Ghost Adventures!

I have a new favorite TV show for Friday and Saturday nights and it goes by the name of Ghost Adventures!  It is on the travel channel (channel 63 for us!) basically all night starting at seven on Fridays and Saturdays.  And there is a lot of comedic value to the show, along with the occasional interesting ghost adventure.

The show begins with an introduction to the location that the coming episode will focus on.  These locations are all hot spots for ghostly activity, and I have seen quite a large range of choices.  Some episodes focus on old mental asylums and poor houses that have long since been shut down.  I saw one episode on a house in Britain near Stonehenge where children's bones were found in the floor.  There was even an episode on a house in Salem that has been standing since the infamous witch trials.  Wherever the episode takes place the introduction is usually pretty interesting.  They review the historical significance of the haunted place and interview people who have had encounters with ghosts in these buildings.  All of this is pretty typical for a haunted show, but these men take a different approach to the last forty minutes of programming.

In each episode there are three main guys who explore the haunted venues, Zak, Nick, and Aaron.  Aaron is by far my favorite, but that's coming.  Zak is the main guy who does most of the voice overs and arranges for the team of three to be locked in that haunted building from nightfall to sunrise.  Throughout the night the team walks around in the dark looking a listening for signs of a ghostly presence anywhere.  Their whole goal is to prove that ghost exist on videotape.  Zak goes about this by attempting to provoke the ghosts, often shouting things at them like "You're a coward" or "I bet you couldn't hurt me if you wanted to".  He has a very interesting style, greased back hair and a lot of Ed Hardy as well.  He then examines his footage for EVPs (or something I can't remember, let's just say electronic voice phenomenons).  Often these EVPs come out sounding really muffled, but Zak can always translate them (really accurately I'm sure), and they usually are saying something hateful, like "Kill Zak" or "I hate Nick", pleasant material.  Zak makes a convincing argument, clearly.

But Aaron is a completely different story.  My friend and I like to joke that Aaron was into the show at first, hunting ghosts and being a rebel, but pretty soon he got really scared and he only stays on to fulfill his contract with the travel channel.  Zak and Nick (who usually runs the camera) like to scare Aaron.  Recently they locked him in the shower room of an old prison and left him alone.  He was scared out of his mind, and asked only trivial questions like "I heard the food here was good.  What was your favorite meal?  The spaghetti and meatballs?  I heard they're pretty good."  Once when locked in an attic he asked a spirit if they knew killing themselves was a sin and basically had a heart attack while he was trying to explain how sorry he was while running out of the room.  Aaron is often regarded as Zak and Nick's sacrifice to the ghosts, and he doesn't approve of his role.

Whatever is going on on Ghost Adventures, I'm sure to enjoy it, especially if Aaron is involved.  Great show, and even better if you put aside the ghost hunting and focus on the comedy and their crude translations of ghost speak.  Although I was frightened once by a flying brick a ghost threw.  Overall, a quality show and worth anyones time.