Ghosts, Cameras, and the Case for Evidence:
Dan Aykroyd in conversation with Bill Murphy, and the Ghostwriter case that won’t die
By Anthony F. Sanchez, Author & Researcher
October 20, 2025
When Dan Aykroyd talks ghosts, he doesn’t default to ectoplasm jokes or Hollywood nostalgia. He talks like a man chasing a missing variable in physics. Sitting down with Bill Murphy (Fact or Faked, SyFy Channel), Aykroyd asks why scientists still treat hauntings as tabloid trivia when so many seem to follow physical patterns. “There’s so much real going on,” he told Murphy, “I’d love a physicist or chemist to break it down … subatomic reforming... what is going on there?”
That question, what’s actually happening, is the connective tissue between Aykroyd’s lifelong fascination with survival-of-consciousness and Joe Augustyn’s book Ghostwriter: The Polaroid Ghost & Other True Tales of the Paranormal. Aykroyd wrote the preface; Murphy wrote the foreword. Together they frame one of the most documented visual cases in modern paranormal research... a haunting that produced more than 150 instant photographs witnessed by investigators, photographers, and broadcast crews.
From Séance to Science
The Aykroyd family’s obsession with ghosts isn’t PR mythology... it’s genealogy. His great-grandfather, Dr. Samuel Aykroyd, was a 19th-century Spiritualist who cataloged séances in rural Ontario, and his father, Peter Aykroyd, authored A History of Ghosts. Dan grew up surrounded by those journals and by Bell Telephone engineers who believed communication between realms might someday be technically replicable. That scientific-Spiritualist hybrid set the blueprint for Ghostbusters... and for Aykroyd’s real-world interest in ITC (Instrumental Trans-Communication).
At the Ghostbusters 35th Anniversary Fan Fest, he told Murphy that modern apparition reports remind him of electrical phenomena. He recounted the case of Eastern Air Lines flight engineer Don Repo, whose image was seen aboard jets built from crash salvage parts. When the parts were removed, the sightings stopped. To Aykroyd, that suggests consciousness may cling to material substrates through unknown energy processes. “Are they harnessing oxygen and nitrogen in our ether? How are they coalescing?” he asked. It was half Ghostbuster, half quantum physicist.
Murphy leaned in with the researcher’s precision that has defined his career since Fact or Faked: cases need multiple sensors, multiple observers, and repeatable conditions. He and Aykroyd then turned to one location that checks those boxes ... the Queen Mary in Long Beach. There, electronic voice phenomena (EVPs) have been recorded for decades with the same vocal cadence. Murphy wondered aloud if the voice... “Jackie,” the child spirit heard in Cabin B340... might be a “thought-form,” a manifestation sustained by collective attention.
Aykroyd agreed: “Our thoughts could generate an image or an apparition. What you put out there in life, you become.”
Enter Ghostwriter: The Polaroid Proof
Joe Augustyn’s book lands squarely on that intersection between belief and measurement. Best known as the screenwriter of Night of the Demons, Augustyn spent years investigating a Los Angeles home where a Polaroid camera began spitting out photographs bearing hand-written messages and faces that no one saw until the film developed. The sessions were witnessed by experts, television crews, and scientists. Skeptics tried to replicate the effect without success. Over time, the stack grew to more than 150 Polaroids, each an instant chemical record of an event that defied ordinary photography.
In his preface, Aykroyd calls the book “an essential volume for any serious seeker in the understanding of the paranormal,” praising its evidence over its emotion. Murphy’s foreword frames it as a “must-read for any investigator who wants to see the rarely revealed facts surrounding the Ghostwriter case.” Between them, they lend the project something the field often lacks: legitimacy from both science-minded entertainers and credentialed researchers.
Ghostwriter is not just a memoir... it’s a dataset. Instant film removes the digital manipulation argument. Repeated phenomena under similar conditions introduce the possibility of replication. And because each frame was produced in front of witnesses, the case shifts from story to experiment. It is, in essence, what Aykroyd was demanding on stage: evidence that can be scrutinized and measured.
