If you had asked me in 2004, before the paranormal TV craze reached its current heights, if a popular television show would involve detailed descriptions of dust flying on-screen… well, first, I'd probably wonder who you were and what you were doing in my house. Then I would have replied that such a television show would be a sign of the end of civilization, and I would have mocked you openly. (I'm terribly sorry for my hypothetical bad manners.) "Who," I would have asked, "would listen to someone narrating the actions of a dust speck?"

Me, apparently.

The Adventurers go to East Los Angeles to the "Hospital of Hell." The opening clips look pretty promising– lots of shouting and madness, and the beginning tour lives up to it. According to Syd Schultz III of Pasadena Paranormal, this hospital was shut down because of massive malpractice lawsuits, and the staff essentially dropped their scalpels and walked away. The Ghost Adventures crew uses the creep factor to turn the intro segment into a playground of disturbing images. The biggest sheer grossout moment involves Zak and Schultz investigating the incinerator. Zak plunges his hand into the ash apparently before realizing that he's just shoved a hand into cremated human remains. He asks for a moment of silence and some hand sanitizer. Other stops on the tour include an office chair that apparently rolls around on its own, and a very creepy Raggedy-Ann doll they find on the floor. Further fuelling my suspicion that the next Kubrick is on the GA second unit, they actually intercut some footage of the doll RIDING AROUND ON THE CHAIR. Now that's what I'm talking about!

Next, Zak interviews Kirsten Thorne and Layla Halfhill from the LA Paranormal Association who talk about an encounter with the spirit of a young girl and play a clip of what they believe to be her voice. As they're trying to do another stop, there's a now-familiar crackle, and Aaron proclaims that they've lost the audio. I know it's a great way to look paranormal, Aaron, but you might want to get that thing fixed. They keep getting interference after every question, which they interpret as the ghost taking over their equipment. Then Zak records "disembodied female humming" at the same spot where LAPA had recorded it earlier. (Or maybe room resonance turned into a humming noise by the voice recorder. But that's just me.) They also manage to hear "a man's voice" (random background hitting sound to my ears) and a voice saying "yeah" (which sounds like a breath to me). OK, guys, I'm just gonna say this… a whole bunch of times: THE DIGITAL VOICE RECORDER IS NOT A TAPE RECORDER. IT CAN TURN NON-VOICED SOUNDS INTO VOICELIKE ONES.

Let's save some time. For the rest of this post, when I say things like "They got an EVP that said 'X', I really mean "They got an EVP that they claim said 'X', but it sounded like a bunch of random noise to me." Okay?

We then continue the tour, bringing in still more outside investigators. Joe Mendoza of 3AM Paranormal describes waving-hand shadows on the wall, and Schultz takes Zak to a corridor where the sound of running gurneys is often heard. Then the guys get really exited when Steve Trousdale and Lynly Ehrlich of Forensic Investigations of Southern California Hauntings (FISCH) take them to the adjoining mental hospital. Erlich demonstrates (on Zak) how she felt pushed out of the room and found scratches on her back. Zak congratulates her on membership of the "Back scratch-mark club", and the two flirt in paranormal code phrases for a while. After Erlich mocks the Ghost Adventure boys for not keeping up with her on the stairs, she unfortunately disappears from the episode.

"All right! The sun has set," proclaims Zak. Since this is a bad part of town, he earnestly offers to pray for the paramedic who will apparently be standing guard on their outside static camera and letting them out in the morning. Was it me, or did Zak overenunciate his instructions to let them out, as though he were a tourist trying to make himself understood? Anyway, they soon have the lights out and are chasing mysterious sounds. Are these sounds ghostly? Maybe– or maybe they're by a street in LA. There are mysterious "screams" and thumps, and Zak tries to build up the tension by insisting they split up. Zak asks, "Is there a little girl in here? Was someone responding to my question?" An EVP replies, "Maybe." So they've got a smartass ghost. Great.

Then Zak hears singing and follows it to room 323, which by astonishing coincidence is the room in which Lynly Erlich was attacked! Zak, with a glassy-eyed stare, immediately sets out to defend her honor. "You know, attacking women is bad," he says. This apparently is news to the ghost, who responds with a "bang" (unidentifiable sound) and a "voice" (unidentifiable sound). After this brief ethics lesson, the dialogue devolves into… well… what kind of video would you think you were watching if you heard the following lines?

NICK: You wanna do something to me? Here I am. I have my back to you. If you're behind me, do something.

AARON: Did you like pushing that girl? Did you get a kick out of it? Tell me. Right here.

I don't even want to get into what the mysterious disembodied voice says. This show has corrupted me in many ways, but I didn't think that this would be one of them.

Then, quite suddenly, we reach the part we've all been waiting for: the Great Dust Discussion of 2009. They show video from their back-to-back X-cams that shows… well, it's dust, twirling happily through the air, following the air currents wherever they want to take it. At least, that's what it looks like to me. Then again, I'm not an internationally recognized expert on dust. Zak seems to be, though, because he VO's earnestly:

We know that this is not dust, because as you can see here, dust has a very different quality, almost like flurries of snow, and also does not strobe whatsoever.

Well, that's telling me. Oh, and the next bit is just too good not to quote:

In our investigation on Poveglia Island in Italy, we had captured a 22 milligauss reading on an EMF detector as these glowing balls which contain electromagnetic energy, something ghosts are said to be made up of, passed right in front of me.

That sentence is a masterpiece of pseudoscience! First he connects the EMF reading with the orbs for no stated reason, then connects orbs with ghosts using an "are said to be!" We're going to have to write this into the drinking game somehow. Oh, and at the same time a strange mist passes in front of the camera. Zak, using his amazing Pareidoli-Vision, proclaims it to be a human figure! A completely round, flat human figure that resembles nothing so much as a flashlight beam. I give up. The Ghost Adventurers, deservedly or not, then leave the mental ward and return to the main hospital.

For the next few minutes, the GAs are determined to jump through as many of their standard hoops as possible. We get a flashback to the "little girl's voice" incident. We get the standard "it's really dark in here" non-IR shot. The group splits up, as per normal procedure. Also according to procedure, Aaron hears a ghostly voice and runs away screaming.

Now comes a crowning moment of… something. Zak and Nick go to investigate Aaron's ghostly voice in the surgical suite, and they catch a squeak and a breath. Zak asks if there's a little girl in there, and Nick, as if to answer his question, screams in falsetto and runs from the room. (I mean no disrespect to little girls, many of whom would be far braver in this situation.) Apparently Nick saw a female figure "standing in my face, dude!" Of course, his and Aaron's cameras both conveniently malfunctioned at that exact moment.

Zak then tries to make contact using yet another gizmo: a phoneme generator. They get "sight", "yeah you did", "leave", and "dead". I don't know exactly how this box works, but "leave" sounded like "ee" and "dead" sounded like "eh" to me.

The lockup finished, the team heads to Fresno, CA for analysis with Mickey Burrow of Paranormal Investigations. For a change, Mickey actually seems to look at the video. They discuss the possibilities of car headlights, lens flare, and a light from behind the camera. They dismiss them all, but it's the best attempt at analysis I've seen in my short tenure watching Ghost Adventures.

This was an episode that, fortunately or unfortunately, had it all, as far as Ghost Adventures was concerned. So, was Nick actually confronted with a spirit so powerful that its mere presence shut down all cameras pointed in its direction? Or was it acting and post-production editing? I have to suspect the latter, of course. One thing that the Adventurers failed to mention is that Linda Vista's creepy reputation– and, no doubt, some of the odd props found lying around there– come from the numerous horror movies which have used it as a convenient set. Perhaps it was just used to make one more.