Ghost Buster

Dan Aykroyd — certified Canadian — co-wrote the screenplay with Harold Ramis and introduced the first ghost-busting film to audiences in 1984.
Audiences across much of the world were thrilled. The rest of the world was, well, rather dismayed.
Parapsychology and the occult, it turns out, can have their entertaining sides.

Long ago — much longer ago — ghosts still had to be summoned.
Whether they actually appeared is undocumented.
But the sport of ghost-hunting has remained alive.
Chasing a spirit, after all, can be quite exciting and offers many possibilities — amusement included.

First, of course, one must determine whose spirit someone truly carries.
That can take time — and lead to severe misjudgments.
Once the certificate of spiritual parentage has been issued, signed, and stamped, the door opens for the hunt — for one ghost or several, depending on the staff involved.
And if you can’t be bothered to hunt ghosts yourself — too tired, too skeptical, too modern — you can always outsource it.
Psychiatrists and psychologists are still taking patients.

Chasing a ghost through the landscapes of imagination is an invigorating exercise.
There are almost no rules, and no penalties if the hunt takes a surprising turn.
Ghosts, it seems, are fair game.
Or perhaps they’ve quietly agreed to live — well, to exist — without the need for a union contract.

The catalogue of summonable or huntable ghosts is impressively large.
The club operating under the brand name “In the Spirit of...” remains hyperactive.
After all, most of these ghosts once held an important or at least remarkable role within human society.

“Know ye not what manner of spirit ye are of?” — according to Luke 9:55, that question came from that figur Jesus himself.
Over time, the phrase has taken on a passive-aggressive flavour.
It no longer asks about faith, but about ideology.
US Senator Joseph McCarthy certainly understood that, unleashing his sniffer dogs on the American population to expose and punish the communist spirit wherever it hid.

The year 2025, it seems, has introduced a remastered version — a McCarthyism Redux.
This new staging, however, is more of a border production.
Anyone standing at one of America’s many border crossings first marvels, then possibly gets detained — or simply denied entry.
These border agents don’t act in the spirit of McCarthy, but rather in the spirit of an excessive narcissist.
Thanks to modern technology, the dogs no longer sniff out red ghosts but electronic ones — lingering inside phones, tablets, and laptops.

Former tourists, businesspeople, and travellers to the United Sniffers of America are now treated as potential offenders of excellence.
And then another spirit appears — one that peaceful, ordinary citizens never meant to call.

“And the spirits they called,
they turned against them.”