The good news about the eighth season premiere of Ghost Hunters is that it sticks to its business. When this show first premiered, back in the innocent days when the SyFy channel still spelled its own name right, it tried to mix ghost hunting with little peeks inside the personal lives of the ghost hunters, to create a form that the network's publicists liked to call "docu-soap." But even though the show was a hit pretty much from the start, there was some grumbling from those who tuned in to see a team of trained investigators search for evidence that there were those who had managed to defy the line separating the living and the dead, and who didn't really enjoy listening to a couple of moonlighting guys from Roto-Rooter wonder bitch about they should go to their high school reunion. So the personal stuff was weeded out, and now we have a lean, mean, ghost-hunting machine of a show that devotes its energies to exploring, as the opening narration of tonight's show puts it, "an amusement park where a paranormal entity is disrupting family fun! A little girl's spirit still yearns for more playtime! Can the team reach a restless soul still riding roller coasters from beyond the dead!?"
The amusement park in question is Kings Island in Mason, Ohio, a setting that once served as host to very special episodes of The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch. I was hoping that it would turn out that the place was haunted by the ghosts of Robert Reed and a hooker who Danny Bonaduce murdered while in the throes of a cocaine frenzy when he was twelve, but as the P.R. rep for the park explained, the spectral entity who's been scaring the clean-up crew is that of a child, "a girl in a little blue dress." "She's been seen around the front gate, and out at the cemetery at the edge of the park," he said. She's also been sighted at White Water Canyon. When he said the words "front gate", we got to see a shot of the front gate, with the words "FRONT GATE" helpfully splashed across the image. When he said "White Water Canyon," we got to see a body of water with the words "WHITE WATER CANYON" superimposed on the screen. When he said "cemetery at the edge of the park", we were shown a cemetery at the edge of the park, but nobody had taken the trouble to flash the words "CEMETERY AT THE EDGE OF THE PARK." I hope somebody gets fired over that.
Jason Hawes, the ghost hunter who looks like the star of Dave's Old Porn, cautioned the P.R. guy that "eighty percent" of the cases they investigate turn out to be bullshit, so even though they'd come all this way to stage a walking sleepover on the grounds of the park and give him a clean bill of ectoplasmic health, he shouldn't expect them to be anything but doubting and diligent. Grant Wilson, the ghost hunter whose rough-hewn, half-asleep look sometimes makes you wonder if he's being played by Shea Whigham, radiated unspoken assent. At times like this, you have to wonder if all that attention they get from people like James Randi and the editorial board of Skeptical Inquirer sometimes gets on the ghost hunters' nerves. If it does, it shouldn't. The representatives of the reality-based community sitting in the peanut gallery may have the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment on their side, but the ghost hunters have the ratings and the machines that go "ping!"
It got dark, and a title card with the day and time flashed onscreen—something that happens frequently on this show, presumably because somebody associated with it saw The Shining when he was an impressionable age and jumped pretty high when the screen went black and the word "Tuesday" appeared—and then the ghost hunters were all over the place. While Jason and Grant checked out the park's restaurant, which was said to be the site of weird noises at night, Amy and Adam took the front gate and the cemetery. Adam was identified as an "Investigator in Training", which I guess makes him the ghost-hunting equivalent of the guy on Wild Kingdom who Marlin Perkins would order to get out of the truck and walk over to that tiger to see what it was eating. He and Amy investigated the possibility that there might be a ghost three feet in front of them by wandering around in the dark, saying things like, "Hello, we're looking for a little girl." "We're not going to make you leave." "Your mother's very worried." My heart went out to them.