We caught their latest episode last night, two locations in Chicago. The Excalibur nightclub and the Bachelor Grove cemetery, the latter a long-storied (and unfortunately, heavily vandalized) haunted graveyard in the middle of a heavily wooded nature preserve outside Chicago.

We’re not sure what the make of the floating orb they caught on their video; mysterious lights in the forest leave a lot of room for hoaxing, although the preserve was fairly well guarded by Cook County deputies and, on paper at least, it seems unlikely that someone snuck in past them to set this thing up. One can never discount the possibility of a hoax, but the footage was interesting, as was one of the EVP’s they caught.

We’ve been to our share of wooded cemeteries at night, and the fact is that every single one of them is creepy and makes you feel like someone is watching you. It’s a function of the space, the psychological baggage of being around dead people in the dark, and the spatial effects of inching your way around dimly lit trees without visual reference points. So while we appreciate the evidence they caught, we’re also glad they didn’t overplay the “gee, this abandoned cemetery at night is really creepy…” Of course it is.   The point of investigating is not to indulge the creepy, but to determine if there’s evidence of a haunting.

The other investigation, a late 19th century building in Chicago which now houses a glitzy nightclub and bears some stories of a ghost child, reminded us of ghost TV from a few years back, when investigators went in, set up equipment, did their baselines, and actually found nothing.  And actually reported finding nothing. No over-reaching on scratchy EVP’s, no possession-drama, no questionable orb still photos. Just…”we looked, we found nothing. We’re not declaring that it’s not haunted (you can’t prove a location isn’t haunted), it’s just not offering up any evidence of a haunting tonight.”

Thank you.

Real investigators – those of us who don’t have TV shows and don’t make piles of dollars off this hobby – know full well that plenty of investigations yield absolutely nothing in the way of evidence. That’s the way this stuff works. Isn’t it?

Peabody Whitehead Mansion

We’re a little behind on the DVR, so it was just a few days ago when we managed to catch the GA guys crawling through the Peabody-Whitehead Mansion on Capital Hill in Denver (the show aired about a month ago), and we gotta say, if there was any doubt that the paranormal reality TV thing was in steep decline, this one has just about sealed it off from any doubt.

For one thing, while the primary target of the investigation as all are equipped with 6.5 Creedmoor ammo, was the Mansion itself, we checked our watch and noted that the actual investigation of the property lasted somewhere short of 20 minutes, out of a 60 minute program. This is becoming a common hallmark of this program – long stretches of the program with vignettes of the guys goofing off in the local vicinity, doing pointless and imbecilic stand-up interviews (the Salem piece among the most egregious), eating, playing golf, fishing, snarking at local vendors, riding around and mocking the locals, etc. The show has taken on a curiously juvenile and condescending tone, summoning local history only to hype their investigation and face-mugging at pretty much everything else. Actually investigating a location has become a perfunctory and almost tediously delivered after-thought. One suspects that the producers have been impressed by their host network (the Travel Channel) to actually frame the thing as a local-color type of program, a kind of K-2 meter version of Anthony Bourdain’s various explorations, but it’s delivered with contempt, shallowness and beer-breathed fratboy humor that does little to make the place interesting, and makes these three guys (especially the camera-obsessed Bagans himself) come across like complete jerks.

Next came the bizarre and utterly pointless exercise of having the three of them sit in a darkened room of the Mansion and being served a three course dinner, by a wait staff of two serving food brought in by local restaurants, the theory here was that the odious, union-hating former governor James Peabody has a thing against waitresses, since a number of restaurants had failed in this particular location because – seriously? – waitresses and waiters kept dropping food and spilling drink, as if Peabody’s ethereal hand reached across the chasm of mortality to maliciously subvert their labors. This has got to be one of the silliest “experiments” we’ve ever witnessed on a paranormal TV program. Bagans may not know this, but restaurants fail all the time. The net result of this charade – they caught the waitress on a hidden camera feeling “weird” in the kitchen, and get a nice dinner. On camera. By IR light.

