Dan Aykroyd Reveals the Paranormal Inspiration Behind Ghostbusters | Joe Rogan

How much of your day do you spend thinking about this? Well, I am an eternal researcher and I'm always looking for stories. I love the mouflon stuff that's coming out. You know, my family was into paranormal research. That's why I wrote the Ghostbusters. My dad was a researcher and my, and his father- That's why you wrote Ghostbusters? Yeah, because we have an old farm in Canada and my grandfather was a dentist in Kingston, Ontario in the 20s. And a man walked up to him. He had been researching psychic research in the other world and mediumship for many years. And a guy walked up to him and said, Dr. Ackroyd, I believe that I have a gift. And his name was Walter Ashhurst. He was a locomotive mechanic at the local Engine Works. And he was our family medium for at least, I don't know, 15 years. And we would have seances in the 20s and 30s. And Sunday afternoon, the big dodges and Cadillacs would pull up and the women, the matrons would get out and my great grandfather would have a 90 minute session with the medium and they would channel entities from the other side. Have you heard of the Fox sisters and the whole Lilydale thing, the whole mediumship of the concept that, you know, we are, that life lives beyond what we have here. Do you know who John Edwards is? The psychic on television? The psychic? Yeah. Isn't he full of shit? No, he's very- Didn't he get busted? No, he's- Well, you know, what happens- I think he got busted with an earpiece. Well, he may- Didn't he? See if John Edwards the psychic got busted. He was, he had some, well, maybe, you know, sometimes what happens is they, you know, they lose their powers and they are unable to- Or they're full of shit the entire time, they just get slippery. Oh, John Edwards though, I watched a show. I kind of believed him. I'm not sure if he was the one that got busted. One of those, one of those psychics got busted. Yeah, so- I'd like to sit you across from Penn Gillette. Yeah, of course. You want to talk to him? Well, he's an expert debunker of all this stuff. Yeah, super skeptical. I would love to- I'd love to have Penn Gillette tell me what he's doing. He thinks of the Fox sisters, why they went around the world with a spirit that performed with them. A rapping. What happened? Well- A spirit rapped? A spirit rapped, yeah. What kind of rapping? R-A-P, not- Not rapping, yeah. Not like- Yeah. Oh, I thought you meant like music. Loud, reverberant rapping, yeah. No, I'd love to, I'd love to, you know. So- Spirit rapper. Medium ship, that's a very- Go straight, kill him. That's a very big thing. I, yeah. Insane clown posse, or yeah, slipknot, there we go. And I believe that we, the consciousness can survive after death. There's a school called Arthur Finley College in England and you can go there and train to be a medium. Why you'd want to, I don't know. It's very exhausting. Can you imagine shutting down your whole system, going into an entrance, reaching the other side, having that entity come through the other side, use your body, use your fluids, use everything, and then abandon you after and then just go, it's exhausting, exhausting. My family researched mediumship and I wrote Ghostbusters based upon, you know, it's just our family interest. Wow. On the Fox Sisters. So you're all in. The Fox Sisters, you should get them up. There's a picture of them foxes. In 1848, they were lying in bed in their new house near Hydesville, New York and all of a sudden this kind of rapping started, terrifying them. They thought it was confined just to that house in Hydesville, but they managed to take it around. When they went to Rochester, it happened in houses. When they went to a theater, it happened in front of 300, 400 people. And eventually they toured the world with this act. They called it the peddler and he was someone who was killed and murdered and buried in the house in the basement. Is John Edwards a hoser? Your pop off? There they are. John Edwards. I looked him up. It didn't come up necessarily. There they are. He was. They were all, and they went around the world, tipping tables and- Look at them. That's a drawing. They're not even real people. They never existed. No, they did. They were, and they were very well scrutinized. Maggie in the end of her life said, no, we were producing these reverberant raps. Why do they have a head? What is that? Is that them? I don't know what point that set. That's out of my realm. There's something about mean faced ladies from like the 1800s that scare the shit out of them. Yeah, there's the cottage. There's the little cottage. Because it was just such a hard time to be alive. That's the cottage that it occurred in. And they said it was the ghost of the peddler that was murdered in the basement. Then they looked down, they did find some bones, but every time they tried to build the groundwater, a dig for the bones, the groundwater kept filling up. Anyway, Maggie at the end of her life said, no, no, we were faking it. I was creating the raps. Oh, Maggie said she was faking it. Maggie said she was faking it. But she said, I was creating the raps. These reverberated in concert halls with my knees and my knuckles. I can crack my knuckles maybe in my knees, but you can't make up- Oh, cracking them? They were slapsies. They were wrappings. And that's what she said? Yeah, and then she recanted it and said, the skeptics made me do it. I was talked into it. There was so much pressure on me. And in the end of her life, she then recanted her recantion, her retraction of it. But very convincing, that was the origin of spirituality. People were looking for a new religion. You had Mormonism that had come in in the 20s. You had all kinds of Protestantism. That area of New York was called the Burntover District because the preachers had all been through there. People were believing in all kinds of different religions. And they were looking for something new, and spirituality and spiritualism gave them that. But I've had people contact me that have passed in dreams. I've never seen a ghost. I've never experienced that. But I do believe that consciousness survives after death. I do believe that. It's an interesting idea. There's no evidence that it doesn't. I think that reincarnation is also a fascinating concept that's repeated in many different cultures. And I wonder why. There's a great Tyler Childers song called Born Again. And it's about things living and dying and being reincarnated in different times. I think that's very attractive to people. The idea that our physical body is one thing, but the spiritual body is something entirely different. I think that atheists and... It's attractive. It is attractive. Atheists are never going to believe that. They're not going to accept that. It's hopeful. It gives us a little hope. And after all, the Kirlyans... Who was that? They were a Russian research group. They're famous for the experiment where the Kirlyan photography, K-I-R-L-I-A-N. And you want a little citrus? Sure. They photographed a woman. She sat there and she was able to blow smoke into a fishbowl and shape the smoke in the fishbowl. So here are some Kirlyan images. They photographed auras. And they did photograph... They did 21 grams. It's supposed to be the weight of the soul. And they photographed a guy dying and they claimed to have photographed his aura leaving his body. Claimed. Yeah. All these claims. Is there a photograph of this photograph of her? I don't know of atomic weight of the soul, 21 grams. And of Kirlyan photo of dying man, I don't know. But there you saw the auras, the photographs there. Why would the soul have weight if it doesn't have a physical embodiment? Well, energy. Energy, mass, energy, what? Electricity doesn't have any weight, does it? What's going... Well, I don't know if it acts as a certain force. It's certainly a force. That's an interesting question. But mass is what reacts to scales. Gravity. Yeah. Right. I mean, well, electrons, you know, there's a mass there. There's an atomic mass, atomic weight. 21 grams seems like a lot. It does. It does seem like a lot, yeah. Fat ass soul. But the Kirlyans were... Yeah.