Dan Aykroyd explains how his lifelong belief in the paranormal led to 'Ghostbusters'

Dan Aykroyd explains how his lifelong belief in the paranormal led to 'Ghostbusters' : 'This stuff is real'

Kevin Polowy

Aykroyd’s great-grandfather Simon was a dentist in Ontario, Canada, who became a mystic with the launch of Spiritualism around the turn of the 20th century. 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 onto Dan’s father, Peter Aykroyd Sr., who eventually published the book A History of Ghosts.

“Most places in Canada you'd see Look magazine or National Geographic or Life magazine all stacked up,” Aykroyd says. “In my house, it was the American Society for Psychical Research magazines, Fate magazine, British Society for Psychical Research, all of these publications that studied the paranormal. So I just grew up with it. … There was no way out of it.”

Aykroyd’s steadfast belief in the paranormal hasn’t faded a bit, evidenced by his new gig as narrator of the Travel Channel series Hotel Paranormal. Through reenactments, interviews and sometimes real footage, the series depicts incidents of spine-chilling paranormal experiences at one specific type of venue where they frequently occur: hotel and motel rooms.