chelseaholloway Review of Ghost Hunters

Ghost Hunters (2004– )

Loved it as a kid; finding it meh as an adult.

[6/10 · 2 April 2022]

To start, I love that all the episodes are available to stream on Discovery+ now. I haven't gotten caught up on the reboot seasons yet, but I was a super fan of the original series back in the day and am currently rewatching it. Granted, I'm still on the 1st season, but I'm really questioning why I loved this show so much as a kid. Maybe because everything is more believable when you're 13. They pride themselves on taking a scientific approach to paranormal investigation, trying to debunk as much as they can in their quest to capture irrefutable proof of a haunting. But they go about it like such amateurs! They bring like 15 people to an investigation, which is insane to me as an adult now. How can you properly investigate anything when you have that many people crammed into one small space? Maybe for some of these bigger venues, like Eastern State Penn, having a big crew makes sense. But for these smaller ones it's laughable. I swear there's like 8-10 min of footage from the actual investigation, which is mostly just them aimlessly roaming around in groups and asking each other, "Did you hear that?" over and over. And the rest of the episode is just their petty and probably staged crew drama plus them setting up/tearing down their equipment and discussing their "evidence". I was personally offended by the episode with that guest book with the pen that supposedly moved by itself. They put the pen back and then came back later to find it had "moved" again. But they didn't think to set up a camera to see if they could get evidence of it moving?? You know, the thing they're literally there to do?? Even the Ghost Adventures crew would have thought to do that. In the pilot episode, they captured some of the most clear and vivid EVPs I've ever heard, plus caught that chair move in the attic. That episode was compelling. But the rest of season 1 has been unimpressive. Makes you wonder if they faked that pilot so the show would get picked up. I know it's not realistic to expect them to capture that kind of evidence on every investigation, and it would honestly be hard to believe if they did, but it seems like they would capture a lot more if they actually took a professional approach to investigating instead of acting like a bunch of giggly teenagers walking around a graveyard at night. I feel like Grant and Jason really take it seriously, but their biggest downfall was having that big ass crew. The show would have been a lot better if it had just been them and maybe 2 or 3 others. I'm interested to see what the reboot seasons will be like.