Ghost Channels: Paranormal Reality Television and the Haunting of Twenty-First-Century America

By Amy Lawrence

Through American history, often in times of crisis, there have been periodic outbreaks of obsession with the paranormal. Between 2004 and 2019, over six dozen documentary-style series dealing with paranormal subject matter premiered on television in the United States. Combining the stylistic traits of horror with earnest accounts of what are claimed to be actual events, “paranormal reality” incorporates subject matter formerly characterized as occult or supernatural into the established category of reality TV.

Despite the high number of programs and their evident popularity, paranormal reality television has to date received little critical attention. Ghost Channels: Paranormal Reality Television and the Haunting of Twenty-First-Century America provides an overview of the paranormal reality television genre, its development, and its place in television history. Conducting in-depth analyses of over thirty paranormal television series, including such shows as Ghost Hunters, Celebrity Ghost Stories, and Long Island Medium, author Amy Lawrence suggests these programs reveal much about Americans’ contemporary fears. Through her close readings, Lawrence asks, “What are these shows trying to tell us?” and “What do they communicate about contemporary culture if we take them seriously and watch them closely?”

Ridiculed by nearly everyone, paranormal reality TV shows—with their psychics, ghost hunters, and haunted houses—provide unique insights into contemporary American culture. Half-horror, half-documentary realism, these shows expose deep-seated questions about class, race, gender, the value of technology, the failure of institutions, and what it means to be American in the twenty-first century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Mar 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781496838124

Amy Lawrence

Amy Lawrence is professor emerita of film and media studies at Dartmouth College. She is author of The Passion of Montgomery Clift, The Films of Peter Greenaway, and Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema. She has written on women’s voices in film, radio, and recordings (Helen Morgan, Marlene Dietrich); masculinity, acting, and stardom (Valentino, James Stewart, James Mason); and on experimental animation. She also makes short animated films.

Book preview

Ghost Channels

Bernadette Marie Calafell, Marina Levina, and Kendall R. Phillips, General Editors

GHOST

CHANNELS

Paranormal Reality Television and the Haunting of Twenty-First-Century America

Amy Lawrence

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

Publication of this work was made possible in part thanks to a generous donation from Dartmouth College.

Parts of chapter 1 were originally published as Paranormal Survivors: Validating the Struggling Middle Class in  Journal of Popular Film and Television 45, no. 4 (2017): 219–30.

All photographs in chapter 5 were taken by Terry Lawrence.

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2022 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2022

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930665

Hardback ISBN 978-14968-3810-0

Paperback ISBN 978-1-4968-3811-7

Epub single ISBN 978-1-4968-3812-4

Epub institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-3813-1

PDF single ISBN 978-1-4968-3814-8

PDF institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-3815-5

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Contents

Introduction: Viewer Discretion Advised

1Paranormal Survivors: Validating the Struggling Middle Class

2Ghost Hunters: Men on the Edge

3My Favorite Medium: Women’s Work

4Confronting Evil: A Short Trip to the Dark Side

5Abandoned Institutions: It’s in the Walls

6In America There Is Real Evil: Excluded Americans

7The Next Generation: Children of the Paranormal

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Ghost Channels

Introduction

Viewer Discretion Advised

"America has always been a land of ghosts, a nation obsessed with the spectral."¹

—Jeffrey Weinstock

Throughout American history there have been periodic outbreaks of obsession with the paranormal. Often arising in times of crisis, this persistent undercurrent has found expression in rituals public and private and across all forms of media. From the somber weight of the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials to the birth of Spiritualism in the 1840s, the lighthearted amusements of newspaper horoscopes in the 1930s or twenty-first-century television’s Long Island Medium, it is clear that this cyclical preoccupation with the paranormal reflects deep-seated aspects of the American character.²

Between 2004 and 2019, over six dozen documentary-style series dealing with paranormal subject matter premiered on television in the United States. Combining the stylistic traits of horror (carefully crafted scenes of suspense punctuated by jolts of fear) with earnest accounts of what are claimed to be actual events, paranormal reality incorporates subject matter formerly characterized as occult or supernatural into the established category of reality TV.³ In these series, paranormal refers to phenomena that cannot be accounted for by rational means, including ghosts, poltergeists, apparitions, shadow figures, light anomalies, shape-shifters, and various negative entities that are said to coexist with the living.⁴ Their presence is demonstrated by unexplained, often terrifying events that are either communicated directly through people who possess special psychic abilities or detected by technological devices such as radio-frequency samplers, digital voice recorders, or infrared night-vision cameras. As is typical of reality television in general, paranormal reality shows represent their human subjects as ordinary, everyday people, albeit people who regularly take part in paranormal investigations, who have seen spirits all their lives, or who happen to have had personal encounters with ghosts.

