'Cleanin' Up the Town' sneak peek: The origins of 'Ghostbusters'

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Learn about the real-world origins of the 1984 comedy favorite

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DAN AYKROYD: It all starts with this gentleman, Dr. Samuel Augustus Akroyd, my great grandfather, who was a dentist in Kingston, Ontario. Great Grandfather Sam, as well as being a dentist, was a psychic researcher in the tradition of the British Psychical Research Society and the American Society of Psychical Research.

And he, throughout his life, was interested in the survival of the consciousness in mediumship, channeling afterlife voices, where the dead really are living, in terms of a presence. You can go to Lily Dale, near Buffalo, New York. And my great grandfather was the reviewer of all the psychic acts that rolled through town, whether it be a channeler, a mediumship, whether it be a precipitated painter, like the Bang sisters or the Campbell brothers.

And every Sunday, these big black cars would pull up. And men and women, all dressed up, would come, just like Sunday, to church. There was an impresario, my great grandfather.

There was a showman, Mr. Ashers, who became the family medium. He was a gifted medium. Really, really, gifted. He could speak in Chinese and Hungarian. And he made trumpets fly around the room.

So my great grandfather watched. And he wrote about them, whether they were genuine hoaxes, whether they were appealing or not. And we found a trunk full of his letters.

So his letters, his journals, were always in the family when I was growing up. And after I made my living in comedy, I thought why not mix the real world of psychic research using the real work of Doctor Roll, and the Maimonides Dream Lab, and Duke University's Para-psychological Department, and use what was really going on in the science, in terms of researching whether there is survival of the consciousness and whether there are, in fact, such things as materialization and apparitions, and take that jargon and that knowledge, and-- and make a good old-fashioned ghost comedy.