I am excited because it’s Wednesday–time for one of my favorite guilty pleasure shows—“Ghost Hunters,” and tonight, my all time favorite ghost hunter, Joe Chin will be appearing.

There are a lot of paranormal copy-cat shows out there, but “Ghost Hunters” started it all in 2004 when 2 plumbers from Rhode Island started taping their night-time hobby of ghost hunting and turned it into a show.  Joe Chin primarily works with the spinoff show “Ghost Hunters International,” but often appears on the original “Ghost Hunters” series, like tonight.

For the most part nothing pans out on these shows. But occasionally the data analysis reveals a creepy voice yelling “Get out!” in the electronic voice recorder or they catch some sort of fuzzy shadow or a blob on the thermal imager. “What was that?” “Did you hear that?” and “I got chills on the back of my neck,” are standard Chin dialogue. Oftentimes ghostly noises are hard to interpret. You can make the call on this one:

I’ve noticed that there aren’t many Asian ghost hunters, even though Asians are experts in the horror/ghost film genre. I can only speculate why, but my theory is that Asians take their ghosts seriously, and we are scared. There is really no need to capture EVPs or analyze thermal blobs to know that they exist. If you hear disembodied voices, it’s time to hightail it out of there. So it takes a very, very brave Asian person like Joe Chin to actually go seek ghosts and hunt them down every week.

While I have never actually seen a ghost myself, I did once own a possessed stereo system. Shortly after I moved to California, a voice would sometimes appear on my stereo system. It sounded like someone on a CB radio. I dismissed it at first, because I thought it was some sort of signal interference—full of static. Though it kind of startled me, I didn’t think much about it when it came out of the radio, but it also happened while playing records. (Yes, I have to admit this was a long time when people still played records.) It didn’t sound threatening, just short bursts of someone talking as if they were in the midst of conversation, or sometimes yelling “Woohooo!”  My sister heard the voice too while in my room.  She ran out when she heard it coming from the record player and agreed it was very creepy.

When my family moved houses, the stereo and the voice came with us. I finally had to get rid of the freaky stereo when one day, the power was completely off and some strange, square-dancing like music blasted out of the speakers. I sped out of the room, completely spooked.  When I was brave enough to go back, the stereo was off.  In fact, I never actually saw it on, and I can guarantee it wasn’t tuned in to any country radio station. After that, the record player was gotten rid of and the voices/music stopped.

Have you ever encountered a ghost?