Peter H. Aykroyd - A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Séances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters

P eople often ask me how I came to write Ghostbusters. The truth is that in the early 1900s my family was part of a worldwide cultural and social phenomenon driven by a wish to make contact with spirits of the dead whether the dead wanted it or not.

My great-grandfather, Samuel Augustus Aykroyd, DDS, presided over his own home circle, and the sitters had their very own medium, Walter Ashurst, whom they believed acted as a conduit to many and varied afterworld personalities. Whether one believes in this kind of thing or not, my family was then and is now not alone in such pursuits. Thousands of people in Western society regularly hold sances and support mediums.

Around the beginning of the 20th century, mediums and their subsequent investigators became big stars and spiritualism took on a distinct show-business aspect. Were there fakes? Hoaxes? Many, to be sure, and some would say they were all tricks. But Baron Albert von Schrenk-Notzing, the German ectoplasm hunter; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writer of the Sherlock Holmes detective series; and Sir Oliver Lodge, eminent scientist and philosopher, were men who held the hope that someday natural science might rationally encompass the supernatural as a proven fact.

Levitations; apports; apparitions; limbs, complete with hair, skin, and bones, instantly growing out of living people; plasmic material molded into real-tissue impressions of faces and bodiesthese things were seen by many witnesses, skeptics and believers alike. Were these mere spectacles achieved by artificial devices, or are some of them simply part of a reality that exists beyond our own sensible understanding?

Part of Ghostbusters appeal derives from the cold, rational, acceptance-of-the-fantastic-as-routine tone that Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, director Ivan Reitman, and I were able to sustain in the movie.

This element originated from my great-grandfathers interest in the subject and from the books he collected. He bequeathed these to his son, my grandfather, Maurice, the Bell Telephone engineer who actually queried his colleagues about the possibility of constructing a high-vibration crystal radio as a mechanical method for contacting the spiritual world. His son, my father, as a child witnessed sances and kept the family books on the subject. My brother Peter and I read them avidly and became lifelong supporters of the American Society for Psychical Research, and from all this Ghostbusters got made.

My daughters are now up on the subject, and one of them, we have found, seems to affect photographs. Glops of light and other shapes attend her when pictures are taken in and around the old family farmhouse.

The children will have to make their own decisions about the verity and value of psychic studies.

Their grandfathers book, A History of Ghosts, will surely assist them. It is as objective as any serious seeker of the truth about alleged paranormal activities could wish.

Both believers and nonbelievers will, first, be highly entertained and then surprisingly enlightened by these stories of real empiricists chasing ghosts.

Dan Aykroyd

Los Angeles, California

February 2009