By Kristen Anderson, @chillinkristen
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Dan Aykroyd’s interest in the paranormal is part of his family legacy. Aykroyd is perhaps best known for his role as Ray in the Ghostbusters movies, which he also wrote, but it turns out his personal history with the supernatural goes back much farther. He’s into ghosts and stuff because his father was into ghosts and stuff because his father was into ghosts and stuff because HIS father was into ghosts and stuff.
Dan Aykroyd is the fourth generation of a family that ain’t afraid of no ghosts.
The first Aykroyd to dabble in the supernatural was Dan’s great-grandfather. Samuel Aykroyd switched careers in his early 30s, pivoting from teaching to dentistry. He opened a practice with the goal of helping anxious patients. Topical anesthetics weren’t a thing yet, so dentistry at this time could be a painful affair. He started researching and came across mentions of dentists who used hypnosis to calm their patients and get them into a relaxed state for treatment.
It seems this line of research sparked Samuel’s curiosity about the type of mental state that hypnosis brings about, and he wondered whether that trance-like state could allow a person to become a conduit for the dead to communicate with the living.
Samuel often spoke about the spirit world with a friend named Walter Ashurst, and when Samuel said he wanted to start holding séances on his farm, Walter said he thought he could act as a medium and master of ceremonies.
We don't know a lot about Samuel’s friend Walter’s paranormal bona fides. Apparently, as a child, he said he had visions (which his father dismissed as nightmares), believed he was clairvoyant, and felt he could communicate with unseen entities. It does seem like he had the right resume. So he became Samuel’s houseguest in 1921 and stayed for 12 years, acting as the house medium for the near-weekly séances they held during that time.
Luckily, we know some of what went down right from the source. Samuel kept journals detailing his explorations with ghosts from 1905–1933, recording the events of about 80 séances.
The journals revealed that a revolving cast of spirit-world regulars seemed to contact Walter when he went into a trance-like state. The spirits included an Irishman named Mike Whalen, an ancient Egyptian prince named Blue Light, and several Native Americans. But an entity Walter identified as a former member of the Chinese Ming Dynasty named Lee Long was the star, showing up most frequently.
When Lee Long visited, Walter spoke in Chinese, which no one at the table understood, and Walter was not known to speak. At best, he spoke genuine Chinese, guided by the spirit, or, at worst, he was blathering offensive gibberish.
Other phenomena also took place during the séances. One time, a trumpet-like instrument supposedly floated over the heads of the attendees. Sometimes a whitish substance appeared in the dark, suspected to be ectoplasm. Ectoplasm is definitely a thing in Ghostbusters, but it’s a little different in the context of a séance. There, it’s said to be a substance produced by the medium’s body at the will of a spirit. Supposedly, they can use this material as another means of communication.
However, these ectoplasmic occurrences were too fleeting for Samuel. In his journals, he expressed some dissatisfaction because what was produced wasn't tangible; it was barely visible in the dark and didn't have provable physical properties. He badly wanted to provoke the materialization of a spirit, its physical embodiment coming into play. To this end, the séances were held on a schedule with the same friends each time, the theory being that it would hopefully make spirits more open and comfortable with the group. Walter responded for them, saying that the spirits told him they were trying to materialize and were asking for patience.
Sadly, Samuel didn’t get to experience this before he passed in 1933. The séance group he put together continued to meet at first but slowly dissolved over the next ten years. However, Samuel’s family carried on his life’s work. After his father’s death, Maurice Aykroyd, Dan Aykroyd’s grandfather, tried to build a device that was capable of capturing ghosts’ voices. He was aided by his own son Peter, Dan Aykroyd’s dad, who attended some of Samuel’s séances when he was very young. They worked on this device together until the ghosts themselves communicated to Maurice that it just wasn't possible. However, this didn’t squelch Peter’s interest in the subject matter—especially not after inheriting his grandfather's journals and a massive library of spiritual literature.
And because of that, Dan Aykroyd was surrounded by a genuine belief in the supernatural as he grew up. (He’s said that some people had National Geographic magazines around the house, but he was used to the American Society for Psychical Research journals lying around). His family’s history undeniably influenced his Ghostbusters script. Some of the preoccupations and language of his great-grandfather Samuel’s journals are present (think “full-bodied apparition,” and the use of ectoplasm), as well as his grandfather's work on devices through the gadgets the Ghostbusters use.
He even currently lives in Samuel’s home. The Aykroyd family was initially going to knock down the old farmhouse and rebuild on the land. But after Dan had an experience in the house that felt like he had been struck by lightning, which to him, indicated that something supernatural had happened, he decided to renovate it instead.
He also harbors his family’s greatest wish. Dan, his brother Peter Jr., and their father Peter compiled Samuel’s journals into a book called The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters in 2009. While on a press tour for the book, they acknowledged that they still have the same ambition their ancestor did—to witness documented proof of a ghost’s materialization. (Sadly, Peter has since passed.)
But to complete his great-grandfather’s legacy, further research on materializations and apparitions is needed. Dan has said,
“I would like to see more hard physicists come in and start to analyze what’s going on. Are oxygen and nitrogen, and hydrogen molecules coalescing to produce these visions in front of people? I’d love it if some research were done on materialization, which is the most exciting part of this, where full-formed limbs come out of a medium’s mouth and even a full-formed body. It would be nice to get some DNA and see if it’s the DNA of the person exuding this mass of ectoplasm or the DNA of another being.”
One thing seems certain: a fascination with ghosts IS in the Aykroyd DNA.