"Ghostbusters" was inspired by Dan Aykroyd's fascination with and belief in the paranormal. This was inherited from his father (who wrote the book "A History of Ghosts"), his mother (who claimed she had seen ghosts), a grandfather (who experimented with using radios to contact the dead), and a great-grandfather (a renowned spiritualist). In 1981, he read an article on quantum physics and parapsychology in "The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research", which gave him the idea of trapping ghosts. Aykroyd was also drawn to the idea of modernizing the comedic ghost films of the mid-20th century made by teams like Abbott and Costello ("Hold That Ghost" (1941)), Bob Hope ("The Ghost Breakers" (1940)), and The Bowery Boys ("Ghost Chasers" (1951)).