High spirits: Reality shows are alive with ghosts

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High spirits: Reality shows are alive with ghosts
October 22, 2009
By DIANE WERT
newsday.com

They see dead people.

And they don't use any sixth sense, either. They use EMF (electromagnetic field) detectors in trying to corroborate instances of EVP (electronic voice phenomena). This is science. They don't need no stinkin' psychics!

It's TV's hottest new reality trend - ghosts and the skeptics who seek them. And in finest reality show fashion, this trend has an enticing appeal: You could do this, too!

Two Rhode Island plumbers are Syfy's long-running "Ghost Hunters." Everyday dudes who "never believed in ghosts" now trek to find them on Travel's "Ghost Adventures." Texas brothers cruise in a tricked-out truck for Discovery's new "Ghost Lab."

But stars aren't left out. BIO's "Celebrity Ghost Stories" follows everyone from Twisted Sister's Dee Snider to Joan Rivers having close encounters of the spirit kind. Even animals get in on the gig. Paranormal pets track ghosts when Animal Planet's "The Haunted" debuts Nov. 22.

"It's hard to know whether there are a lot of ghost shows because it's something in the zeitgeist or because somebody had a hit ghost show that a lot of people are trying to copy," says Mark Stern, executive vice president of original programming for Syfy.

His channel had that original hit back in 2004. "Ghost Hunters," from the producers of the cable hit "Dirty Jobs," smartly showcased two Roto-Rooter plumbers who seemed like real guys because they were. Rhode Island friends Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson had been investigating ghost stories in their spare time since 1990 with their Rhode Island Paranormal Society, now called the Atlantic Paranormal Society to yield the snappier acronym TAPS. They tried to confirm hauntings with scientific instruments - night-vision cameras to capture video/audio of apparitions, electromagnetic field detectors to record environmental disturbances.



'A skeptical approach'
connections

* Michael Jackson Michael Jackson
* Circuit City Circuit City
* Andrew Lloyd Webber Andrew Lloyd Webber
* Elijah Wood Elijah Wood
* Snoop Dogg Snoop Dogg

While Syfy's plumbers became visible exponents of the trend, they were hardly the only ones operating at the show's 2004 premiere - which suggests ghost hunting was a TV phenomenon waiting to happen.

The Long Island Society for Paranormal Research had been founded in 2003. It's now part of "the TAPS Family" of nearly 100 groups around the country to whom TV's ghost hunters refer local cases. "You have to meet strict criteria to be part of the TAPS Family," says the Long Island society's president, Cynthia Romano, an executive assistant from Lindenhurst who joined the group after calling them to study suspicious activity at her home. "You have to be an established group, with a certain number of investigations," she says, "with all members over the age of 21."

Romano says the society never charges for investigations (neither do the "Ghost Hunters" guys), and "everything we do, we try to base it in some scientific manner. When we go into a location, the first thing we try to do is debunk. The majority of the time, it's something completely normal. Or we may have experiences we can't explain, but because we can't document it, we can't say it's actually haunted."

Syfy's Stern thinks that's why "Ghost Hunters" has thrived. The TAPS guys "took a bit of a skeptical approach," he says. "A lot of shows that came before were, 'Yeah, ghosts exist, of course,' and filled with strange orbs and all kinds of crazy things. These guys were not taking that wide-eyed, gullible approach. They did it in a much more responsible and objective way."



Host 'never believed'

Likewise, the host of Travel Channel's year-old favorite "Ghost Adventures" announces weekly, "My name is Zak Bagans, and I never believed in ghosts until I came face to face with one." He and two friends go on overnight "lockdowns" at sites like a former Ohio state reformatory, where they interviewed former guard and inmate witnesses about reported hauntings. They employ a do-it-yourself production style of handheld video, motion blurs and garbled audio (with handy subtitles), along with the inevitable eerie music.

Syfy and ghosts certainly makes sense. But Travel Channel? "The important thing for us is that it includes information about the destination," says Huntington-born and Oyster Bay-schooled Charlie Parsons. He does double duty as Travel Channel's senior director of content and executive producer of events like the Halloween stunt "Ghost Adventures Live" (Friday, 8 p.m.-3 a.m. on Travel).

"Viewers are curious how else you can look at a place, and the paranormal opens up so many doors and stories," Parsons says. "We spend two full acts just setting up the context of the place - what the town is about, what the history is, what the locals are saying - so you know the story behind it."

The "Ghost Adventures" centerpiece, though, is the second-half lockdown, where the trio confronts creepy sounds and unexplained "mists" shaped like human figures. Hours of footage get edited down to 20 minutes. But for Travel's seven-hour live broadcast from West Virginia's Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Parsons says, "We show the whole thing from top to bottom, letting viewers see what it's like to be in there all night long." They also cut away to outside experts for comment.

"Ghost Adventures Live" even lets viewers in on the act. They can text or e-mail messages for an on-screen crawl, and scrutinize online video from eight webcams, "to let us know if they see something," Parsons says.

Of course, there are no guarantees that "ghosts" will be found during the live event. Or during any show. Syfy's Stern says he initially assumed "Ghost Hunters" would find spirits every week, but "I'd say the hit rate is maybe 20 percent. And that's exactly what people want. If they came out of every episode and said they found another ghost, you'd say, 'Yeah, sure you did.' " Even skeptics can enjoy the ride. "If you believe," says Travel Channel's Parsons, "you're all-in for that reason. If you just want to be entertained, you can get goose bumps, anyway."

The double-barreled approach seems to work. Genre top-dog "Ghost Hunters" averages nearly 3 million total viewers, and growing, outdrawing network competition like "Melrose Place." Ghost shows are so hot now that "South Park" went after them in its Oct. 7 season return - always a good barometer of pop culture status.

But you aren't likely to catch LI exponent Romano tuned in to TV's ghost hunt. "I tend not to watch it that often," she says, "because I live it."