I’ve recently gotten hooked on the Travel Channel’s “The Dead Files”, a show where a woman (Amy) who sees the dead and speaks to the dead and a retired NYC homicide detective (Steve) pair up to research supernatural phenomena and scare the bejeezus out of folks like me who tend to believe in that sort of thing. The shows all follow a similar pattern: The NYC cop gets a call from someone whose house or place of business is haunted and meets with the people involved. At the same time (but without the cop’s involvement) Amy does a walk-through of the property and describes the experiences she is encountering with the dead. She’ll inevitably have a artist sketch out some of the things she sees. Steve, in turn, uses all sorts of local resources and folks to investigate the history of the property. Then, at the end, everyone gathers around the table to share their findings and the artist’s sketch, and they figure out a plan of action to get rid of the ghosts.

Is it hokey? I dunno. Is it legit? I also don’t know, but it sure is entertaining. Here’s a sample.

What I have learned is this: either Amy’s got a truly vivid imagination, or the creatures she sees are not just limited to ghostly visions of Uncle Fred or Aunt Ethel as shadows in the hallway: she sees creatures that are four-legged, alien-like, and creatures that make the word demon seem like a walk in the park. It makes one wonder how a loving God would allow such creatures to exist in eternity like that, but hey, that’s too deep a subject to contemplate – I just like the show. It’s definitely better than the show “Ghost Adventures” that runs on Travel Channel the same night.

But if you like that kind of stuff – and I do – they’re both entertaining, which is more than you can say about just about everything else there is on TV these days.

Here’s a funny story: the whole concept of this show isn’t a whole lot different from one conceived by my good friend Ben “The Funny Guy” of Goodboys fame while I was working my way towards entering the process to becoming a priest in the Episcopal Church more than a dozen years ago. Ben’s idea was that we would find places that were haunted and he, being of a scientific nature, would approach the phenomena from that angle while I as an ordained priest would approach it from a religious / spiritual angle. I don’t remember how we planned to wrap it up – maybe I’d get an exorcist and/or he’d write papers and get published in all the great scientific journals of the world. But no matter, it shows we were definitely ahead of our time!