How the Travel Channel became the ghost channel
The episode has all the glitz you’d expect from a travel show about Los Angeles: a sparkling skyline, a classic film industry location, a Spanish Revival mansion, over-the-top characters. Also: ghosts.
“That house is a containment chamber for the souls of victims, souls of killers,” says Zak Bagans, host and most-intense star of Travel Channel’s “Ghost Adventures,” a long-running hit on a network that once aired shows such as “Hotel Impossible,” “Baggage Battles” and “Bikinis & Boardwalks.”
When you turn on the Travel Channel these days, there will almost inevitably be ghosts — or other supernatural phenomena, mythical creatures or famous mysteries. It’s no surprise that the executive who oversees the network is also in charge of paranormal streaming content.
“Now it’s kind of like a joke,” said Mark Wolters, a travel vlogger and teaching associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Gies College of Business. “Oh, I remember the Travel Channel. Remember Samantha Brown when she was on there, and Anthony Bourdain and ‘No Reservations?’ Those were the days.”
Travel Channel spokeswoman Caryn Davidson Schlossberg, who is also director of communications for shows in the Paranormal & Unexplained genre on the Discovery Plus streaming platform, said network executives were not available for an interview.
“We have a rotation of programming, which delivers content audiences want to watch,” she said in an email.
A look at the November lineup — following the annual “Ghostober” bonanza of spooky content — reveals some examples of that programming: “Paranormal Caught on Camera,” “Ghost Adventures,” “Conjuring Kesha,” “Ghost Hunters” and “Eli Roth Presents: My Possessed Pet.” Very occasionally, an hour is devoted to restaurants around the country, though it’s a Food Network show.
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It’s a far cry from the network’s earliest days, when a subsidiary of the now-defunct airline TWA launched Travel Channel to be “devoted exclusively to travel and leisure” in 1987, the Associated Press reported. It was an era of niche programming for widespread interests, said Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University.
“When cable was first launched, the idea was it was going to be this miracle of places you could go for anything you wanted and there’d be 24-hour specific programming for that,” he said, naming MTV, the Weather Channel and Court TV as examples. “So many places, that didn’t necessarily work out.”
The Travel Channel shift started more than two decades ago, when shows about UFOs and haunted B&Bs started running alongside “The World’s Greatest Spas” and “Lonely Planet.”
In 2000, then-general manager Steve Cheskin acknowledged to the trade magazine Broadcasting & Cable in an interview that the network didn’t need to cater to travelers, but rather TV watchers.
“People who spend a lot of time traveling don’t spend a lot of time watching TV,” Cheskin told the publication. “We will not have a predominance of ghosts, but there will be a mix.”
For years, that mix included options as varied as “Hot Dog Paradise,” “Creepy Crypts,” “Mancations,” “Castle Ghosts of England” and “Dangerous Grounds,” about the global quests of a coffee buyer. “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” debuted in 2005; the series “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern” joined two years later. “Ghost Adventures” launched in 2008 and is still running strong.
In recent years, the ghosts have taken over. The Travel Channel unveiled a new look, logo and focus in 2018, announcing that it was now the “all-new TRVL Channel” after Discovery Communications bought the network’s parent company, Scripps Networks Interactive. The company is now Warner Bros. Discovery after a merger earlier this year.
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“New Travel Channel programs focusing on the paranormal, the unsolved, the creepy and terrifying are taking viewers into some compelling and surprising new territories,” the announcement said. “Let’s just say there are destinations you may not have been anticipating.”
Discovery said in a statement the next year that 2018 had been “the most successful year in Travel Channel history with ratings up 15 percent over the prior year.”
After the switch, Wolters, who blogs at Wolters World and has more than 900,000 subscribers on YouTube, started hearing a lot of questions about what had happened to the old Travel Channel.
“People watch the ‘Ghost Hunters’ stuff for entertainment — and you want to be entertained every day. When you talk about travel, you probably travel once a year,” he said in an interview. “There’s not as many people looking for, ‘Where am I going to go in Spain?’ as opposed to, ‘I want something to entertain myself for 15 minutes without thinking.’ ”
For some travel aficionados, the changes have made the network unwatchable. A 2019 Reddit thread asked: “Any other Travel Channel fans losing their mind over all the ghost shows that now make up most of the stations content?”
