10. Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist started out as the idea for a ghostbreaker novel: “I set out to write a supernatural detective story…” Blatty said.
9. Johnny Depp has played more ghostbreakers on film than any other actor: Ichabod Crane in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1999), Dean Corso in The Ninth Gate (2000), Professor Abberline in From Hell (2001), and all in a three year span.
8. Only one ghostbreaking team has their own pasta: the Scooby-Doo Gang.
7. The longest running ghostbreaker on TV is Doctor Who, who had 26 seasons before a break and another 12 seasons, but this depends on whether you consider Doctor Who a ghostbreaker. Certainly during the Earthbound Pertwee years…
6. The men who created Superman, Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster, also created the sub-genre of supernatural sleuth comics with “Dr. Occult” in 1935, making him 3 years older than Sup.
5. Scooby-Doo got his name when Fred Silverman heard Frank Sinatra sing…”Scooby-Doody-Doo…”
4. The very first ghostbreaking character was Athenodorus that pliny the Elder wrote about in a letter in the 1st Century BC.
3. The film version of The Monster Undying (1942) completely removes the ghostbreaking Luda Bartendale. Known as the White Witch, Luda prefers “The Super-sensitive”, as an English psychic who helps families in trouble with the supernatural.
2. Jules de Grandin and Doctor Trowbridge’s famous portraits by Vigil Finlay were cribbed from ads for a constipation medicine.
1. Ghost Busters‘ creator, Dan Ackeroyd’s great-grandfather was a Spiritualist in Eastern Ontario, Canada. This family history helped inspire the movie and the TV show Psi Factor (1996-2000).
How many did you know?