Despite the number of programs produced and their evident popularity (some running for over a decade), paranormal reality programming has received little critical attention. This may be due partly to the scorn with which the subject is routinely greeted. The world of the paranormal is often dismissed out of hand, those who deal in it branded as con artists, their customers superstitious and irrational. At the end of the nineteenth century, noted psychologist William James declared that if people believed it possible to communicate with the dead, it was because of their own soft-headedness and idiotic credulity.⁵ At the beginning of the twenty-first century, another scholar warned that the recent dignification of Spiritualism as a subject of serious enquiry risks leading people to forget the shrieking silliness of the whole business.⁶ At best, interest in the paranormal elicits a sigh, the entire subject regrettable proof of how obstinately people cling to outmoded beliefs.

Abandoning debates about whether or not the paranormal is real, modern scholars have accepted that proving or disproving the existence of ghosts is a fruitless exercise.⁷ Once ghosts are no longer viewed as a literal phenomenon requiring empirical verification, it becomes possible to shift the focus to "the persistence of the trope of spectrality.⁸ Writers such as María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (prompted by Marx and Derrida) argue that it is more productive to think of the paranormal as a conceptual metaphor capable of bringing to light and opening up to analysis hidden, disavowed, and neglected aspects of the social and cultural realm, past and present.⁹ In other words, instead of asking whether audiences believe that paranormal shows are real, it is more fruitful to ask what these texts can tell us about contemporary cultural concerns. Which issues preoccupying contemporary culture are being addressed in these programs and why are they being expressed in paranormal terms? Why the resurgence of interest in the paranormal at this historical moment and why in this form? By exploring the social tensions, contradictions, and fissures that are raised across multiple programs we begin to see the various ways in which the occult and the paranormal force us to re-describe and reconsider the aesthetic and political ramifications of the popular."¹⁰

Adding to the overall disdain for paranormal reality television is its adoption of reality TV’s style and methods. As in much of reality television, people who are not professional performers look directly into the camera to speak as themselves about their own experiences. In some programs, a less polished visual style implies lower budgets and a do-it-yourself approach as amateurs take television into their own hands, using consumer-grade cameras and sound recorders to provide objective proof of their subjective experiences. The adoption of such well-established documentary techniques situates paranormal series firmly within the category of reality TV—a form whose own relation to reality is hotly contested.

As Misha Kavka notes, reality TV sits at the devalued end of the cultural spectrum, with viewers, participants, individual programs, and the genre as a whole held in contempt.¹¹ Combining reality television techniques with paranormal subject matter creates a uniquely bad object. In 2009, a critic in the New York Times characterized the entire swath of paranormal series as repetitive and not the least bit frightening, equating their appeal with that of soft-core cable porn and professional wrestling.¹² Class bias is made explicit when the programs are described as appearing only on the more populist environment of basic cable.¹³ But if, as June Deery argues, reality TV is worth analyzing on the grounds of its impact, tenacity, and cultural resonance, the same can be said for paranormal reality television.¹⁴

