In a classic passage in his horror novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury brilliantly evoked the impatient expectation that surrounds Halloween. “And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight,” Bradbury wrote, “it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.”
Well, the bosses at the Travel Channel want to wait no longer. Throughout the year, not just when the leaves have turned, and Reese’s peanut butter cups have changed into pumpkins, the channel presents an extraordinary lineup of reality TV-style paranormal programming, including its signature shows “Ghost Adventures” and “The Dead Files.”
To be sure, the Travel Channel, which now calls itself “Trvl,” also presents such relatively straightforward, non-Halloween fare as “Mysteries at the Museum” or “Bizarre Foods Delicious Destinations.” But, if you tune in most Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays, or Saturdays, you will find hour upon hour of less earthbound offerings. On those days, the channel is not unlike a Halloween supply store where the owner refuses to shut down after the season has ended.
In recent years, plenty of channels have presented nonfiction shows centered on the paranormal, but nowadays most of the programming has migrated to the Travel Channel. In addition to “Ghost Adventures” and “The Dead Files,” here are some other shows airing on the channel: “A Haunting,” “Fear the Woods,” “My Ghost Story,” and “My Haunted House,” among others. Let us take a moment to mourn Animal Planet’s now-canceled “The Haunted,” which had cornered the market for shows about spirits perceived by Fido.
This proliferation of paranormal programming suggests a vestigial willingness among viewers to regard an afterlife as a reality. Christopher Hitchens would wag his finger, as would, beyond a doubt, Billy Graham, but isn’t a belief in some form of the eternal better than none at all?
The granddaddy of modern paranormal programming is the original incarnation of “In Search Of,” which, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, featured Leonard Nimoy holding forth on such subjects as the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness monster. The presence of Mr. Spock, with his supposedly emotion-free, logical approach to phenomena, added authority to the show’s cheesy, educational reenactments. The next great leap in paranormal shows, the first iteration of “Unsolved Mysteries,” which aired from 1987 to 1999, benefited from the clipped delivery of host Robert Stack. Like “In Search Of,” “Unsolved Mysteries” did not devote itself strictly to the supernatural. Cold cases and so-called lost loves were also part of its mandate, but the show was at its most eerily effective when offering dry, reasonably believable examinations of Roswell, real-life men in black, and the like.
In keeping with our more casual times, the Travel Channel’s marquee ghost shows are absent authority figures like Nimoy or Stack. Instead, the shows feature approachable true believers, such as a stoic former cop and a talkative, wide-eyed medium who appear in “The Dead Files.” Then there’s “Ghost Adventures,” which relies on the dorky charm of its lead ghost adventurer, Zak Bagans, who, in one version of the show’s opening credits, solemnly informs us, “I never believed in ghosts until I came face to face with one.”
Each episode shows Bagans and his excitable cohorts, notably Aaron, Billy, and Jay, venturing to various spooky venues including a clown motel and an abandoned psychiatric hospital. Bagans is a surprisingly good and sympathetic listener when interviewing witnesses of ghosts, but the high point always comes when the crew switches on the night-vision and ambles through dark corridors and unlit rooms. Messages from beyond are sought, with the team often peppering emissaries from the unseen world with shouted-out questions: “Who is here with us?”; “Can you throw somethin’ across the room?” Audio recordings are played back to detect any faint answers, while the video gets scrutinized for “anomalies,” which are little specks that shoot across the screen like ectoplasm.
Bagans and company concede that not everything odd is paranormal — the word “DEBUNKED” splashes across the screen at such times — but the fun is in the buildup. Last Oct. 31, a live presentation of “Ghost Adventures” banked on the hunch that viewers would be content to watch the crew wander from room to room in Bagans’ Haunted Museum in Las Vegas for four hours.
Those of us who watched did so with a sense of possibility. Maybe we’d hear something. Maybe we’d see something. It was a great background to a Halloween party, for sure, but perhaps it was something more, too. The great writers Russell Kirk and Charles Williams saw no contradiction in their religious faith and their enthusiastic authorship of ghost stories. Could it be that their successor can be found no further away than the Travel Channel?
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
