18 replies to this topic

[Mikach]

History of Ghosts with Dan and Peter Aykroyd

Friday, October 16, 7:00 - 8:00 pm

Status: Available

Dan Aykroyd, Ghostbuster, and his father, Peter H. Aykroyd, author of recently published book, A History of Ghosts, present the story of the Aykroyd family's involvement with spirits, ghosts and extraordinary psychic phenomena. A unique opportunity to meet two creative people and to discuss mediums, séances and things that go bump.
Book signing after talk.

Location: Royal Ontario Museum, Level 1B
Signy and Cléophée Eaton Theatre

Cost: Public $18.00, Member $15.00, Student $10.00, Child $10.00
More infos : Royal Ontario Museum | Programs | Lectures, Courses & Events

[Mikach]

The book is on pre-order, with a look inside :

Amazon.com: A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters (9781605298757): Peter H. Aykroyd, Angela Narth, Dan Aykroyd: Books

[Cropper Classic]

Thanks for the tip!

[Jo_Pierce]

Thanks for the Aykroyd related tip... but... Ugh. This annoys me.

Museums are scientific institutions, not places for commercial enterprise or advertising - especially of paranormal things...

(Unless it's a museum of the paranormal. That's different!)

[TakkunEG]

Maybe it's to draw visitors. Slow year? It also looks to be one of the all-encompassing kinds of museums - art, history, science, local stuff. Paranormal culture and study is a part of history. Whether the ghosts are real or not, their students are.

[Dean Heuke]

I'm still reading the John Belushi Biography ...
Maybe this becomes next

[Steam McQueen]

Wow, Dan's dad is 88 years old and still hamming it up! :D

Quote

Peter Aykroyd, author of A History of Ghosts, enjoyed his son Danny's film Ghost Busters, which was, for a spell, the highest-grossing comedy of all time. However, he believes only one scene could hold up to the best paranormal science.
"In defense of reality, the scene in the beginning, when the books start coming off the shelves, that's an exhibition of the poltergeist phenomenon and is very common," the 88-year-old Aykroyd says. "That scene resonated 100% factually. The bad scene was the one with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man."
"You didn't like that," interrupts Dan Aykroyd, that film's co-writer and star, and author of a forward to his father's third book.
"No, no I didn't, and you and Murray and whoever else said you were going to change it," Peter says a bit harshly, as if still nursing a slight grudge.
"No, no, no. I knew you were wrong," replies Dan to his father. "OK, well, yes. It did give me some pause, but we knew who we were dealing with - once we got those packs on our backs, we were well beyond the parameters of your book."
His book, six years in the writing, is a serious examination of the history of the unexplained. All families have their traditions. For the Aykroyds, that tradition is ghosts.
"When I was growing up, the family medium lived with us and I attended seances as a young boy," recalls Peter Aykroyd, who credits his grandfather, Samuel Augustus Aykroyd, with planting the seed of the spirit world - not the spiritual world, mind you, for the world of ghosts has nothing to do with religion and has been studied by the Aykroyds as a science, not as a belief -into their family tree.
"Growing up, the spirit world was something I knew, that's why in the movie, the guys take the attitude that not only does it exist, but it has to be cleaned up and it's going to cost you," says Dan Aykroyd, who wears a blue pinstripe suit that's eerily similar to the natty attire worn by his dad. "I was raised to believe in the presence of an invisible world."
Of course, both Aykroyd men realize it's also a world that's ripe for hucksters, but they offer an elegant William James quote in the book for those who disbelieve: "To upset the conclusion that all crows are black, there is no need to seek demonstrations that no crows are black; it is sufficient to produce one white crow; a single one is sufficient."
Of course, the Aykroyds have done more than most families in producing that inexplicable white crow.
"The subject of ghosts is of interest to everybody. What happens to us when we die?" says the elder Mr. Aykroyd, who, Marshmallow Man aside, is proud of his son's involvement in the family business, however, also a bit wary of the continuity of the family line.
"The story started with my grandfather, then his son, there's me and there's Danny, it's almost like a dynastic thing, which may be fading because of Danny's children," Peter Aykroyd sadly says.
"Now, now, now," replies Dan, interrupting, "They're well-steeped, to be sure!"
"They just may not have the same intellectual interest," concludes his dad. "Although, there is one of them at Harvard University."
"That's right," says the son, "and none of them want to sleep in the ghost room."