While numerous works have been written describing the economic, legal, and industrial factors underlying the development of reality television, few mention programs that feature paranormal subject matter.¹⁵ Kavka’s Reality TV (2012), Deery’s Reality TV (2015), and Laurie Ouellette’s A Companion to Reality TV (2014) and Lifestyle TV (2016) offer detailed discussions of structured competition shows like Survivor, American Idol, and The Amazing Race, docusoaps (Beverly Hills Housewives, Keeping Up with the Kardashians), as well as series about cooking, travel, fitness, fashion, etiquette, dating, shopping, home decorating, sex, health, finance, parenting, … weight loss, makeover, property and self-help—but not a single reference to any of the dozens of paranormal reality programs broadcast during the same period.¹⁶ One major exception is Annette Hill’s Paranormal Media (2011). Taking a primarily sociological approach, Hill studies how audiences in Great Britain view paranormal-based reality programs.¹⁷ Given paranormal reality’s disreputable position in popular culture, Hill finds that regular viewers (even self-styled fans) approach these programs from a position of distrust. No one wants to be seen as uncritical, gullible and naive when it comes to paranormal matters.¹⁸ Using their knowledge of genre conventions, she argues, viewers question the existence of paranormal phenomena represented in specific episodes, critique the techniques used to construct effects like fear and suspense, and describe themselves as maintaining a critical distance.¹⁹ Skepticism, however, does not constitute a wholesale rejection of either content or style. As scholars have noted elsewhere, Belief in the veracity of what you are watching is not a prerequisite to engagement and pleasure.²⁰ As historian Simone Natale points out, nineteenth-century producers of magic shows and spiritualist séances found that a degree of uncertainty about the authenticity of an attraction would contribute to the arousal of interest in the public and the popular press.²¹ Audiences wavered between acceptance and skepticism but were nonetheless drawn.²² Evidently, the chance to walk this tightrope of simultaneous belief and unbelief is part of the pleasure supernatural entertainments provide.

Karen Williams describes paranormal reality television as a form that harbors two intentions: one of earnest authenticating and the other of spectacle and effect.²³ Embracing spectacle as a means and entertainment as a goal does not in itself preclude paranormal reality from addressing substantive cultural issues. Folklorist Diane Goldstein, for example, asserts that even though ghost stories may be subject to forces of commercialization, it does not mean they are necessarily made trivial or meaningless.²⁴ For Williams, the true "power of reality TV lies as much in its depiction of the experience of reality as it does in the depiction of reality itself.²⁵ Such shows may not render the ghost, but they do render the subjective experience of haunted spaces and haunted people." In the process, they give voice (in admittedly highly mediated ways) to those who find their lives and experiences outside the mainstream.

Like a thrill ride, paranormal reality television attempts to transform the fear caused by a sudden perception of precariousness into a form of entertainment. The frisson of flirting with disaster, though, is only pleasurable if contained. Every paranormal reality show I shall discuss relies on familiar narrative structures and generic conventions to limit what could otherwise be a disturbing glimpse of the fundamental instability at the heart of America. The recent resurgence in occult practices such as astrology and reading tarot cards signals a widespread desire to find alternate routes back to a sense of control. But like wartime surges in patriotism, bull markets, or religious revivals, belief in these inverted images of mainstream hegemonic institutions eventually wanes as they too fail to establish a firm foundation upon which one can manage the present and reliably predict the future.

The instability underlying the lives of Americans applies to the medium of television itself. The paranormal reality series discussed here are the product of what can be characterized as the cable television era. The term cable television is shorthand for the period that saw a decisive shift away from analog/broadcast television to digital formats (including cable as well as satellite services). This technical and regulatory change (mandated to be completed in the US by 2009) restructured television and the way viewers interacted with it, shifting costs directly to consumers in exchange for a dramatic increase in stations, hours of operation, and targeted viewing options (niche programing).

As the accompanying list shows, the trend in paranormal reality programming began around 2004 with the debut of Ghost Hunters on the SciFi Channel.²⁶ By its fifth year, the show had become the channel’s flagship reality show, attracting three million viewers, more than half in the 18–49 demographic.²⁷ A deluge of imitators followed, leading the Hollywood Reporter to proclaim in 2009 that the ghost-hunting genre shows no signs of slacking on cable TV.²⁸ In fact, the paranormal reality trend was picking up steam. Over the next ten years, more than fifty new series debuted. As new series appeared, the earlier ones did not pass away. Like the undead, programs that were no longer producing new episodes stayed in circulation, feeding cable television’s endless appetite.

