Saturday, November 2, 2013

Ghost Adventures 100 Episode



Ghost Adventures 100th Episode:

The Exorcist House



Ghost Adventures reached their 100th episode milestone. They've also been in their eighth season for a while now. It has been decent; not too bad not too excited but we're only eight episodes into said season. The place that happened to be investigating on their 100th episode was the house that inspired the popular movie The Exorcist.

A bit of history first, it's based off a book that is based off of events that took place in 1949. It started in Maryland and ended in St. Louis where the exorcism took place. A boy who has remained unnamed even after all these years, experienced demonic possession and as various sources feel the need to state, he was from a troubled home. Some details are sketchy and vary in places but cutting it down to size those facts remain the same.
The movie plot is different obviously, but it had plenty of rumors surrounding it like deaths before the film release and a fire that took place on set. It was probably not related to the fact that they were filming a movie about an actual event, but it's still fun to look at some of the facts found on the internet. She mentioned the whole 'the kid and his grandmother were playing with an Ouija board and that's how the demon possessed him' story. There may be variations on this throughout the internet but bottom line a demon showed up and possessed the boy and might have told them to go to St. Louis, or they had relatives in St. Louis and thought maybe a vacation might help their son's behavior, insert theory here. There was a different show, unrelated to Ghost Adventures that mentioned the boy having Louis carved into his body and for the life of me I don't remember what it was, when I watched it, and what channel it was on.

The Exorcist house episode was pretty interesting. It dealt with the possibility of demons again and with their history with demonic hauntings, and the great niece of the priest who did the exorcism stating she knows it was real (the 1949 exorcism) and refused to be interviewed anywhere near the home were pretty chilling starters to the whole episode. I feel the balance of interviews and pre-investigation theatrics to set up the whole tone of the episode leaned more towards the interviews and reminding you that, this is where one of the most famous exorcisms in history took place and there may be a demon still here but it could just be residual as well. It's not that the investigation lacked in evidence because they received some very compelling evidence, I just felt like I had to wait forever to get to the investigation, and then once the investigation happened it didn't hold up to the hype. I do like how this episode really shows how much they've grown as a team and how they've 'grown up' when it comes to this case. In the earlier seasons Zak was very full charge guns blazing when it came to demons and it was very reckless. However they were still trying to re-invite a demon into a house which is just a stupid and reckless as going in guns blazing.

I haven't given praise where praise is due. They did get good EVPs and had an intense spirit box session. Those were the two that stood out to me. I disagree with the use of the Ouija board but they weren't necessarily using it as indented. It was just sitting there as a trigger object to get the voices. However, the Ouija board might have had something attached to it because later on they interviewed the guy they got the board from and he said he saw a shadow figure in his house after previously using the board. So was it the residual energy or actually active energy of the house or was it something brought in with the board the whole time? Either way they got some pretty good evidence whether it was the spirits they were trying to initially contact or different ones.

I know they can't always get definite answers on investigations. Paranormal investigations don't work by walking in and demanding something to happen and it always happens once you tell it to do something. Also even if you did a live playback there's still no way to know if you have a definite yes or no as to the thing you want answered about the haunting. It's rather disappointing that they went in and got half of an answer but they did their best on their limited time schedule. This episode wasn't a complete failure, it was rather successful, but I couldn't felt but feel slightly disappointed. I can't put my finger on what disappointed me about the whole thing. Normally I know what disappoints me about an episode of anything, not this one. So I'll give it an okay approval. It wasn't mind blowing, while it did have some mind blowing evidence.