‘Ghost Hunters’ Seeks Spirits and Ratings

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‘Ghost Hunters’ Seeks Spirits and Ratings
November 10, 2009
By BRIAN STELTER
The New York Times

Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson are searching for ghosts. They walk toward a hallway inside Waverly Hills, a Kentucky sanatorium that attracts paranormal investigators like themselves.

Camera crew in tow, Mr. Hawes says the owners of the decrepit building “constantly see shadows back and forth.” Then the hunters’ thermal-imaging camera picks up a silent apparition at the far end of the hall, about three feet tall, darting from one room to another.

“Look, look at that,” Mr. Hawes exclaims as he cradles the camera screen.

“Oh, that’s trippy,” Mr. Wilson answers, before striding down the darkened hall. They wonder if it was an animal. Or could it be a tormented spirit they are seeing?

Mr. Hawes and Mr. Wilson are the shadow-chasing sleuths on “Ghost Hunters,” the Syfy reality series that has made believers out of its producers — believers in paranormal programming, if not in the spirits themselves. Despite a legion of detractors, “Ghost Hunters” is Syfy’s most popular show many weeks, beating scripted series on the channel like “Eureka” and “Stargate Universe.” Now in its fifth season, it regularly draws almost three million viewers, more than half in the advertiser-friendly 18-to-49-year-old demographic, according to Nielsen.

“Ghost Hunters” attracts more women than men — an important attribute for something that called itself the Sci Fi Channel until July. “One of our objectives of the relaunch was to move beyond the narrow perceptions of the sci-fi genre — primarily space, aliens and the future,” said Dave Howe, the channel’s president. And “Ghost Hunters” is helping to do just that. Mr. Howe now calls it the channel’s flagship reality show.

The “Hunters” have already spawned an international spinoff. On Wednesday the channel will add another one, “Ghost Hunters Academy,” which will test potential new group members.

On each show viewers watch burly men tip-toe around supposedly haunted houses in the dark. What could be so appealing about that? Perhaps the “did you see-that?” moments, like the one at Waverly Hills three years ago, that tap into an enduring interest in the afterlife.

“A lot of people don’t want to think that when they close their eyes, that’s it,” Mr. Hawes said in a telephone interview. “They want to know that there’s something after this life.”

More plainly, the show delivers on a desire for safe frights. “People like to watch it with the lights off,” Mr. Howe said.

Mr. Hawes and Mr. Wilson are self-made paranormal men. Plumbers by trade, they founded a group called the Atlantic Paranormal Society in Warwick, R.I., in the early 1990s and investigated reports of shadows, energies and unexplained phenomena in their free time. It is closer to a full-time job now, although they retain honorary positions at Roto-Rooter, the plumbing company they worked for.

Their big break came in 2002 when The New York Times profiled Mr. Hawes and the society, which had about 25 regular members then. Soon after, several television channels came calling. What appealed to Sci Fi, said Mark Stern, its executive vice president for original programming, was the group’s sincerity.

“They would get in their vans on their days off, drive for hours and stay up all night investigating for no money,” he said.

Though committed, the hunters sound skeptical. They say that they are firm believers in the paranormal but that they are also convinced that most claims can be debunked.

“If it may be haunted, we try to disprove the haunting,” Mr. Wilson said.

The hunters come complete with a vocabulary. Paranormal activity is “anything we can’t explain,” Mr. Wilson said. They reserve the “haunting” label for audio or video evidence that “reflects that there’s intelligence, possibly a dead human or something,” behind an occurrence.

“Ghost Hunters” had its premiere in 2004. Since then other cable channels have started their own paranormal investigation shows, but unique to the plumbers, said Craig Piligian, an executive producer of “Ghost Hunters,” is an effort to find practical explanations for the bumps in the night. If a door is squeaking, well, maybe it just needs WD-40.

“Those orbs that you’re looking at?” Mr. Piligian said, sketching out a potential case. “That’s dust. If you close the upstairs attic window that’s been open for a year, some of that stuff won’t be happening.”

“And then, honestly, bizarre stuff does happen, and you can’t explain it,” he added.

The society says it receives thousands of requests to evaluate hauntings, more than they could ever answer fully.

“So many people want their house or their business investigated,” Mr. Wilson said. “We have to do the work to figure out which ones actually warrant it.”

The group’s television series has attracted a sizable number of skeptics, who can be found on YouTube poking holes in some of the more dramatic cases in “Ghost Hunters” history.

Benjamin Radford, the managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, says the group and others like it lack scientific rigor and mislead people into thinking that their homes are haunted.

“I’ve seen first-hand some of the damage that the show can do to fragile people who are scared and looking for a real explanation to their experiences,” said Mr. Radford, who also investigates ghostly claims.

The inhabitants of homes showcased on “Ghost Hunters” often sound relieved, not damaged, at the end of an investigation. Mr. Hawes rejects suggestions that the show is scripted or that it exaggerates evidence of hauntings. “We’re not changing anything we do to make more of an entertainment factor,” he said.

Mr. Piligian, too, insists that no camera trickery is at work. In an interview last week he professed not to believe in ghosts, even with a sixth season in production.

“Although,” he hesitated after answering, “well ... there’s got to be something. I don’t know what that is.”