Dan Aykroyd shared his great-grandfather’s séance transcripts on Twitter, giving a look at the family records that helped inspire Ghostbusters. “It was the spirit of his work passed down through the generations that inspired my interests,” he wrote. “He’s the original Ghostbuster.”
His great-grandfather, Samuel Augustus Aykroyd (1855-1933), was a teacher who became a Kingston dentist and practiced Spiritualism. Spiritualism is a religious movement centered on the belief that the human soul survives death and that the living can communicate with the spirits of the dead, usually through a medium.
Between 1899 and 1929, he wrote to Kingston newspapers as “Student of Psychic Phenomena.” The family farmhouse, on Loughborough Lake’s north shore near Sydenham, Ontario, was where he hosted séances.
Dan’s father, Peter Aykroyd, and his aunt discovered 83 of Sam’s notebooks in a blue trunk. Dated from 1905 to 1931, they mostly documented séances. In his 2009 book, A History of Ghosts, Peter wrote that Ghostbusters “was absolutely and directly derived from the blue trunk.”
Dan described that inheritance in 2014: “It’s the family business, for God’s sake.”
