The long-running SyFy and A&E series Ghost Hunters follows the TAPS team as they investigate
paranormal activity of all kinds, using all kinds of different equipment to detect specters
in the dark.
Here are some of the creepiest moments in the TV show's history.
The Atlantic Paranormal Society, or TAPS, crew often differentiates between different
types of hauntings and breaks them down into three categories — the residual, the human, and the non-human.
During the episode "Irish Ruins," the team believes they're dealing with the latter.
TAPS is called out to the ruins of Lisheen Castle in Ireland due to its haunted history.
According to historian Joe McGowan, who appears on the episode, the castle was cursed by a
widow that the castle's owner had evicted from her home.
Since then, the Lisheen ruins are believed to be haunted by fairy spirits.
These aren't the cute winged creatures of today's stories but rather the older, more
dangerous spiritual entities of Irish folklore.
Throughout the investigation, the crew experiences several eerie happenings.
While recording in the castle's basement, Dave Tango and Dustin Pari hear footsteps
walking across a wooden floor.
Except, there aren't any wooden floors in the ruins.
Then, Brian Harnois takes an ethereal whack to the finger while explaining how the places
believed to be the fairies' home gives off seriously creepy vibes.
The activity begins to amp up when a local friend of the TAPS crew, Barry Fitzgerald,
sees a disembodied face flash out of the darkness.
The investigator chases the face into the ruins but finds nothing.
Fitzgerald takes this as a spectral warning and decides to remove himself from the investigation
before the other shoe decides to drop.
During the season two premiere of the A&E Ghost Hunters reboot, co-lead investigator
Kristen Luman takes an awful fall down the stairs of the Clifton Hotel in Clifton, Arizona.
It could just be an accident, but Luman's fall doesn't feel like your standard staircase
tumble, and when the town's history is added in, it becomes even more suspect.
Clifton is an old mining town with a bit of a haunted past.
When the TAPS crew calls a town hall meeting to gather stories of the paranormal from the
locals, almost everyone that shows up has their own paranormal experience to share,
making Clifton a hotspot for either mass hallucination or mass spectral activity.
"How many people in this room believe they've had a paranormal experience?"
Townsfolk claim to hear mining activity and the sounds of children roaming the town at
night, and when TAPS asks the less-than-living inhabitants of the hotel about the activity,
they hear voices respond.
It's creepy, but not as creepy as what happens next.
Later in the episode, Luman is walking down the hotel stairs when suddenly, she's sent flying.
Not falling, flying.
She later said that she knows she didn't trip, nor did she feel a sensation like she was pushed.
But the co-lead investigator clears most of a flight without hitting a single step.
Luckily, she escaped without serious injuries.
In the season 10 episode "Darker Learning," the TAPS crew catches an apparition on a thermal
camera while investigating the Everett Mansion on the Southern Vermont College campus.
The figure walks through two doors right in front of them, which is something living people
with heat signatures do all the time, but there was a problem — besides no living
people being in that area of the building, both the door the human-shaped heat signature
walks out of and the one they walk into are locked.
It's believed by some that Edward Everett's wife and their children's nanny took their
own lives in the mansion, which is more than enough to provide fuel to any preternatural fire.
And the thermal specter the crew catches on camera falls well inline with previous sightings
within the home, including accounts of a lady in white and other female apparitions walking the premises.
So, maybe, just maybe, this heat signature is the wandering soul of one of these tragically deceased ladies.
In the season one episode titled "The Armory," the Ghost Hunters team investigates reports
at a castle-like building in Massachusetts that operated as a facility for the National
Guard for the majority of its existence.
Soldiers lived and learned there, and some of those folks would leave the building only
to die in battle shortly after, making it a prime spot for their restless spirits to return to.
It was their last point of safety before the chaos of war or the danger of a disaster at
home ended their lives.
And, just because this building was once a safe space doesn't mean the deceased soldiers
are happy to be there.
One of TAPS' members finds this out the hard way.
While walking a catwalk in the building, Frank DeAngelis, one of the show's sound guys, gets
knocked backward by what he claimed to be an entity passing straight through his body.
DeAngelis was so shaken by the experience he required medical assistance afterwards,
and unfortunately was so traumatized that he eventually quit the show.
As the crew investigates claims of spectral children in an old Victorian manor in season
11's "Manor of Mystery," a couple of the TAPS guys ask the supposed ghost children if they
want to play, which is creepy enough by itself.
Then, after feeling a cold spot in a doorway, they ask the spirits if they are capable of
moving objects, and the door behind them opens on its own.
This is the point when viewers get off their couches to make sure all their doors are firmly latched.
But, it isn't only the moving door that makes this investigation eerie.
The spirits within the manor seem to respond to the crew through several methods of communication,
including responses to questions via a phone app that beeps when touched.
There is also an unexplained thermal signature in a chair next to the crew, suggesting these
specters aren't afraid to get close.
Louisville, Kentucky's Waverly Hills Sanatorium is believed to be one of the most haunted
places in the state if not the entire United States.
Since it's such a notoriously haunted location, the TAPS crew at Ghost Hunters had no choice
but to check it out during episode 14 of the second season.
This particular haunted location has a wealth of claims covering just about every type of
paranormal activity known to man, and TAPS was lucky to catch some of evidence of their own.