The Mechanics of Manifestation
Across their discussion, Aykroyd keeps returning to language no comedian should know so well... “electro-chemical level,” “subatomic reforming,” “freezing light.” He references a real scientist experimenting with solidifying photons as a metaphor for capturing identity. For him, the mystery isn’t supernatural... it’s unmeasured. If light and magnetism can store information, why not memory or intent? Murphy responds by pushing for controlled conditions... correlating EVPs with electromagnetic and thermal data to find what environmental variables align with manifestation. Both men treat apparitions as systems to be studied, not souls to be worshipped.
That attitude anchors the best paranormal research today. Whether you call it spirit communication or cross-dimensional resonance, the field’s future depends on quantifiable events, which Ghostwriter delivers in spades. A hundred-plus images captured under witnessed conditions become data points for analysis: temperature, film batch, lighting, time, observer count. Re-examining that archive with modern AI image forensics could extract new metadata from old film grains. In other words, Aykroyd’s call for “serious scientific inquiry” may finally have a testbed.
The Thought-Form Hypothesis
When Murphy brought up the Queen Mary’s recurring EVP voice, he offered a provocative idea: maybe the “spirit” is not a person at all but a psychic echo created by decades of attention. Each visitor expecting “Jackie” reinforces the signal until it stabilizes like a standing wave. Aykroyd didn’t flinch. “That’s important, man,” he said. “What you put out there in life you become. Keep the light on it... don’t succumb to the dark thoughts.” It was a philosopher’s answer wrapped in Quantum Mechanics... part ethics, part waveform.
In that sense, Ghostwriter could be viewed as a controlled thought-form study. Each photograph acts as a feedback loop between human expectation and chemical film. If conscious intent can imprint energy into matter, the Polaroid becomes a primitive sensor for the mind-matter interface Aykroyd suspects exists. That’s a bold claim... but also a testable one.
Evidence Meets Emotion
The power of this pairing, Aykroyd and Murphy on stage, Augustyn on paper, is balance. Aykroyd brings mainstream attention and scientific curiosity; Murphy brings method; Augustyn brings documentation. All three share the same instinct that fueled early psychical research at Duke University and the American Society for Psychical Research: don’t dismiss; measure. As Aykroyd put it, “Conventional science can no longer hide this interest from the public.”
For skeptics, the takeaway isn’t that every Polaroid proves a ghost exists. It’s that some phenomena persist under conditions that should eliminate error, forcing a rethink of what “impossible” means. For believers, it’s validation that the tools they use... cameras, recorders, meters... are part of a long continuum stretching from the Aykroyd family séances to modern ghost apps and spectral imaging devices.
A Legacy in Two Frames
If Aykroyd represents the spiritual gene and Murphy the scientific discipline, then Ghostwriter is the photograph that brings them into focus. It’s the rare case that lets both worldviews shake hands... faith and forensics on the same page. One man asks for a mechanism; another records its effects; a third publishes the evidence. That’s not pseudoscience. That’s proto-science, and it deserves a seat at the table.
BOOK DETAILS
Ghostwriter: The Polaroid Ghost & Other True Tales of the Paranormal
By Joe Augustyn | Preface by Dan Aykroyd | Foreword by Bill Murphy
Softcover trade paperback · 6×9 in · 254 pages · First Edition 2021
ISBN 978-1-7361070-0-3 · $20.00
Contains over 150 Polaroids, many never before published.
Available on DKRM
"If you must read only one book on cases considered paranormal in origin, this is the one.", Bill Murphy
For further viewing:
🎥 Dan Aykroyd × Bill Murphy, Ghostbusters Fan Fest Interview
YouTube
About the Author
Anthony F. Sanchez is a software engineer, author, and founder of Ghost Hunter Apps, the technology brand behind some of the most respected tools in modern paranormal research. His work and interviews have been featured on HBO Max, Discovery+, GAIA TV, and The Travel Channel.
As the author of UFO Highway and UFO Nexus, Sanchez bridges his background in computer science with decades of investigative fieldwork into UFOs, UAPs, and the paranormal. Through his media platform Strange Lights Publishing, he continues to merge data, technology, and firsthand research to illuminate the unexplained.
He divides his time between Northern and Southern California, splitting days between code, coffee, and conversations that question everything.
📡 GhostHunterApps.com | 📘 UFOCurrents.com