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[TakkunEG]

LOL, the first pic is hilario!

[vicious]

on the first pic it looks like that Dan would give his dad a hart attack

[TakkunEG]

My grandmother called me this AM and said that Dan and his dad were on the Today show to promote the book! I was already at tax school, so I didn't get to see it!! Did anyone else catch it??

[Steam McQueen]

Dang, missed it. Here's a couple of links to try, neither link seems to like Canada. :mad:

Dailymotion - NBC TODAY Show _ Dan Aykroyd: ?I Do Believe? In Ghosts - a News & Politics video

Hulu - NBC TODAY Show: Dan Aykroyd: ?I Do Believe? In Ghosts

I'll have to wait until it shows up on youtube, hopefully it will, I'd love to see it.

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[TakkunEG]

Thanks for those Steam! It was fairly short, and a good interview (especially considering that Al Roker conducted it. I don't dislike Al, but he's been...strange in the last few years.)

[Steam McQueen]

takkuneg said:

Thanks for those Steam!

You're welcome! I'd be interested to see Dan's dad, I've never seen him in an interview. In the print interviews it makes me realize where Dan got his smarts from! A great interview from The Globe and Mail today ...

(copy/pasta to preserve for future generations)
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Article by Sarah Hampson
From Monday's Globe and Mail Published on Monday, Oct. 26, 2009 12:00AM EDT

