Danielle Aykroyd
Appearances
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
There's a lot of Ackroyds, but as far as I know, I haven't come across a Danielle Ackroyd. There's Peter Ackroyds, and Peter's my grandfather's name and my uncle's name, and there's a famous Shakespearean author, scholar, called Peter Ackroyd, but no Danielle's. I think I am the one junior.
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
We have to be connected somehow. It's such an uncommon name. There's a lot of different spellings because it's been misspelled for over a thousand years, essentially.
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
I don't think so. I mean, entertainment is certainly something that he stumbled into. It's not anything really that he ever wanted as far as he describes it. I mean, he basically lives in the woods in Canada now, which is kind of what he always wanted to do. But yeah, I'm a fifth generation spiritualist, technically. I don't practice spiritualism myself. My practice is different.
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
But if you wanted to You know, really draw the lines. It started with my great-great-grandfather, who, turn of the century, began looking into this stuff. And it's trickled down in various ways, and each generation has taken it in a new direction.
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
Yeah, I mean he – first of all, he wanted it to be lighthearted and funny, although it initially was a lot darker from what I can gather before Harold Ramis and others got involved. But yeah, basically it grew out of him growing up in this environment where my grandfather, my great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather and the women alongside them investigated all of this stuff.
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
And we've grown up in wickedly haunted houses. The real nexus of all of this would be my family farm in Canada, which is where they held all of these seances. And so my dad was surrounded by that and in that environment from the time he was
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
very, very small child and sort of picking up these, you know, Fate magazine and the Journal for the American Society of Psychical Research and reading all of these things. I think he said on the phone to me earlier today that it was originally sparked by him reading this article on quantum reality and the paranormal, essentially. And then just kind of weaving in
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
these things that he had heard about from his father and grandfather and all of these stories that he'd gathered as sort of a magnet for this stuff. I mean, as you certainly now know, is once you dip a toe into this world, it's like...
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
Wild. I think I'm lucky that they just had an intellectual bent.
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
I mean, they were all... I mean, my great-great-grandfather was a dentist. His son was a bell telephone engineer, which certainly came into all of this. I mean, there's engineering minds behind this stuff, and you can definitely see that in Ghostbusters. My dad is not an engineer, but he has a very sharp, incisive scientific mind. So that's where that came from. But they were, I don't know, like...
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
Yeah, there was a sense of inquiry. And my great-great-grandfather wrote everything down. I mean, we have these books and books and books and books of transcripts of these seances that took place in our house with all of it in there.
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
Yeah, Samuel Ackroyd, who was a dentist in Kingston, Ontario, and he became interested. You know, spiritualism kind of blew up at the turn of the century. But he was in it very early. I mean, he used to go to Lilydale, you know, Lilydale.
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
Very cool, yeah. I'm pretty sure I met her when on the final pilgrimage to Lilydale with my grandfather before he died. Wow. We went and sat in some seances with varying degrees of success. Mm-hmm. And... Yeah. So my great-great-grandfather, I think he went to Lilydale for the first time in 1908.
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
But before then, he'd started hosting seances in his house with a full trance medium that had walked up to him on the street knowing that he was interested in this stuff and said, I think I've got these gifts. And Samuel helped him to develop them. And from what I gather, for the next 50-odd years, they hosted them in our family home after my great-great-grandfather died.
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
His son, the Bell telephone engineer, took it over. And then his wife, Marjorie, who was a sensitive herself, for what I gather, she was bringing things in as well.
Otherworld
Interview with Danielle Aykroyd [Patreon Preview]
No, he met these people just in his town, in this small town in Canada that we're from originally. And this guy allegedly just walked up to him on the street and said, I know you're into this stuff. Because he would write to newspapers about his interests. He was a philosopher. He was an ethical humanist. He was a socialist. He was interested in humanism generally, but then...