By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor

It has happened more than once.

I will be in the middle of a paranormal investigation or leading a group through a reportedly haunted location, doing what I do, taking readings, asking questions, keeping the energy of the room steady, and someone will pull me aside afterward and say some version of the same thing.

"You know who you remind me of? Egon Spengler."

I take that as a compliment every time. Egon is, after all, the methodical one. The researcher. The person in the room who is most interested in understanding what is happening rather than simply reacting to it.

But the best version of this happened during an investigation when one person made that observation and her friend immediately added:

"Yeah, but with the dad jokes and the way he takes over a room, he is also Peter Venkman."

I have been thinking about that observation ever since, because I think that friend accidentally said something true about what paranormal investigation actually requires. Egon brings the methodology. Venkman brings the human connection. And if you have spent any time doing this work seriously, you know that you need both.

Which brings me to Ghostbusters.

I went back and watched it recently with fresh eyes, not as a fan reliving a childhood memory, but as someone who has spent fifteen years doing the actual work the film is depicting. And here is what surprised me: it gets more right than people realize. It also gets some things spectacularly wrong. And the distance between those two things tells you something important about what paranormal investigation actually is and what popular culture has always wanted it to be.

The film opens with Peter Venkman conducting an ESP experiment using Zener cards on two university students. He is measuring, as he puts it, the effects of negative reinforcement on ESP ability. Now, before anyone compares my teaching methods to Dr. Venkman's, let the record show that I have never administered electrical shocks to a student for incorrectly identifying a Zener card. I also generally try not to flirt with research participants while collecting data. These are standards I feel comfortable defending.

But here is what the film got right: Venkman's ESP experiment was not invented for the movie. Zener cards really were developed in the early 1930s by psychologist Karl Zener for ESP research with J.B. Rhine at Duke University (Joyce & Baker, 2008). Rhine spent decades conducting controlled experiments with these cards, and his work is still discussed in parapsychology literature today. When Venkman sits across from a student holding up a symbol card, the film is drawing on nearly a century of actual research tradition. The comedic layer is the joke. The underlying protocol is real.

Dan Aykroyd, who co-wrote the film, did not invent this world from scratch. He grew up in a family with a four-generation history of interest in the paranormal, his great-grandfather a spiritualist, his grandfather a practicing medium, with the journals of the American Society for Psychical Research part of his childhood reading (The Daily Beast, 2024). Ghostbusters is not a parody of paranormal research. It is a love letter to it, filtered through comedy and spectacular special effects.

The PKE meter, the device Egon waves around to detect psychokinetic energy, reflects a genuine theoretical question that investigators actually ask. Does a paranormal presence generate or disrupt measurable energy fields? That question is the foundation of EMF detection in real investigation. The film invented a fictional instrument for a real investigative impulse, which is more than most paranormal entertainment bothers to do. The team dynamic is also more accurate than it appears. Egon provides the scientific framework, Ray provides the institutional knowledge and enthusiasm, Venkman provides the human interface.

Real investigation teams work the same way. You need the person who reads the instruments, the person who knows the history, and the person who can sit with a frightened client and make them feel heard. I have played all three of those roles at different points in my career, sometimes in the same evening.

Where the film gleefully leaves paranormal research behind is the containment unit. To my knowledge, no investigator has successfully stored a ghost in a climate-controlled basement in Manhattan, and if someone has, I apparently missed that conference. In real investigation, the question of what to do when a location appears to have genuine paranormal activity is considerably more nuanced and considerably less cinematic. You document. You analyze. You work with the client to understand what they are experiencing and what, if anything, they want to do about it.

Nobody pulls out a proton pack. Though I will admit, on certain investigations, the thought has crossed my mind.

The ectoplasm is also worth a moment, not because the film invented it but because Slimer has essentially replaced the actual history of the concept in popular imagination. I wrote an entire blog about the real history of ectoplasm, (here), including the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who coined the term and the séance investigations that followed, and I will link to it here for anyone who wants the full story. The short version is that ectoplasm in the serious paranormal literature bears almost no resemblance to luminescent green slime. Slimer is a delight. He is not a paranormal research document.

Here is the thing about those two comparisons I received on investigations. The people who said them were describing something real. Egon represents the investigative commitment to methodology, rigor, and honest documentation. Venkman represents the human commitment to the person in the room, the ability to read what someone needs, to communicate across fear and uncertainty, to make contact with the living before worrying about the dead. Neither one works without the other. An investigator who is all Egon reads the instruments and misses the client. An investigator who is all Venkman connects with the client and misses the evidence. The work requires both because the experience of the person reporting unusual activity is always the starting point, and the methodology you bring to examining that experience is what determines whether your findings mean anything.

Venkman's experiment in the opening scene is intentionally and hilariously compromised from the first frame. He is not testing ESP. He is flirting. The data he collects means nothing because he has corrupted the protocol before it begins. As a demonstration of exactly what a researcher should not do, it is genuinely instructive. As a comedy bit, it is still funny forty years later.

I spent fifteen years trying to hold the Egon and Venkman balance together. I apparently look like a fictional character while doing it, and I have made peace with that. Ghostbusters did not get everything right. But it got something important right that most paranormal entertainment misses entirely. It treated the investigators as serious people doing serious work, work that happened to be funny and spectacular and wildly entertaining, but serious underneath all of it.

Come on. Who among us has not wanted a proton pack at least once?

If you want to go deeper on the real history and methodology behind what the Ghostbusters were reaching for, much of that thinking is explored in my book, The Paranormal Professor: Investigating Belief, Perception, and the Unexplained, available now.

References

Atlas Obscura. (2025, August 7). How one man used a deck of cards to make parapsychology a science. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-one-man-used-a-deck-of-cards-to-make-parapsychology-a-science

Joyce, N., & Baker, D. B. (2008, April 1). ESPecially intriguing. Monitor on Psychology, 39(4). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2008/04/zener

The Daily Beast. (2024, September 11). Ghostbusters is real! https://www.thedailybeast.com/ghostbusters-is-real/