The Rise and Undeath of “What Was That?” Paranormal TV Shows

It was 20 years ago this month that SyFy–then called the Sci-Fi Channel–aired the first episode of a series that would go on to become both a television institution and the archetype around which an entire genre would be built. No, it’s not some great scripted sci-fi series you’ve almost entirely forgotten, like Farscape. Rather, we’re talking about the flash-in-the-pan sensation that was the first season of Ghost Hunters, progenitor of dozens of paranormal investigation TV shows that would follow in its wake, a genre I’ve come to think of as “What was that?!?” television. For two decades, and with morphing targets that have included everything from ghosts to bigfoot, UFOs to ancient buried treasure, these shows have somehow made an enduringly profitable, endlessly recycled model based around the premise of “searching for something, and then never finding it.”

Granted, Ghost Hunters was by no means the first notable bit of paranormal TV programming. Shows like the Leonard Nimoy-hosted In Search of… had explored the same topics decades earlier with higher production values and at least an attempt at documentary style presentation of information from multiple sources. MTV’s 2000 premiere of the reality show Fear is a more likely culprit for directly contributing to the genre that would follow, casting aside any attempt at presenting boring old facts and instead just strapping some cameras on random yahoos in a dark, supposedly haunted place before letting them run wild. But it was Ghost Hunters that fused the reality-style presentation with a sheen of pseudoscientific rigor, the “investigation” angle, while simultaneously introducing a permanent cast of researchers who would become recognizable characters just as much as the leads of a scripted series. They stumbled onto a format that contained exactly the right blend of plausibility, personality and entertainment for the median American TV viewer with some kernel of interest in the paranormal.

Nor are we talking about these types of shows in the past tense, as they have remained effectively bulletproof, leaping from network to network, reboot to reboot over the years. Ghost Hunters has had 279 episodes to date, across 16 seasons and four networks, and finished its latest season in 2023. You want to watch it right now? There’s a 24/7 Pluto TV network running at all hours, just like there are channels playing endless reruns of The Price is Right. Its spiritual successor/dark mirror image Ghost Adventures (hosted by the endlessly punchable Zak Bagans) has been even more prolific, with more than 300 episodes across 26 seasons and two networks, including a season in 2024. Those two have always been the powerhouse franchises of this weird little niche, but there have been plenty of others along the way, from direct competitors such as A&E’s Paranormal State to the numerous spinoffs like Ghost Hunters Academy, UFO Hunters or Kindred Spirits. There’s always more room for another show dedicated to the timeless art of not finding any ghosts.

And that really is the common thread that ties all the shows of this genre together: The part where they don’t find any ghosts. Because if they did ever complete such an impossible task … well, where would there be to go from there? Actually finding the object being searched for would both introduce more competition and effectively put these guys out of a job, which necessitates a tone suggesting that the big, promised discovery is always, tantalizingly just over the next horizon. It’s about the thrill of searching, rather than the letdown of actual discovery. Coupled with the fact that viewers get to know the crews of such shows over the course of multiple seasons, it encourages a phenomenon where a show like Ghost Hunters or Ghost Adventures slowly drifts from its own stated purpose or the task at hand, revolving more around the personalities of the team, their petty squabbles or power plays, or the fallout when one person chooses to leave (or is kicked out) after years of episodes. Forums and fandoms for these shows become divided into bitter camps, each supporting various members in their squabbles, while the ghosts and ghouls remain presumably just out of sight. South Park parodied this shit in 2009, and they’re still doing it in exactly the same way, unchanged, 15 years later.

This kind of “endless mystery” format has proven extremely adaptable beyond just searching for ghosts, theoretically being applicable to subjects as concrete as looking for a 600 lb sasquatch, to something as esoteric as searching for evidence of an ancient (fictional) civilization. All that matters is the continuous teasing that major payoffs will eventually come. Beyond that, you just need a liberal dose of “What was that?!?” shooting in the dark to get from episode to episode, the “stumbling around and saying ‘did you hear that?'” portion of any given episode serving as connective tissue. It served the likes of Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot well for an insane 100 episodes and 9 seasons, during which time that intrepid crew very nearly managed to find zero bigfeet. And hell, look at History’s truly diabolical The Curse of Oak Island, which for more than a decade (11 seasons, 205 episodes) has centered around digging holes on a small island off the coast of Nova Scotia in search of buried treasure, which to date has yielded a few discarded coins and small pieces of metal and wood. There’s a community that has watched hundreds of episodes of this and is still clamoring for more scrounging in the dirt. It’s like a workshop on the sunk cost fallacy in action: They’re not about to quit watching when season 12 of the series is obviously about to stumble on the treasure mother lode. It’s so close!