Several weeks ago, I wrote a Freaky Friday about attics. I mentioned that the reason I was moving my office upstairs to our refinished attic was that my daughter, son-in-law, and three delightful grandsons were moving in with us for a while. Well, they are officially here – and we are having a great time.
When I mentioned that I was going to be writing my Freaky Friday column, the oldest of the three told me that he had a great idea for me. And then he proceeded to create a wonderful story about ghosts, portals, and the Ghostbusters. It was a fairly sophisticated story for a seven-year-old, but unfortunately, it wasn’t really Freaky Friday material.
However, although I couldn’t use his story, I started to wonder about the whole Ghostbuster phenomenon – what was the origin story of Ghostbusters? What caused Dan Aykroyd would come up with an idea about a bunch of ghost-busting scientists? Did Dan have a paranormal experience that changed his life? Did Dan believe in ghosts?
Well, not only does Dan believe in ghosts – he calls it “the family business.”
But has Dan actually had paranormal experiences of his own?
In a Dan’s great-grandfather Simon became a mystic during the Spiritualism movement around the turn of the 20th century. According to Yahoo.com (https://www.yahoo.com/now/dan-aykroyd-ghost-stories-hotel-paranormal-150046932.html) “Simon witnessed and documented the work of several mediums in the hamlet of Lily Dale, N.Y., near Buffalo, and passed his journals onto the actor’s grandfather, who passed them on to Dan’s father, Peter Aykroyd Sr., who eventually published the book “A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Séances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters” with his son Dan and another author, Angela Narth.
“>Yahoo article, Dan relates a couple of his experiences:“My wife and I were in bed and her jewelry did little dance next to our bed. She saw it [too]. … She had bracelets there, a pearl bracelet and a metal bracelet, and all the sudden it was like they were doing a little mini cyclone.”
The house they previously resided in the Hollywood Hills, one that Cass Elliott from the Mama and the Papas also once lived in — 7708 Woodrow Wilson Drive to be exact — had “some things going on” as well.
“Something got into bed with me one night, I believe, when I was alone there. The door was closed but not locked. And it opened. And I felt a chill and then I felt something compress next to me on the mattress. And what am I gonna do? I’m tired, I’d just come from work. There’s no one there. So I just snuggled up next to it and I went to sleep. … I had a good night’s sleep, actually.”
“My daughter saw a red-haired man with a red-haired girl walking at the end of the hall. And the rumor was that somebody had died of a drug overdose in the house and was buried in it in the hillside. It was also Mama Cass’s house. One of our friends, an ex-Army boxing champion, scared of nothing, said he saw a huge black mass moving across the stairway. We used to hear the StairMaster going on [by itself]. … Numerous people said there was stuff going on in that house.”
In an interview with George Stroumboulopoulos from the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Dan shares an experience his non-believing mother had: “My mom apparently had one: just after I was born, she was nursing me upstairs in the farmhouse, and she kind of woke up and saw a young couple standing at the end of the bed, and she cried out for my dad, and the couple vanished, and then they hauled out an old family album and it was my great-grandparents, Sam and Ellen Jane. They’d come to welcome the baby to the farmhouse. This is her story anyway, and my Mom – she’s a skeptic.”
Dan Aykroyd currently hosts the paranormal show “Hotel Paranormal” which is described as “terrifying true stories of those who have come face-to-face with otherworldly hotel guests. Actor Dan Aykroyd narrates each episode featuring spine-tingling stories of paranormal encounters told from stays at hotels around the world.”
Of course he narrates spine-tingling, scary, ghost stories, because who else you gonna call?
Happy Friday!!!
Good one!!