime cooling in unpredictable ways. But we think the program usually only floats the best evidence to the surface (we obviously don’t know what they DON’T count as evidence, since it doesn’t air), and we generally appreciate the demeanor of the investigators themselves.
Bagans himself tends to get a little hyperventilated about the locations and their histories – we suspect this is a by-product of over-consulting by the network – and the guy does get a bit drama-queenish at times during particularly intense investigations. But overall, we like the program and the approach.
Ghost Lab
Following the work of Everyday Paranormal, a ghost club founded by Brad and Barry Klinge in San Antonio, Ghost Lab is somewhat similar in format and approach to Ghost Hunters, with a few distinct differences. Far less scripted and formalized, the program also features a lot more on-site evidence analysis, courtesy of a giant RV converted into a media-analysis laboratory, with banks of amplifiers, TV screen and PC’s. There is less emphasis on getting all members of the team the same amount of camera time each week, and a bit more set up with witnesses and property owners/managers on the background of their investigation sites.
We remain fans of this program and these two large, decidedly un-telegenic brothers. They frequently subject their own evidence to outside scrutiny and consultation as part of episodes (Ghost Adventures does also, although GH does not), and they also use a substantial amount of static media recording as part of their approach. They also seem to really work a space, taking into account environmental conditions and historical context when gathering evidence, and generally seem less camera-aware than most of the other teams on TV.
They have tendency to pursue some questionable legends (they recently did an investigation following the trail of a supposedly escaped John Wilkes Booth, and captured an interesting if not compelling EVP of an entity admitting his identity as the infamous Lincoln assassin), and a few other of their theory-testing experiments seem grounded more in speculation than in physics or meteorology. Their stated claim is that they use “science” to probe the mysteries of the paranormal, and from our standpoint that’s a VERY dicey assertion to make….but overall we find each episode plausible, fun to watch and reasonably sound from an investigatory standpoint.
Paranormal Cops
We’ll admit to being surprised by this one. Paranormal Cops follows the investigations of a handful of Chicago cops, gathering more or less standard evidentiary media (EVP recordings, EMF spikes, etc), then tracking down the source of the supposed haunting. At the time of this writing, we’ve only seen a handful of the episodes (it seems to have a fairly hit-or-miss schedule on A&E, although it is still in production), but the methodology of the team is reasonably sound and their day-job detective skills do seem to get woven into the episodes with low-key plausibility.
The fact these guys are real cops, not young and telegenic TV stars, lends a scrappy cred to the program that enhances its appeal. Until we’ve seen a few more episodes, we’ll reserve too much commentary…but it does show some promise, despite our initial misgivings that it would be just another also-ran in an already crowded pack of paranormal reality shows.
Paranormal State
A&E’s off-the-line answer to Ghost Hunters, Paranormal State started its run in late 2007, following the work of the Penn State Paranormal Research Society and its founder, Ryan Buell. The show traces a similar format to Ghost Hunters – Buell sets up the team with a discussion of the location to investigate, and they head out with cameras and recording devices.
The program concentrates on private homes almost exclusively and seems to pivot most often around a family-in-crisis theme, working into its investigations interviews with the family members. And actually, that’s kind of the point. Buell’s team regards themselves as paranormal counselors as much as investigators, going to back for a besieged and at-wit’s-end family dealing with malevolent spirits, human or demonic, and the program’s code is almost always a sense of relief that the source of the problem – the loss of control of the family over their own space – is finally (usually) resolved. They do use mediums in nearly every episode (including the spectacularly annoying Chip Coffey, and the now-embarrassing Lorraine Warren, long ago dismissed as an unreliable player over the Amityville Horror fiasco), but they usually offer only the most researchable and patently obvious observations about the state of the family conditions, and predictably vague “impressions” about who or what is haunting the episode’s subjects.
There’s a lot confrontation and ghost-challenging in their tightly paced 30 minute episodes, and a lot of religious stuff as well – priests chucking holy water, prayers said over supposedly disturbed burial grounds, that sort of thing), and the production leans heavily toward the menacing and good-vs-evil type strain of ghost hunting – not typically our cup of tea.
Probably our biggest complaint, though, is that there is very, very little real evidence gathering at work here, and way too much family counseling. It’s as if their producer decided that a bunch of geeks walking around with devices is essentially a bore (and in some ways, it is), and that “helping peolple” brings a sort of personal impact angle to the paranormal investigation game that viewers may prefer instead. After all, the theory goes, who really cares if an abandoned warehouse is haunted?
We wouldn’t be so callous as to doubt genuine intent to help people freaked out over shadow apparitions or meancing, disembodied voices. We’re just not altogether impressed with the paranormal aspect of the program (we struggle to recall even a single episode that captured anything like compelling evidence of the paranormal at all), and it’s a bit easy to grow cynical and numbed by a confrontation with one of Lucifer’s minions every week. Certainly not the worst, but not necessarily our favorite either.
