In 2003, CM Punk wrestled Chris Hero for 92 minutes. Little did he know, but this marathon of a match was just a warm-up for the bout he’d have with Ghost Hunters three years later.
Intended as a cross-promotion between two series on the Sci-Fi channel, the Ghost Hunters Halloween special featured (WWE) ECW’s CM Punk on a live paranormal investigation.
The place: Colorado’s Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for Stephen King’s The Shining.
The time: Midnight to 6 am Eastern
ECW might have popular for a Sci-Fi show, but weren’t no one pulling an all-nighter mid-week just to watch Fun With Night Vision.
Besides, CM Punk all but admitted he was the last person in the ECW locker room who should be on a ghost show. Unlike Balls Mahoney and “Fatty Dreamer”, Punk had never encountered a ghost.
At worst, a ghost named Skeleton Bob haunted his apartment, but only when Punk wasn’t around. At best, he and his girlfriend had faulty wiring and a neighbor with the same TV remote.
But Punk did have other people’s stories to tell, like how his pal Scott met a ghost stripper.
Or how his Samoan friend had a ghost sit on his chest, possibly while drunk.
And even though CM Punk had never seen a ghost, he had run into vampires…
…and, scariest of all, internet wrestling fans.
As for the rest of the crew, they were experts at scaring themselves. Throughout the six-hour ghost hunt, members of The Atlantic Paranormal Society took turns being total morons, only for their partners to swiftly yank them back to reality.
When they weren’t bickering like doofuses, they were forgetting the most basic of facts, like how at night, it gets cold…
…or that living humans make noise, too…
…or that telephones exist.
—The shadow man has been here—
[phone rings]
—What’s that?
—That’s the phone.
Precisely two seconds after picking up, the women concluded there was no one on the other end. Spooky!
Punk, on the other hand, feared not the haunted trumpet of Alexander Graham Bell…
…teasing the phantom caller with the riddle of Pete and Re-Pete but getting no response.
And still, these so-called “prank” calls continued until, fed up, the team unplugged the phone, as if this would stop the constant ringing. It did, obviously.
“Ghosts don’t know how to use the phone”, concluded Punk.
(Aside from that quip, though, the investigators were quite respectful of the ghosts, as heard in this clip that sounds way sleazier than it actually was:
“We’re not trying to get you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“…But if you do wanna do something, go right ahead.”
I assure you, this was a ghost hunt, not a casting couch)
Even CM Punk himself occasionally put his foot in his mouth trying to drum up scares. After feeling like he was being watched all night, he had an epiphany: “But there are cameras on me…”
…
Now, scaring themselves was fun—Why do you think they always worked at night with the lights off?—but the real business of Ghost Hunters was the scientific investigation. To that end, every TAPS member, including honorary teammate CM Punk, got special gadgets.
One gizmo measured EMF…
…another measured temperature…
…and another recorded electronic voice phenomena, or EVP. This being only 2006, we were spared a CM Punk rant about that last one.
Even in theory, these devices couldn’t actually prove the presence of a ghost, but only produce data consistent with what they maybe kinda suspected a haunting would be like.
But in practice, all they did was bore CM Punk out of his mind.
When the crew wasn’t having extended Q&A sessions with a silent ghost…
…they were recreating the Help! album cover in a vain attempt to detect the notorious “cold spots” in the air. After about the tenth straight minute of reaching to the ceiling, Punk checked out.
A drafty old hotel might be frightening to some (an HVAC technician, for instance), but there wasn’t enough Pepsi in the world to keep CM Punk alert and on his toes all night.
The regular crew did their best to keep Punk entertained with stories of past incidents at the Stanley Hotel.
There was the glass that had mysteriously broken in the middle of the night…
…and the Scottish ghost who hid in a closet and watched the hotel guests in bed.
That same ghost would reportedly steal from guests. Leave jewelry in your room, and when you’d come back, it would be gone! I bet that one’s a favorite story of the hotel staff (“Sorry ma’am, your diamond earrings were missing from your drawer when I got here. Damn ghost!”).
Despite the lack of paranormal excitement, CM Punk assured the ghost hunters that, having dealt with WWE Creative, he was used to being jerked around and having his time wasted. Still, a sleepy Punk virtually disappeared the last two hours of the broadcast.
…
Regardless of how you felt about ghosts or the paranormal, there was no getting around the sheer length of this Halloween special. I mean, six hours! And not just any six hours, but the six hours after midnight—the time no one’s sure whether to call “night” or “morning” because you’re supposed to be asleep anyway.
It would have been bad enough to record the show and watch it the next day, but there were a handful of viewers (like Punk’s aunt Cathy) who actually stayed up with the TAPS crew, offering helpful tips about the shadows they saw…
…and voting in important polls for 99 cents a text.
But after six agonizing hours, where the most exciting incident involved the crew briefly mistaking the kitchen staff for ghosts, it’s hard to imagine even the most die-hard all-night viewer being happy with their decision.
Especially the following week, when Ghost Hunters aired “highlights” of the investigation on a new episode.
Obviously, you could make the even the longest, most boring slog seem like the most exciting thing if you cut the highlights together well enough. It’s how I felt about Jeff Hardy vs. The Undertaker.
But so little had happened on Halloween night, half the episode was recycled from a prior visit the season before. The whole six-hour vigil yielded maybe twenty minutes of usable footage. And it was still boring as shit!
The Ghost Hunters/ECW live special was such an incredible waste of time, they only did it twice more.