During their investigation, the crew catches a 3-foot shape on thermal imaging that they
believe to be the spirit of a child, as well as an object that flashes across their camera
in the same location.
The team also comes across a different entity that looks like a bat-like creature flying
through the sanatorium's walls.
Through the entire episode, apparitions of different types seem to show themselves to
most of the crew, but in a location with this much history, it isn't surprising for a ghost
or two to show their ethereal faces.
Stephen King based the haunted hotel in his terrifying novel The Shining on the real-life
Stanley Hotel in Colorado, and it turns out the place has its own haunted history.
Guests of the hotel have reported seeing apparitions throughout the halls, feeling spirits sit
on their beds, seeing ghost children playing on the fourth floor, and even having spectral
entities walk up and steal their jewelry.
TAPS investigates the Stanley Hotel during a special live investigation in season three
of Ghost Hunters, called "Best of the Stanley Hotel," and some of the evidence they find
confirms claims echoed by former guests.
In the spirit of King's story, members of the TAPS crew hear sounds of music flowing
from unoccupied rooms, bringing back visions of Jack Nicholson partying it up in the ghost
bar before going insane.
A fairly mild occurrence that seems to catch the crew's attention is the clear sound of
a woman saying, "Hello," caught on their recording equipment.
"Hello."
"Hello?"
The team hears this in person as well, and, honestly, team member Jason Hawes seems pretty
confused when it happens.
But it's the sound of laughter they find during their evidence review that really creeps them out.
To be fair, it creeps us out too.
When the TAPS vans set off for Long Island Sound, Connecticut, at the beginning of the
season one episode "Race Rock Lighthouse," things get off to a rough start as one of
the crew members almost forgets the team's folding chairs.
The chairs are found, and the crew turns out to have an exciting investigation because of it.
According to the crew, the lighthouse has had eight documented shipwrecks at its shores
and a whirling undertow that would prove deadly to any sailor caught in its waters.
Lighthouses have been viewed as paranormal venues for much of their history, and Race
Rock is no exception.
Over the years, it's built up a portfolio of haunted phenomena, from spectral sounds
and sightings to disembodied wet footprints climbing the lighthouse steps.
The most hair-raising thing to happen in the episode comes after Grant Wilson leaves his
nearly forgotten chair in an empty room.
A camera placed in the room catches video of the chair being pulled across the floor
by an invisible entity.
This could be explained away by a wire trick or stealthy string-pull, but so far, no one
has come forward to disprove it, so let's chalk it up to "creepy" and leave it at that.
Singer and actor Meat Loaf is not the most obvious addition to a team of paranormal investigators,
but the Loaf has an unmatched love for ghosts and spirits and a personality that could drive
any entity out of hiding.
He's also one of Ghost Hunters' favorite celebrity guests and has appeared on the show more than once.
So, TAPS invites him to tag along while they check out Alabama's Sloss Furnace in the season
six episode of the same name, and he does not disappoint.
Several creepy things happen throughout this two-night investigation.
At one point when Jason Hawes, Grant Wilson, and Meat Loaf are walking through the tunnels,
they hear voices responding to Loaf's inquiries.
Even better — they manage to catch these voices on a recording device.
Knocks are also captured in response to the musician's prodding at another time, which
corroborates claims from locals.
At other points, Wilson feels like he's shoved by an invisible force, and an image believed
to be an apparition is captured on video.
The moral of the story seems to be one of two things — either Sloss Furnace isn't
the type of place you want to spend your free time, or hanging around Meat Loaf can be a creepy endeavor.
St. Augustine Lighthouse, which Ghost Hunters visits in season two, is Florida's oldest lighthouse.
And if you know anything about Florida's coastal waters, you know they hold the bones of hundreds
of shipwrecked vessels.
Naturally, this leads to ghost stories and other rumors of the paranormal that draw investigators
to the area.
The lighthouse in St. Augustine features the classic spiral staircase extending up the
center of the tower.
These spirals can be intimidating on the best of days, even when they aren't haunted, and
this one proved to be both.
As the crew climbs the steps, they spot an apparition looking over the rail above them.
They start and jump into action, attempting to chase down whatever had been looking down
at them, but they fail to find a corporeal cause.
However, they do catch two different shadows on the stairs.
They also managed to catch the sound of a disembodied voice crying, "Help me!"
Buffalo Central Terminal in Buffalo, New York saw thousands of travelers come through its
station in the 50 years it was open.
And though it closed down in 1979, not all of those travelers have vacated its premises.
Some, it seems, are eternally waiting for trains that may never come.
It's why Ghost Hunters likes the location so much they've filmed there three different
times, and each time, they find something new that keeps them interested.
But it's during their first investigation in season four's "Speaking With the Dead"
that the TAPS crew finds their most chilling evidence of Buffalo Terminal's paranormal residents.
After setting up an EMF meter, Grant Wilson and Jason Hawes appear to be speaking with
an entity that lights up the meter to voice its responses, and from those EMF responses,
they determine they're speaking with a woman who's been waiting since the 1940s for a loved
one's train to come in.
They also catch what they believe to be several voices on recorders.
Some yell for them to "go home," while others say cryptic things like "bring back the girls."
The entities don't seem to be malevolent or anything, but hearing conversations between
the dead is a surefire way to creep out even the most astute skeptic.
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