SERIES BY YEAR

Where quality (i.e., scripted) dramas with paranormal subject matter have been occasionally welcome on major networks (e.g., Ghost Whisperer on CBS [2005–2010] and Medium on CBS and NBC [2005–2009]), paranormal reality series are found almost exclusively on the more obscure, non-premium cable channels. Several cable channels have dedicated the majority of their programming to reality series about the paranormal.²⁹ During one week in 2015, for example, Destination America broadcast sixty hours of paranormal shows arranged in multi-hour blocks. Monday featured eight hours of Ghost Asylum; Tuesday and Thursday each aired eight hours of A Haunting; and Wednesday and Friday were set aside for The Haunted (eight hours and eleven, respectively). That same week another fifty hours of paranormal reality programs were available spread across Lifetime (six hours of My Haunted House), The Travel Channel (five hours of Ghost Adventures), Syfy (ten hours of Paranormal Witness), and History 2 (eight hours of Haunted History).³⁰ In a single week, a dedicated viewer could binge watch or record over one hundred hours of paranormal reality programs.

At the height of its appeal, cable channels with no obvious connection to the supernatural found ways to incorporate paranormal subject matter into their existing brand identities. With its focus on actors, comedians, and other pop culture figures, A&E (Arts and Entertainment) and E! Entertainment Television developed programs such as Celebrity Ghost Stories and Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry. The Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures and The Dead Files center on visits to allegedly haunted destinations across the United States. Even the Weather Channel got into the act, suggesting that atmospheric disturbances can disturb the spirit world (see the series American Super/Natural or Tornado Alley’s Twisted Believers).³¹

Because no trend lasts forever, investing in paranormal reality is not a guarantee of continuing audience interest or financial stability. But whether interest in the paranormal stays strong or begins to fade, the medium in which these series flourished is crumbling. As part of an ever-changing medium/technology/business model, cable television at the end of the 2010s is itself becoming obsolete due to the popularity of streaming, on-demand viewing, and social media.³²

If every word of the phrase paranormal reality television is unstable, open to question, and subject to changes brought on by increasing social and economic pressures, we must remember that what is really being questioned, investigated, and tested at the heart of this genre is what passes as normal. As we will see, these shows tell us two things: normal is not what we thought it was, and normal, everyday life can be terrifying.

Title Sequences: Introducing Horror

Across the genre, paranormal reality series begin the same way: with a disclaimer. At first this seems to signal producers’ and programmers’ awareness of paranormal reality television’s dubious status in the popular imagination. Designed to protect the broadcaster from complaints and/or legal action, disclaimers call attention to these programs’ shaky status within a corporate system. For instance, A&E begins each episode of the series Paranormal State (2007–2010) with the following: The views of the occult and supernatural documented in this show are not necessarily those of A&E Television Network. While the legalese of such language establishes distance between the channel’s ownership and potentially controversial content, disclaimers also serve as a kind of advertising. Balanced between caution and come-on, appeals for discretion acknowledge that texts can be read differently by different audiences. While parents might be comforted when The Travel Channel warns that an episode of Ghost Adventures contains adult situations and mature content that may be not be suitable for younger audiences, younger viewers might be enticed, encouraged to test their ability to handle forbidden material.³³

Even for a single viewer, the push/pull, attraction/repulsion of such disclaimers requires a divided viewing position. Having been alerted to be on guard against fear or flim-flammery, one is immediately assured that the people appearing on the program are genuine and therefore worthy of emotional and intellectual investment. After posting a Warning! (spelled out in large red letters), MSNBC’s My Ghost Story: Caught on Camera proclaims: What you are about to see are Haunted Events Encountered by Real People.³⁴ When Ghosts Attack! states: The victims you are about to see are real. These stories are their personal accounts. By fashioning their subjects as victims (people who have suffered), the producers elicit sympathy, promote viewer identification, and deter overly critical readings of the witnesses’ truth claims. Paranormal Survivor is even more insistent: "You are about to see real people reliving horrifying paranormal encounters."

As the title sequences proper begin, the carefully worded warnings, reality-claims, and equivocations are suddenly left behind as the viewer is plunged into the realm of horror. A stentorian-voiced narrator begins each episode of When Ghosts Attack! with the statement, There are ghosts that haunt—ghosts that hunt—and ghosts that kill. A fast-paced montage rushes us through a landscape of violence, signs of death, and things barely seen. Canted shots of cemeteries, stone angels, damaged dolls, skulls, and crosses punctuate views of Gothic buildings silhouetted against the sky. Jagged, handheld camerawork lurches through dilapidated corridors. Back-lit figures waver in and out of focus, struggling to emerge from haloes of white light. Disturbing music (often low tones pierced by sudden noises or sharp cries) accentuates suspense. Technical glitches (scratched frames; the sound of static; the jerky, unnatural motion of time-lapse photography) suggest that televisual technology is not quite under control. Even the graphic design of the letters in each title follows a distinct stylistic pattern. The N in the title of A Haunting is slashed through as if the screen has been torn by a mythic beast. The white letters of My Ghost Story: Caught on Camera form themselves out of a mist. The childlike drawing of a house that frames the title of My Haunted House has a blood-red roof, with the H in House dripping down the screen. Red drops also slide from the letters of Ghost Stories, while the white liquid that forms the words Paranormal State seems to drip upward, violating the laws of physics.³⁵

