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'Are you going to repeat that again?" Peter Aykroyd playfully admonishes his son, Dan, as he begins an anecdote about a medium.

His son immediately stops talking. The famous face droops. "I guess not," he says.

Take a seat at the Aykroyd Comedy Hour. The two men are at a downtown Toronto hotel, on the interview circuit for the elder Aykroyd's new book, A History of Ghosts, a collection of stories about mediums, spiritualism and séances. The affectionate ease of their relationship fills the room like mischievous ectoplasm, bubbling up between their identical blue-suited forms.

"The last thing this guy is is an uptight ex-civil servant," Dan says, jerking his thumb at his father. "He has an irreverent absurdist softness."

"The ludic sense," confirms the elder. "The love of the ludicrous."

"And my mum is muriatic acid. She's extremely caustic."

"Be careful now," warns his father. "Don't speak about Lorraine," he says of the woman he calls his "original wife" of 57 years.

"Anyway," says the younger Aykroyd, also 57, waving off the interruption. "The humour goes back. Dad's mum was a poetess, a humorist in terms of her writing. And your dad was taciturn and dry," he says.

"I happen to come from a very rich background," Dan continues, leaping into a hilarious performance of his mother's fast-talking French-Canadian family.

Humour runs in the family, and so does an interest in ghosts. As a child, Mr. Aykroyd Sr. watched séances his grandfather, a doctor named Sam Aykroyd, held in the family home outside Kingston, where he now lives. After finding his journals in an old trunk in the early 2000s, he decided to write a book, documenting famous ghost appearances and the spiritualist culture at the turn of the last century.

The 1984 hit film that Dan co-wrote and starred in, Ghost Busters, was also a result of the family fascination with the paranormal. "It was accepted as fact in our family that ghosts exist," he explains.

And what did his father think of the movie?

"Well, when he rides in the Hawker 1000 privately, he doesn't worry about it," mutters the son, throwing a sidelong glance at his father.

"I knew that they were going to make a success of it because these people Danny was working with were the best in the business," the father replies diplomatically.

"He cheered us on. [But] we had some disagreements with some elements in the script. He didn't think the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man would work." Dan rolls his eyes.

"I thought it was a bad way to end it." Peter chuckles softly. "But of course, that was the best part of the film."

The two then banter about spooky phenomena: an uneducated man who could speak Mandarin when channelling people from beyond, a doctor who could diagnose at a distance, materializations.

Mr. Aykroyd's book tells only a selection, and includes some of the best-known mediums and believers, including Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, and several respected men of science: Charles Richet, a French doctor, Glen Hamilton, a Winnipeg doctor, and Oliver Lodge, a British academic. "At the end, I lost my sight," explains Mr. Aykroyd Sr. of the painstaking research and writing process. Aged 87, he suffers from macular degeneration.

"Not because of writing the book," quips his son. "He didn't eat enough broccoli when he was a kid."

The book took six years to complete. "I'm not a skeptic about the phenomenon at all. I'm a believer." Still, he has never seen a ghost.

His son has seen a presence, at least - once, in his Los Angeles home. "Something got into bed with me. The mattress depressed in the shape of a body. I know what I saw," he says, bugging his eyes.

Has he ever gone to a clairvoyant? "I've never gone," he responds. "I don't want to know what's going to happen. That's why I left my sitcom [Soul Man] at ABC. I had a beautiful job," he says, gesticulating in the air. "I walked away from $100-million but I had to go to work everyday at 10:30. I don't want a desk job, thank you very much, and I don't want a seer telling me what's going to happen in the future."

"That's the land of nuts, fruits and flakes," says his father about Hollywood.

Dan unleashes a booming laugh. "Your son is one of them! I'll take nut. I ain't a fruit. Not that I wouldn't be proud of being one if I was. I ain't a flake, because I follow through when I say I'm going to do something. But you know what, Pop? I'm a nut!"

The conversation shifts to the peaks of spiritualist interest at various times in history.

"I don't know if I'm enough of a cultural philosopher to answer with any authority," demurs the senior.

"Oh, it's always been there," insists his son. "From the caveman contemplating the moon. It's part of the psychic atmosphere of our planet."

"Well, there's plenty of evidence of humankind's preoccupation with these things," agrees the father.

But his son is off on a manic riff about world events that have encouraged spiritualist inquiries. "The 1880s was a turbulent time - industrial revolution, famine," he booms like a circus ringmaster. "World War I. Lots of people died. Millions! People were actively seeking ... to bring back the lost son, the lost brother. The twenties! You have the crash! And in the thirties! The economic cataclysm! And then World War II, and the Nazis and their devotion to the occult."

His enthusiasm practically lifts him off his chair. "The fifties?" he continues, unprompted. "The spookiness of the Cold War. We buried our heads under desks and buried ourselves in the culture of the pink toilet seat and Mamie Eisenhower and the homogeneous avocado-coloured kitchen. And in the sixties, well, you have drugs!" he exclaims. "Then, in the seventies, you just have bad clothes. And in the eighties, you have Ghost Busters."

He stops suddenly, hands folded primly across his paunch, satisfied with his impromptu monologue.

"Well, well," deadpans his father, looking approvingly at his son. "That was worth the price of admission."