I learn from the Book Beast that Dan Aykroyd’s grandfather, Samuel, was “a dentist with a side career as a psychic investigator.” His “research into the paranormal continued with his son [Dan’s father, Peter], who sought to create the first device capable of capturing ghostly voices only to be told by the ghosts themselves that such a contraption was impossible to build.”

Errrr… Now Peter has written a book called A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters, for which Dan has contributed a foreword. It turns out that the comedic actor is quite the paranormal believer:

“I would like to see more hard physicists come in and start to analyze what’s going on,” the younger Aykroyd said. “Are oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen molecules coalescing to produce these visions in front of people? I’d love it if some research were done on materialization, which is the most exciting part of this, where full-formed limbs come out of a medium’s mouth and even a full-formed body. It would be nice to get some DNA and see if it’s the DNA of the person exuding this mass of ectoplasm or the DNA of another being.”

You know what? I’m sure hard physicists would be more than thrilled to check that DNA. Now if one of them could just be in the room when ectoplasmic limbs are popping out of a medium’s mouth. . . .