BY AARON SAGERS
(Originally published at Den of Geek)
Born in Vienna on January 26, 1920, Hans Holzer was like many children, fascinated by the ghost and fairy stories he heard in his youth. But those tales, told by his Uncle Henry, which he retold at school to the disapproval of adults, stayed with Holzer. Ghosts became his life’s work as one of the world’s most famous figures in the paranormal field.
Before his death in 2009, at age 89, Holzer authored nearly 140 books on the paranormal, extraterrestrial life, witchcraft, and more, beginning with 1963’s Ghost Hunter. During a career that famously involved the “Amityville Horror” house case in 1977, Holzer also taught parapsychology at the New York Institute of Technology, and both appeared on, and consulted for, Leonard Nimoy’s late 1970s show In Search Of… And interestingly, actor Dan Aykroyd claimed an obsession with Holzer, which inspired him to write Ghostbusters.
The paranormal subgenre of reality television exploded around 2005 – a trend that continues today with numerous series on networks such as Travel Channel, and A&E, and which has expanded online. Four decades prior, Hans Holzer was one of America’s first famous ghost hunters, preceding Ed and Lorraine Warren.
“He was the king of all paranormal media,” says Dave Schrader, lead investigator of Travel Channel’s unscripted series The Holzer Files, which re-examines Holzer’s cases, and host of the popular paranormal radio show Beyond The Darkness. “He was like the Howard Stern of his time, and was on TV, wrote for movies, and wrote books.”