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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 11, 2018)
OCTOBER 11, 2018 // 3 SCRATCHPAD ‘Ghost Adventures’ lots of fun, except ghost part By ERICK BENGEL FOR COAST WEEKEND W ERICK BENGEL PHOTO From left: Michael Guggino, Jay Wasley and Devin Lawrence — all involved in the Travel Channel series ‘Ghost Adventures’ — play blues at Workers Tavern in Astoria in April 2018. INSIDE THIS ISSUE coast weekend arts & entertainment 4 7 8 COASTAL LIFE Home & Chef Tour Assistance League fundraiser has houses, flowers, food COAST WEEKEND EDITOR ERICK BENGEL CALENDAR COORDINATOR REBECCA HERREN CONTRIBUTORS MARILYN GILBAUGH WILLIAM HAM RYAN HUME KATHERINE LACAZE THE ARTS Water Music Festival Virtuosos’ selections span the globe FEATURE Local celebs step up ALSO INSIDE WATER MUSIC FESTIVAL A Q-AND-A WITH AUTHOR ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE ASSISTANCE LEAGUE OF THE COLUMBIA PACIFIC’S HOME AND CHEF TOUR Every Thursday Oct. 11, 2018 • coastweekend.com DANCING WITH THE CLATSOP COUNTY STARS TO SUBMIT AN ITEM OCT. 18 AT THE LIBERTY THEATRE DINING Mouth of the Columbia Bayway Tavern: no frills, no nonsense FURTHER ENJOYMENT MUSIC CALENDAR ....................5 CROSSWORD ...............................6 ASTORIA ART WALK ............... 14 CW MARKETPLACE.......... 15, 16 BOB PYLE Q&A ......................... 18 To advertise in Coast Weekend, call 503-325-3211 or contact your local sales representative. © 2018 COAST WEEKEND New items for publication consideration must be submitted by 10 a.m. Tuesday, one week and two days before publication. Dancing with the Clatsop County Stars supports The Harbor 12 hen I met some of the “Ghost Adven- tures” crew last April, they were playing the blues at Uniontown’s Workers Tavern — a sound engineer on guitar, a writer/editor doing vocals and harmonica, a cast member pounding the djembe. They seemed like the nicest guys in the world, very patient with the questions of a reporter who had never seen their TV show and was intent Find it all online! CoastWeekend.com features full calendar listings, keyword search and easy sharing on social media. Phone: 503.325.3211 Ext. 217 or 800.781.3211 Fax: 503.325.6573 E-mail: editor@coastweekend.com Address: P.O.Box 210 • 949 Exchange St. Astoria, OR 97103 Coast Weekend is published every Thursday by the EO Media Group, all rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced without consent of the publisher. Coast Weekend appears weekly in The Daily Astorian and the Chinook Observer. on distracting them from their drinks and jam session. And indeed, in the first episode of the show’s four- part miniseries, “Graveyard of the Pacific,” that debuted Saturday, they come off as an affable gang, almost childlike in their eagerness to scare themselves stupid in the dead of night. The episode, which takes viewers beneath Gulley’s Butcher Shop and the Liberty Theatre, makes good use of Astoria’s grim, gray palette. Ah, those wet sidewalks … that creeping fog bank ... the pilings on the riverfront peeking through the mist ... the macabre, maritime atmo- sphere. The wonderfully eerie port town I love. My enjoyment was dimmed by one tiny, nagging quibble: Ghosts probably don’t exist. There likely are better explanations for bumps in a basement and subterranean tingles than, say, spirits lin- gering from the Astoria Fire of 1922. At one point, host Zak Bagans speculates that an ancient curse is sabotaging the filmmakers — eleva- tors getting stuck, internet connections crapping out, as if someone, or something, doesn’t want these stories told. Uh-huh. It’s hard to tell how much the cast buys into this and how much is pure histrionics. I don’t know about you, but whenever their ghost-o-meter starts to ping, so does my BS detector. (Question: Why does almost every supposed haunt- ing in our area only involve people and events of the last 100 to 200 years? Native American tribes occupied the region for thousands of years, yet no one around here seems especially wary of souls who, say, perished in the great earthquake and tsunami of THOMAS ROTT PHOTO Features Editor Erick Bengel. 1700. Just sayin’.) I wonder about the cultural effect of shows like this. Though useful as escapist entertainment, does such programming quietly corrode truth as a value, lowering standards of evidence for claims that demand a much higher threshold, offering caricatures of the scientific method to a public whose grasp of science is already dubious? Don’t such shows tend to make viewers more credulous, giving them permission to indulge their fantasies rather than question their premises? I suppose that’s not the point. It’s “Ghost Adven- tures,” not “MythBusters.” To the extent that I could set aside the wet blanket of my skepticism and simply savor the great cinematog- raphy — what magnificent drone shots of Astoria! — the endearing earnestness of the cast, the nods toward Asto- ria’s sketchy past and the glee of pointing out sites that are personally meaningful (Hey, my apartment! Hey, I bought a sandwich there once!), it’s a fun show. But I must tediously aver that the evidence for ghosts is thin at best, and it should take a lot more than the “Ghost Adventurers” investigations to make someone a believer. In any case, Astoria has a rich history of perfectly real-world horror sufficient to freak people out; no need to embrace murky meta- physics. CW