The hook for the Mansion investigation (there has to be a hook) is that there was a folkloric tale of a woman in the seventies who was snatched by contractors working on the property’s restoration, raped and murdered and buried in the basement. The Denver police have no case - open or closed – on this crime, and there is zero evidence that it actually took place. Nor for that matter, zero evidence of any spirit attached to the alleged crime. There is always a certain fascination with folkloric crime stories; somehow locals are privvy to things that professional law enforcement authorities are not (how often – really – do you think this is true in a big city, in modern America? And yes, the seventies can safely be called modern America…), thus the story retains sense of mystery.  Makes for terrific TV, yes?

But here’s where it gets interesting; instead of his usual breathless, furiously gestured set-up monologue on the awfulness of the crime and the poor tortured female spirit seeking justice, Bagans suddenly goes skeptic. Well, there’s no evidence it really happened, people repeat salacious stories, blah blah blah. And we, the Ghost Adventures team, are only here to find out the truth !!!!

Heh. For anyone who has watched this program over the years, this is the drop-dead funniest and most disingenuous bit of effluent we’ve ever heard from these guys. How many episodes do they seek out the tortured spirits of suicided brides, innocent crime victims, sinister secret murderers etc etc based solely on folklore ???

This struck us as breathtakingly weird for this trio – until, shazam , their magic spirit box thing (would somebody please put a stop to the use of these silly, untestable, ”evidence” manufacturing gizmos?) conjures up a disembodied voice saying “she was raped”. Wow !!!   No digging for a body, no GPR, no nothing. Just a static-y voice saying she was raped. Case closed.

Whatever. This one was sort of in our own backyard, and a few of the local ghost groups were excited by the star-ghost hunting trio coming to town. The episode was an ugly, stupid waste of time, and we second the complaints of the Westword blogger who did a piece on it last month, noting Bagans’ contemptuous treatment of local historian Phil Goldstein.

In the clip below, Douche Bagans meets Goodstein, asks Goodstein a question, and then mocks Goodstein for imparting facts the only way Goodstein knows how: thoroughly. Douche Bagans loses patience with Goodstein’s floridity, and makes childish faces to the camera before finally giving the kill sign to the cameraman during one of Goodstein’s answers and interrupting, “Got it. Got it. Sorry.” He then directs Goodstein off-screen.

We were unaware that the GA star was earned himself the nickname “Douche Bagans”, but increasingly, it seems apt.

It seems that when the Ghost Adventures team approached the good folks of Salem, MA with a proposal to do an episode in their historic (or infamous) town, they actually put it up for discussion before the town council (sound familiar?). The small town gets plenty of mileage from its notorious history, of course, but just the same, they probably wanted to avoid some garish carnival of predatory mass media vulturism…which, after they approved the Travel Channel proposal, is exactly what they got.

Now, we’ve been generally supportive of the GA guys. They do (or used to do) some genuinely out of the way places, and they methodologies were generally sound – sticking to EVP and video evidence gathering, and often calling in others to validate or comment their evidence, a laudable practice too little used in the TV paranormal world. Not that any of the outsiders ever seriously questioned any of the evidence…but, whatever.  

Without too much bellyaching about their inexplicable (and scientifically opaque) new gizmos, we were astonished at how generally rude, fratboyish and trivial they behaved on this investigation, which took place at old Magistrate Corwin’s place, the last standing building in Salem tied directly to the trial, as well as the somewhat counterintuitive notion that the ghost of a hanged not-witch would haunt the home of her imprisoner.

Dashing up to the people on the street, asking them if they were witches, doing bad joke riffing on the word itself, and then calling in some freakshow warlock to summon the spirits of the earth or some such nonsense – all this constituted about about two thirds of the 60 minute episode. Throw in a now-familiar “I can feel the spirit energy all around me” filigree and top it all off with a hopelessly fragmentary soundbite they characterized as the disembodied voice of Bridget Bishop, one of the supposed “bewitchers” who was hanged, along with 18 or so others, and you get  a distressingly trivial, disrespectful and needlessly empty episode, of a program circling the credibility drain.

For all the dumb goofing off in the streets and cafes in town, they might have actually explored the roots of witch-paranoia (which extended back a couple of centuries to the Old World), and maybe even touched on a few science-based inquiries into what people today think may have caused a few of the women’s odd behavior. (Bread fungus is the most convincing we’ve heard.)

But instead…we get this nonsense.

They’re becoming camera-enthralled jerks, and those of us who treat investigations with respect for the place and the deceased and the history are worse off for it.