Quote

Are you going to repeat that again?" Peter Aykroyd playfully admonishes his son, Dan, as he begins an anecdote about a medium.
His son immediately stops talking. The famous face droops. "I guess not," he says.
Take a seat at the Aykroyd Comedy Hour. The two men are at a downtown Toronto hotel, on the interview circuit for the elder Aykroyd's new book, A History of Ghosts, a collection of stories about mediums, spiritualism and séances. The affectionate ease of their relationship fills the room like mischievous ectoplasm, bubbling up between their identical blue-suited forms.
"The last thing this guy is is an uptight ex-civil servant," Dan says, jerking his thumb at his father. "He has an irreverent absurdist softness."
"The ludic sense," confirms the elder. "The love of the ludicrous."
"And my mum is muriatic acid. She's extremely caustic."
"Be careful now," warns his father. "Don't speak about Lorraine," he says of the woman he calls his "original wife" of 57 years.
"Anyway," says the younger Aykroyd, also 57, waving off the interruption. "The humour goes back. Dad's mum was a poetess, a humorist in terms of her writing. And your dad was taciturn and dry," he says.
"I happen to come from a very rich background," Dan continues, leaping into a hilarious performance of his mother's fast-talking French-Canadian family.
Humour runs in the family, and so does an interest in ghosts. As a child, Mr. Aykroyd Sr. watched séances his grandfather, a doctor named Sam Aykroyd, held in the family home outside Kingston, where he now lives. After finding his journals in an old trunk in the early 2000s, he decided to write a book, documenting famous ghost appearances and the spiritualist culture at the turn of the last century.
The 1984 hit film that Dan co-wrote and starred in, Ghost Busters, was also a result of the family fascination with the paranormal. "It was accepted as fact in our family that ghosts exist," he explains.
And what did his father think of the movie?
"Well, when he rides in the Hawker 1000 privately, he doesn't worry about it," mutters the son, throwing a sidelong glance at his father.
"I knew that they were going to make a success of it because these people Danny was working with were the best in the business," the father replies diplomatically.
"He cheered us on. [But] we had some disagreements with some elements in the script. He didn't think the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man would work." Dan rolls his eyes.
"I thought it was a bad way to end it." Peter chuckles softly. "But of course, that was the best part of the film."
The two then banter about spooky phenomena: an uneducated man who could speak Mandarin when channelling people from beyond, a doctor who could diagnose at a distance, materializations.
Mr. Aykroyd's book tells only a selection, and includes some of the best-known mediums and believers, including Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, and several respected men of science: Charles Richet, a French doctor, Glen Hamilton, a Winnipeg doctor, and Oliver Lodge, a British academic. "At the end, I lost my sight," explains Mr. Aykroyd Sr. of the painstaking research and writing process. Aged 87, he suffers from macular degeneration.
"Not because of writing the book," quips his son. "He didn't eat enough broccoli when he was a kid."
The book took six years to complete. "I'm not a skeptic about the phenomenon at all. I'm a believer." Still, he has never seen a ghost.
His son has seen a presence, at least - once, in his Los Angeles home. "Something got into bed with me. The mattress depressed in the shape of a body. I know what I saw," he says, bugging his eyes.
Has he ever gone to a clairvoyant? "I've never gone," he responds. "I don't want to know what's going to happen. That's why I left my sitcom [Soul Man] at ABC. I had a beautiful job," he says, gesticulating in the air. "I walked away from $100-million but I had to go to work everyday at 10:30. I don't want a desk job, thank you very much, and I don't want a seer telling me what's going to happen in the future."
"That's the land of nuts, fruits and flakes," says his father about Hollywood.
Dan unleashes a booming laugh. "Your son is one of them! I'll take nut. I ain't a fruit. Not that I wouldn't be proud of being one if I was. I ain't a flake, because I follow through when I say I'm going to do something. But you know what, Pop? I'm a nut!"
The conversation shifts to the peaks of spiritualist interest at various times in history.
"I don't know if I'm enough of a cultural philosopher to answer with any authority," demurs the senior.
"Oh, it's always been there," insists his son. "From the caveman contemplating the moon. It's part of the psychic atmosphere of our planet."
"Well, there's plenty of evidence of humankind's preoccupation with these things," agrees the father.
But his son is off on a manic riff about world events that have encouraged spiritualist inquiries. "The 1880s was a turbulent time - industrial revolution, famine," he booms like a circus ringmaster. "World War I. Lots of people died. Millions! People were actively seeking ... to bring back the lost son, the lost brother. The twenties! You have the crash! And in the thirties! The economic cataclysm! And then World War II, and the Nazis and their devotion to the occult."
His enthusiasm practically lifts him off his chair. "The fifties?" he continues, unprompted. "The spookiness of the Cold War. We buried our heads under desks and buried ourselves in the culture of the pink toilet seat and Mamie Eisenhower and the homogeneous avocado-coloured kitchen. And in the sixties, well, you have drugs!" he exclaims. "Then, in the seventies, you just have bad clothes. And in the eighties, you have Ghost Busters."
He stops suddenly, hands folded primly across his paunch, satisfied with his impromptu monologue.
"Well, well," deadpans his father, looking approvingly at his son. "That was worth the price of admission."

Haha ... great stuff! Mr. Aykroyd is one cool dude!

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[vicious]

god i'm so gonna buy the book!

[ZackBlues]

AWESOME!

I can't wait to read it.

I got everything i need... almost

[Steam McQueen]

Some more pics from a book signing ...



Dan & Peter Aykroyd appear at Indigo Books, Toronto for A History of Ghosts & Ghostbusters | Free Celebrity Editorial Photos and Movie Star News

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[Steam McQueen]

Finally a couple of vids that play for me!

The Today Show - With Weird Al Rokervic
msnbc.com Video Player

Canada AM - With Beverly Thomson
CTV News | Dan Aykroyd's ghostbusting family business



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[2FAB]

Here's the video from Larry King Live. It takes a while to load. Dan and his dad start at 09:30.

Video - Breaking News Videos from CNN.com

[Steam McQueen]

Thanks for the link, 2FAB!



lol
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Joan Rivers ... Jesus H. ...




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