Ghost Asylum

The only saving grace about this show is the Tennessee accents of the Ghost Asylum team. But, you get over that and then try to get into the ghost hunting they do, but you come up short.

The ghost trap stuff they do is an adolescent fantasy. In fact, the whole show has an adolescent flavor to it. I've watched many episodes, well maybe five, and really tried to get excited about it. But, I couldn't. I found the team leader's showing off his buff physique to be offensive, pathetic. He can can hardly walk normally, he's so stiff. Sure, he's probably a super guy, but man, that bodybuilder stuff is ridiculous. Well, I guess better than being obese like the rest of the crew.

So I watched the first episode of "Ghost Asylum", which I'm calling Duck Dynasty meets Ghost Adventures = Ghost Busters?

You gotta be kidding me... I started out not very happy about this, but I gotta say I liked the solar panel ghost attractor idea... and gathering up old hospital trigger objects, that's called doing your due diligence... this might not be so bad after all...

We'll see, this is just the first episode, and if it does well it could get a higher budget and start to utilize more creativity they have up their sleeves.

Only time will tell. Being the show is on Destination America, a channel dedicated to the paranormal, my guess is they will be able to throw a budget at the show and see how far it can go, the way they do with many of their other shows.

Capturing ghosts, trapping them in a faraday cage, releasing the capacitors in a peaceful place so they can cross over? Intriguing... I don't think a paranormal investigation show has ever done that before...

There are some interesting things they find, but their efforts to communicate with the spirits they encounter are less than mediocre. I also find it incredibly sad and upsetting that they would go into a place, especially after praying to God, and then try to trap a spirit. I do not think it has ever been clearly stated what they intend to do with a spirit if they do capture one, but the thought of trying to force a spirit into an object or other such material prison seems, to be quite frank, cruel to the spirit! I know these boys probably come from a strong hunting culture, being from the South myself, but this is not a game. The dead shouldn't be trapped and drug back home for your amusement. That is not only asking for trouble but it is incredibly disrespectful to those who have probably not died decent deaths.

Each week, these backwoods bumblers build some wacky device designed to "capture" a ghost.

Their accents so thick it's almost impossible to understand them without subtitles, they exposit some ridiculous theory about how you can catch a ghost with bubble gum and paper clips (or some such) and proceed to mount an "investigation" at some purportedly haunted location (e.g., hospital / asylum).

Sometimes, they claim to have "caught something" and spend the last 15 minutes of the show trying to communicate with whatever it is they "caught" - in one recent episode, they thought the ghost might have been captured in a quartz stone and spent several minutes literally talking to a rock!

I would have given this one star, but the fact it's so ludicrous has a bit of entertainment value in and of itself - it's *almost* worth watching just for the eye-rolling exercise.

I was pumped when I saw the ads for this one. Finally thought we might have a decent filler for between seasons of the gold-standard Ghost Adventures. I gave it four episodes and wanted it to work, but it just got worse and worse.

It follows the same idiotic formula of most of the other ghost shows (especially Ghost Hunters - so much so that I wonder maybe they have the same producers, I don't know). Each one opens with them on the drive to their next investigation, on walkie-talkies between vehicles (why? why not just use speaker on the cell?) telling each other about where they're going and some of the history or interesting facts - as if they all would not already know all that stuff before leaving.

Then they chat with some of the people at the place they're investigating, pick up some names of some of the people that used to live/work there. Then they investigate.

The investigations are generally pathetic. Most times it's all 5 of them, plus however many camera and sound men behind them, all in the same room, shuffling around, making noise, etc. Every time something happens they jump to conclusions and attach the event to whatever name they picked up in their interviews (e.g. John used to work there - one of them felt touched after asking John a question - therefor it was 'definitely' John that was trying to communicate with them). Every happening has to be followed by a cutaway of one of the guys, scripted but pretending to be a spontaneous interview, talking as if they are still onsite and it just occurred, pointlessly describing the event that we just watched happen not 15 seconds earlier. They don't use equipment properly or consistently, they fail to do even the most basic debunking most of the time (e.g. a cigarette burns hotter as if being puffed by a ghost, or birthday candle smoke drifts as if blown by one - in both instances while the items are surrounded by nearly all of them facing the items and talking. No test to make sure it wasn't the breath from one of them talking or movement or something, just a declaration of how 'amazing' that evidence was.)

Near the end of the investigation they start with the show's gimmick - building a 'trap' to catch a ghost in. They pretend like they come up with the idea for the trap on the spot and then go to the nearest Home Depot for the stuff to put it together. The trap ideas are ridiculous. The whole concept is just plain stupid.

At the end of the show they meet in their little office that looks more like a backyard shed and review the evidence. 95% of it is crap or personal experience that can't be corroborated. If they have an evp, most of the time they just tell you what they think is said and then play it real quick and then move on to the next piece of evidence, rarely cleaning it up or playing it slowly so we can hear clearly. I can't think of a single decent piece of video evidence (partly because they hardly use any cameras, or don't use them strategically - nearly all video is taken by the camera crew following them around) - the ones I can remember are from the FLIR camera and as usual, they appear to misinterpret or jump to conclusion.

There is only one single aspect of this entire show that I like - that their investigations span multiple nights. I wish GA would go multi-night. Aside from just being able to gather a higher quantity of evidence, I think it would lend more credibility to what is gathered if they continued to get the same evidence over multiple nights.

Anyway, they might be nice guys in real life, but in this show they come off as dunces and dooshbags. A massive disappointment and wasted opportunity.