Sensational and gory, these stylistic flourishes signal that we are entering the realm of horror, a destabilizing genre that disturbs assumptions about family, identity, bodily integrity, the reliability of perception, the security of the domestic sphere, and the predictability of time and space, upending the natural order. In doing so, horror challenges our deepest beliefs in ourselves and how the world works, or (even more unsettling) exposes how unstable those assumptions have been all along. Over time, though, what a culture fears changes.³⁶ As the previous generation’s ghouls and monsters lose their power to terrify, the horror genre evolves. Classic themes of threatening forces somewhere out there (Old World monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein, or The Mummy) give way to modern tropes where it is the benign surface of everyday life that hides the most profound threats.³⁷ Instead of taking place in a castle or a manor house out on the moors, the modern paranormal narrative occurs in urban apartments (Rosemary’s Baby [1968]), suburban ranch houses (Poltergeist [1982], Nightmare on Elm Street [1984]) or the manicured milieu of the country club (Stepford Wives [1975], Get Out [2017]).

By locating horror within the everyday, paranormal reality television side-steps the expensive special effects, costumes, and set construction needed for classical Gothic horror while suffusing domestic space with the unnerving potential to house limitless evil. Household chores, for instance, become fraught with suspense. Doing the dishes allows someone (or some thing) to sneak up behind you when your back is turned; taking the laundry to the basement makes you vulnerable to having your ankle grabbed or being pushed down the stairs; glancing in the bathroom mirror suddenly reveals a terrifying figure close by. The riskiest thing you can do is sleep in your own bed. Because reality TV as a genre makes it difficult for outside observers to tell what has been manipulated and what hasn’t, the use of its tropes is particularly effective when it comes to undermining the viewer’s sense of security.³⁸ In its depiction of encounters with the metaphysical (the nonhuman, ghosts, unspecified forces beyond our comprehension, etc.), paranormal television joins reality with horror to lay bare the fears of a particular cultural moment. Based on the dozens of paranormal reality series on television in this period, nothing is more horrifying than daily reality.

Shock cuts: Celebrity Ghost Stories

Shock cuts: Ghost Asylum

By far the most disturbing paranormal reality programs are the ones based on firsthand accounts. In programs such as Paranormal Witness, Paranormal Survivor, and A Haunting, people who are neither celebrities nor TV stars provide eyewitness accounts of their traumatic experiences with the paranormal. The people on these shows find themselves in a constant state of fear, immersed in situations they did not choose, trapped in houses they cannot escape. If the paranormal is a way to express the inexpressible, the haunted houses featured in these series serve as an apt metaphor for the 2008 housing crisis (chapter 1). In these first-person narratives, victims are given a voice and the nightmare they have been through is recognized and validated.

First-person programs interweave the truth claims of eyewitness testimony with reenactments staged and shot like fictional horror films. Dramatizations propel viewers into the scene, keeping the audience off balance by drastically limiting their ability to see. Obscured, under-lit, or out-of-focus figures lurk in the shadows until a shock cut reveals something too hideous to look at. Perspective continually shifts as characters are stalked by tracking shots from the point of view of malignant presences. The soundtrack fosters a sense of dread regarding what might be lingering just outside the frame, leaving the audience in the position of wanting to see and not wanting to see at the same time.

