Zak 4 Life

I freakin' love paranormal TV shows. I just can't fathom the depths of denial and gullibility that these people are swimming in. Now, I do believe in some form of afterlife, and I do not completely write off the existence of “ghosts” or “spirits” or what-have-yous. And since I watch so many of these shows I must admit that out of the hundreds of hours of footage I have absorbed I have seen 1 or 2 things that I was genuinely intrigued by, and I watch Ghost Adventures (Obviously, the penultimate resource on supernatural happenings. Zak Bagans 4 life. His book is on my coffee table.).

One of these things was personal footage of a family's home with a supposed poltergeist haunting. The people, to me, seemed credible and have made no money off of their footage. What they showed was their home, after they had gotten up in the morning, with permanent marker scribbled on the walls, cans of food stacked to the ceiling everywhere, furniture flipped upside down, etc. They had hours of footage of these events, obviously taken at different times. They would always clean everything up only to have it happen again. The overall package presented actually gave me pause. Either these people were telling the truth, or they were all very good actors.

This story told, let's move on to the pile of crap that is most of this nonsense. Right now I am in the midst of a mini marathon of “Haunted Highway,” Jack Osbourne's supernatural/cryptid adventure extravaganza! This particular episode consists of Jack and his friends hanging bits of meat from trees and screaming and running a lot. There's some sweet IR shots of raccoons in the distance too! What am I learning from this? If you go out into the desert at night, there will be potentially dangerous wild animals. Whether or not they are “skinwalkers” is irrelevant. You are dumb.

My second favorite of these shows (The first being Ghost Adventures. Zak 4 life.), is Finding Bigfoot. These people try so hard. You gotta give them a pat on the back. They organize town hall style meetings with the local townies to talk about their bigfoot experiences. They actually do some semblance of research, and you think “OK, there's a little science, I'll stick with it.” But then, things start to get “squatchy” and the show devolves into running and screaming at night in the woods accompanied by the chilling the sounds of fat men making “squatch calls.”

I also enjoy “A Haunting,” but mostly for the awful reenactments that they produce. There is no science, no investigating, no real effort. They just find some people who had a spooky time 20 years ago and then hire some “close enough” looking actors to recreate said spooky time. These stories always end with “and he was never seen again.”

I will never stop watching these shows. I love seeing what people will think they saw. They freak themselves out and lose all sense of reality. And it's pretty hilarious most of the time, especially right now when it's Jack Osbourne wandering through an old mine in the middle of the night rattling chains to summon hell hounds. "I think what we have here is a hell hound in the cave and a cryptid that we don't know about. That's a plausible scenario." In closing, Zak 4 life.

Smoldering Intensity.