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Jamie Larounis, a travel industry analyst for Upgraded Points, used to love the Travel Channel’s hotel programs, especially “Great Hotels” with Samantha Brown and “Hotel Impossible.” He said he used to feel immersed in whatever destination was being featured — but no more.
“I really won’t even turn on the Travel Channel any more because I know it’s likely to be something ghost related, and have stopped watching, I’d say maybe around 5 or so years ago, when the ghost stuff really started to be pushed hard,” he said in an email.
But other viewers — clearly a significant number, given the ghostly proliferation — can’t get enough.
Madison Cummins, a 19-year-old freelance designer in Seattle, only started watching in the past couple of years but is a fan of the ghost-centric programming.
“I never knew before that that it was actually about travel,” she said.
Heather Kurtz of Olathe, Kan., has been a fan for nearly two decades. The 54-year-old mother of two and insurance company employee started watching for shows such as “Mysteries at the Museum” and “Expedition Unknown.” As more paranormal content joined the lineup, her interest grew. Current favorites include “Ghost Hunters,” “Ghost Nation,” “Ghost Adventures,” “Ghost Brothers” and “Destination Fear.”
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“Each of the paranormal groups have a different investigation style which makes it interesting to see what kind of evidence they get,” she said in an email. “Since the groups are still traveling to different parts of the country, we are still getting to see parts that we may never get to see as well as hearing some of the history of the area they are in.”
Kurtz also has a personal interest in the shows: It made her feel as if her deceased loved ones were still looking out for her, and as if she could do the same for her family. She was devastated after receiving a breast cancer diagnosis almost eight years ago, when her sons were 9 and 4.
“I was determined to fight for my life to be there for my young sons,” she said in the email. “But watching the paranormal shows made me realize that I could still watch over my boys if I lost my fight.”
Y’all Kesha has a ghost hunting show on the travel channel just finding out this is very important
— Paul (@paulhaslegs) October 23, 2022Ghostly content can provide that sort of comfort, said Thompson, who is also founding director of Syracuse University’s Center for Television and Popular Culture.
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“For all this scariness, there’s a sense of extreme optimism,” he said. “The idea of a ghost has in its foundation that we don’t disappear when we die, we don’t go off into nothingness.”
Popular interest in the paranormal is long-standing in the United States, dating back to the rise of spiritualism in the mid-1800s, said Darryl Caterine, a professor of religious studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., and author of “Haunted Ground: Journeys through a Paranormal America.” He said the subject gained more traction in popular culture in the 1970s. As confidence in organized religion wanes, paranormal subjects can fill a void, Caterine said
“There’s great uncertainty in terms of what is real and what is not real right now,” he said. “That is sort of the essence of what the paranormal’s all about. It’s sort of the ambiguity.”
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Despite all the otherworldly ambiguities, some affiliated with today’s Travel Channel shows insist that they are firmly tied to travel.
Jeff Belanger, an author, TV host and paranormal expert, has worked as a writer and researcher on “Ghost Adventures” since the first season. When Bagans, the host, told him the show would air on the Travel Channel, Belanger didn’t question it for a second.
“That was the most obvious slam dunk for me,” he said. “Of course the Travel Channel.”
As author of a book called “The World’s Most Haunted Places” and frequent seeker of haunted locations on vacation, Belanger said travel and ghosts go hand in apparitional hand.
“A unique way to see a city is to see it through its ghostly lore,” he said. “You have to connect with its history. It’s often tragic and macabre.”
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On “Ghost Brothers: Lights Out,” which has its second season streaming on Discovery Plus and premiering on the Travel Channel on Nov. 26, an Atlanta-based trio of friends travels to investigate scary sites.
“When you think about it, we’re going all over the world and we’re telling you stories attached to these different locations,” said Dalen Spratt, one of the stars. “We’re giving you these dope experiences.”
He recalled one episode in Jamaica that featured beaches and tropical scenery — and the legend of a murderous ghost.
“It is travel wrapped in storytelling,” he said.
The new season includes stops in Ohio, Kentucky and Rhode Island. Spratt joked that he and his co-stars wouldn’t mind even more travel.
“We tell Travel all the time, ‘We don’t gotta go all the time to Ohio,’ ” he said. “I’m telling you, people died in Hawaii. People died in Fiji. I know somebody done died in Tahiti, let’s go look.”
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