'Ghostbusters' star Dan Aykroyd was haunted by “three S-shaped spirits” which made him flee his family’s farmhouse in terror.
Dan Aykroyd recalls being haunted at family farmhouse
The 71-year-old actor’s family held seances at the property in Ontario for generations as his great-grandfather was a renowned spiritualist, his telephone engineer grandfather investigated the possibility of contacting the dead via radio technology and his father Samuel Aykroyd published books on the history of the supernatural.
Dan was inspired to create the 1984 comedy – which is getting another sequel 'Frozen Empire' this year – from his visits to the house, but one stay left him and a friend running in pure fear.
Speaking to Empire magazine, he recalled: “That farmhouse was where I originated the idea for 'Ghostbusters', reading my father’s American Psychical Research journals. Many years ago, a friend and I went upstairs there and saw three S-shaped spirits following one another across the landing. Energies of once-living humans, come back to intrude! We ran right out of there!”
As well as seeing ghosts, Aykroyd also believes objects can be possessed by both good and evil spirits and he claims his late friend Michael Jackson – whose 'Liberian Girl' video he starred in back in 1989 – told him he once own a haunted cabinet.
He said: “Some objects can carry spirits. Michael Jackson spoke of a cabinet he bought in Germany that was possessed. There was stuff going on in there. He had to get rid of it.”
Sharing his own experience of a moving object in the former home he shared with his wife Donna Dixon, he added: “A while back, at our old house, I was falling asleep one night and suddenly I heard a clinking sound and saw Donna’s bracelet and earrings doing a dust-devil whirlwind dance on the bedside table. But that wasn’t necessarily a spirit manipulating them; it was probably due to my own residual psychokinetic energy. Beverly D’Angelo lives in that house now, and she says there’s still stuff going on in there."
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