Dan Aykroyd’s great-grandfather kept a live-in medium at his Ontario farmhouse for 12 years, and the family’s weekly attempts to talk to the dead ended up on screen in a $370 million comedy. A clip of Aykroyd describing Samuel Augustus Aykroyd as the family’s first ghost hunter has been circulating again this week, so here is the documented history behind the line.
Born in 1855 in Storrington Township near Kingston, Ontario, Samuel was the eldest of 14 siblings. He taught school, decided in his thirties that he hated it, and opened a dental practice in 1894. Somewhere between pulling teeth and reading about hypnosis, he became convinced that certain people could slip into a trance and carry messages from the dead.
In 1917 he met Walter Ashurst, a machine operator who believed he could do exactly that. By 1921 Ashurst had moved into the Aykroyd farmhouse near Sydenham, Ontario, as a resident medium. He stayed until 1933.
What happened around the table
The sessions ran almost every week with the same circle of friends holding hands in the parlor. Samuel’s journals, which cover 1905 to 1933, record Ashurst channeling a Ming dynasty courtier, an Egyptian prince and Samuel’s own great-grandfather. At one sitting in the home of his son Maurice, a spirit trumpet reportedly floated over the guests’ heads.
Samuel wanted more. His notes show a man frustrated that the spirits kept promising a full materialization, and ectoplasm, and never delivered. He died in 1933 still waiting, and the circle dissolved over the following decade.
The obsession did not die with him. Maurice, an engineer at Bell Telephone, tried to build a radio that could tune into the dead. Maurice’s son Peter, who had watched the séances from a staircase at age 7, inherited the journals and a library of spiritualist books. Peter’s son Dan grew up hearing the stories and, as a teenager, reading copies of the American Society for Psychical Research journal at home.
Dan still lives in Sydenham, the same village where the séances were held. He calls himself a Spiritualist and has said the great-grandfather he never met corresponded with Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle and belonged to the Lily Dale spiritualist community in New York state. Reflecting on all this in 2014, he put it bluntly: “It’s the family business, for God’s sake.”
From the parlor to the proton pack: a Badiyaa timeline
- 1855: Samuel Augustus Aykroyd is born in Ontario.
- 1894: He opens his dental practice.
- 1917: He meets medium Walter Ashurst.
- 1921 to 1933: Ashurst lives at the Sydenham farmhouse; near-weekly séances with young Peter watching.
- 1933: Samuel dies; Maurice tinkers with his spirit radio.
- 1952: Dan is born in Ottawa.
- 1981: Dan reads an article on quantum physics and parapsychology in the psychical research journal and gets the idea of trapping ghosts.
- 1982: John Belushi, written in as a lead, dies in March; Bill Murray takes the part.
- 1983: Columbia Pictures agrees in March; Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Ivan Reitman rewrite the script in Aykroyd’s Martha’s Vineyard basement in July; filming starts in October.
- June 8, 1984: Ghostbusters opens and becomes the highest-grossing comedy to that point.
- 2009: Peter Aykroyd publishes A History of Ghosts, with Dan writing the introduction.
How much of the farmhouse is in the film
More than you might expect. Deep trances and ectoplasm both show up in the 1984 script. Ray Stantz, Aykroyd’s character, treats ghosts as a research problem with gadgets, which is roughly how Samuel approached his parlor: notes, schedules, repeat conditions. Even the radio experiments of grandfather Maurice rhyme with the idea of hardware that can detect and contain a spirit.
The one thing the sources do not show is Samuel ever catching anything. The line of Aykroyds got a Bell engineer’s radio, a dentist’s 28 years of journals and, eventually, a film that earned at least $282 million on its first run. Dan’s father put the whole saga in print in 2009, and Dan himself is due back on the road for his book Soulhider on May 18, 2027.
Further reading
Image: Bernard Gotfryd, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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