A whole genre of movies has been created to feed off of the inherent fear that we all have of things that go bump in the night.  We have all heard them; especially after watching one of these movies.

Recent years have found more and more horror/ suspense (scary) movies being supposedly based off of true stories.  The Blair Witch Project made a ton of money simply because it was filmed as if it was an average person’s home video; it appeared to be real.

These kinds of things give a lot of credence to the possibility that there is something that causes those bumps in the night besides our pets, the wind, and old floor boards.  Since it is not possible to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that ghosts do not exist, than what’s to say that they do not?

That is a guiding premise behind the SyFy Channel series Ghost Hunter’s Academy (Wednesdays at 10pm), a spin-off of the original Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters International.

In Ghost Hunter’s Academy, a group of 5 aspiring ghost hunters are instructed in the art by a pair of veteran sleuths, Steve Gonsalves and Dave Tango.  These gentlemen are faced with the task of testing the recruits and teaching them what is needed to be a true ghost hunter.  The winner will get the chance to join either the Ghost Hunters or Ghost Hunters International team.

The opening episode introduced the new recruits and found them visiting a familiar site to Ghost Hunter fans, Fort Mifflin in Pennsylvania.  It was hear that the team discovered that they had not one but two people claiming to have psychic abilities.

The creators have to be given a lot of credit for taking a concept that could very well be laughable and crafting it into a well made show.  It would be easy to create a show that Bill Murray’s character from Ghostbusters, Peter Venkman, would be proud of.  Instead they have taken a questionable yet interesting subject matter and treated it with the seriousness due the most intense of criminal investigation.

This could very well be because ghosts are something easy to believe in and something that would explain all those bumps in the night.  The team leaders make this apparent in the opening episode as they easily shoot down all the suspected sightings that the recruits think they encounter effectively making the show somewhat pointless and dull.

Ghost Hunter’s Academy has a limited appeal.  Unless you are a believer in the supernatural, someone that is really curious, or someone that is really bored and already watched everything they have on TIVO you will not be interested in this program.  There was nothing in the first show to draw me back in.  Although the next site the team is visiting, the U.S.S. Carolina, is interesting there is little to see and not much worth watching.

Beer: Black Magic from the Ghost River Brewery in Memphis, TN- this dark beer will definitely work some magic on your taste buds.  Full bodied and heavily influenced by malts in the brewing process this beer has a crisper, cleaner flavor than most dark beers normally get attributed with. The relative smoothness makes it an easy beer to drink making it easy for you to see a few ghosts after drinking a few!