Before the Ghostbusters were chasing Slimer through a New York hotel, Dan Aykroyd’s great-grandfather was holding séances in an old Ontario farmhouse. The dentist was also investigating psychic claims while keeping detailed records of his encounters with the supernatural.
Now, Aykroyd is sharing more of that family history, including original séance transcripts and a rather creepy painting that appears to hide a skull.
“These are my great-grandfather Dr. Sam Aykroyd’s transcripts from the Seances he hosted in the Old Farmhouse,” Aykroyd wrote on X. “It was the spirit of his work passed down through the generations that inspired my interests. He’s the original Ghostbuster.”
Dr. Samuel Augustus Aykroyd (1855–1933) was a dentist in Ontario whose fascination with spiritualism became a family obsession. His great-grandson has discussed the connection between his ancestor’s paranormal research and the creation of Ghostbusters for years, but the latest post brings the original documents back into the spotlight.
Samuel’s route into spiritualism began in an unexpected place: the dentist’s chair. He earned his Doctor of Dental Surgery degree in the early 1890s, when effective ways to manage pain during dental procedures were limited. Hypnotism was one technique used to help patients relax, and according to the family history documented by Dan’s father, Peter Aykroyd, that interest in altered states of consciousness helped lead Samuel toward spiritualism.
He eventually became a local reviewer of psychic phenomena in Kingston, Ontario, examining claims made by people who said they could perform extraordinary feats. His subjects included levitators, along with mind readers. Seers were never out of the equation, either. Some even claimed to be “precipitated painters,” supposedly producing oil paintings without using brushes or paint.
By 1921, Samuel had turned the family farmhouse into a regular gathering place for spiritualist experiments. He hosted séances with the help of Walter Ashurst, a medium who reportedly went into deep trances while attendees attempted to communicate with the dead. Ashurst stayed at the farmhouse for years, becoming a fixture in the family’s paranormal investigations.
Samuel kept extensive journals and transcripts documenting the sessions, including accounts of alleged spirit communication and experiments involving ectoplasm, the mysterious substance spiritualists believed could manifest during a séance. His records also included subscriptions to publications such as the American Society for Psychical Research Journal, which explored claims involving psychic phenomena.
Aykroyd inherited that material through his family, and it became part of his childhood environment. His grandfather, Maurice Aykroyd, continued the interest in a more technological direction, experimenting with the idea of using radio frequencies to contact spirits. Dan’s father, Peter, later explored the family’s history in his 2009 book A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Séances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters.
That family archive helped shape the movie that would turn Dan Aykroyd into a pop-culture legend. While reading material on parapsychology and quantum physics as a young man, he began imagining a comedy about paranormal investigators who approached ghosts with the language and methods of scientific research. The result was Ghostbusters, released in 1984 and co-written by Aykroyd and Harold Ramis.
The connection is more than a convenient origin story. Aykroyd has repeatedly explained that the terminology and ideas used in the film grew out of the spiritualist literature he encountered at home. The family séances also supplied some of the concepts that made their way into the movie, including trances and the pursuit of physical evidence of spirits.
The latest batch of family material includes an especially strange curiosity: a painting depicting a dark gathering in a séance room, with what appears to be a hovering spirit. Turn the image upside down, and the composition reportedly transforms into a skull. It is exactly the sort of unsettling discovery that feels at home in the history behind Ghostbusters.
Of course, Samuel Aykroyd’s records document what he and his fellow spiritualists believed they witnessed. They don’t establish that the supernatural claims were genuine. But the surviving material does reveal how seriously he pursued those questions, and how his fascination was passed from one generation to the next.
So the next time someone asks where Dan Aykroyd got the idea for Ghostbusters, the answer goes back much further than Hollywood. It starts with a dentist, a farmhouse full of séance guests, and a family that spent generations trying to find out what might be waiting on the other side.