More than simple horror shows, it is the scenes of testimony that set the first-person paranormal reality shows apart.³⁹ Individuals look into the camera and speak directly to the viewer. A classic documentary technique, direct address is fundamental to this kind of program. When witnesses state unequivocally, This happened to me, their credibility hangs on the assumptions that they are who they say they are and that what they say can be trusted. The witnesses’ authenticity is established by the distance between them and the polished performers usually featured on television. They also vary in terms of age, class, and body type. Hailing from small towns and rural areas outside the major media centers of New York and Los Angeles (places often mocked as flyover country), they speak with regional accents and unorthodox grammar.⁴⁰

Describing their experiences, contemporary Americans are in a position similar to that of nineteenth-century Spiritualists. For those early proponents of the supernatural, testifying was a risky act.⁴¹ Declarations of contact with spirits were met with disbelief, ridicule, even diagnoses of madness.⁴² When people (then and now) look to be believed, despite the fact that nothing supports their testimony but a personal appeal, it lends a sense of urgency to their accounts, a sense that there is a great deal at stake. Those earlier testimonies were also "self-assertions: demands for a public recognition of the value of personal experience, no matter how extraordinary or idiosyncratic it might be.⁴³ As Hill points out, paranormal events are real to the people who experience them."⁴⁴ At heart, first-person programs are about validation. People present themselves as ordinary Americans whose experiences must be acknowledged. And those experiences are grim.

Across dozens of first-person programs, in episode after episode, people tell about finding their dream home only to see it turn into a nightmare. Not being experts or authority figures, these witnesses struggle to define something they cannot explain, describing phenomena they have only glimpsed, dimly perceived, and partially understood. Knowing they might be dismissed as crazy, they nevertheless insist on being heard. Marginalized partly because of class (how they look, dress, or speak), and partly because of their insistence on configuring their experience in paranormal terms, the people on these shows are convinced that their sufferings have been overlooked, their pleas for help ignored, and their lives undervalued. Terrified and desperate, they do the only thing they can. They run for their lives.

The picture painted of life in America by first-person programs is bleak, the fissures exposed disturbingly deep. Not only is the American dream of social mobility and financial security through home-ownership shown to be a myth: it could kill you. And there is no one who can help. Experts of all kinds—psychics who verify the presence of spirits, investigators who document the haunting with advanced technology, even priests who perform official exorcisms—fail to resolve the problem. It is an understatement to suggest that what our current obsession with ghosts and hauntings ultimately reveals is the insufficiency of the present moment, the inability of existing social institutions to address the conditions that have made daily life unendurable.⁴⁵

Other paranormal reality programs strive to make the supernatural manageable, fitting it into more familiar (potentially more commercial) narrative formats. Built around ghost-hunting teams (chapter 2) or mediums who claim contact with the dead (chapter 3), these programs provide a reassuring sense of predictability. Rather than being prey to the unknown, ghost hunters and mediums engage with the paranormal when and where they choose. Unlike the people victimized in first-person shows, paranormal investigators and mediums make their encounters with the paranormal serve them, validating their methods and expertise in episode after episode. The presence of recurring characters offers the audience the chance to build an emotional connection with the show’s cast. Depicted as ordinary in every way except their connection to the paranormal, the stars of these programs invite identification. You too could get together with friends and form a ghost-hunting team as people did in Ghost Adventures, Ghost Lab, Ghost Asylum, Ghost Brothers, Destination Fear, etc. You might meet or even become a reality TV personality yourself, an opportunity made explicit in the series Ghost Hunters Academy and Paranormal Challenge (both 2011) where members of the public were invited to try out for a slot as a cast member on a paranormal show.⁴⁶

Constructing programs around ordinary people-turned-television-celebrities offers the audience the fantasy of celebrity as a solution to the economic and personal crises depicted in first-person shows. It also mitigates financial risk for the producers by providing a more reliable foundation for marketing and expansion. A hit show can generate numerous spin-offs and variations. The SciFi series Ghost Hunters (2004), for example, led to Ghost Hunters International (2008) and Ghost Hunters Academy (2009). When the original series ceased production, team members Amy Bruni and Adam Berry created Kindred Spirits (2016) for the family-friendly TLC. In 2019, a new Ghost Hunters debuted on A&E opposite The Travel Channel’s Ghost Nation, both shows featuring cast-members from the original Ghost Hunters.

As is the case with fictional television, the same performers appear in multiple series, providing continuity across the genre. In 2016, Destination America’s Paranormal Lockdown, for example, joined Nick Groff (former star of Ghost Adventures) with Katrina Weidman from Paranormal State. In its first season, the series featured a steady stream of guest stars who had become