Lost & Found Footage

The Ghoul Show

Live at the Magic Bag

By Jerry White Jr.

Hey group! Let’s travel back to the summer of ’93, scratch glass and turn blue as The Ghoul gets up to some of his old TV antics live on stage on tape! Enjoy this Midwestern legend from a bygone era in this video which has never appeared online. . .until now!

30:07, 1993

Link to page on ARCHIVE.ORG

This was a one-night/two-show performance recorded at the Magic Bag Theatre in Ferndale, Michigan. In addition to the stage show, The Ghoul screened the 1959 B-movie “The Tingler” and had a stage show before and after the film. I was in the audience with my friend and 30MOM alum, Dan Augustine and you can catch us several times throughout the video (which does not include The Tingler——only the live stage segments made it to air). Dan and I are having a good old time and even get in on some lukewarm Cheez Whiz action! This special aired on Channel 52 in Oakland County, Michigan, which was the home of 30 Minutes of Madness during its original run.

If you’re from in/around Detroit or Cleveland, of a certain age, and have a taste for this sort of thing, then you already know who The Ghoul was. If not, long-story-short: The Ghoul was a local television host of low-budget, usually horror, schlock––one of many regional varieties that were popular from the 60s through 80s (Elvira likely being the most famous). The Ghoul was a proto-punk youth/rebellion subculture figure. He was a beatnik mad scientist jester. A little Zappa, a bit of Dr. Demento, and a heaping dose of the cool uncle who let you stay up late and watch R-rated flicks. He was the class clown who grew up (sorta) and got his own late-night show. There’s some early SNL in The Ghoul’s DNA as well as vibes you’d find later in Letterman and O’Brien. Naughty, but not explicit, the Ghoul was like Halloween year-round. As for The Ghoul’s cultural impact, all I can say is that he was known and loved in Michigan and Ohio for decades by a certain niche audience.

Before The Ghoul, there was Ghoulardi, a Cleveland-based hip horror host from the early/mid-sixties, created and performed by Ernie Anderson (director PT Anderson’s dad). After a few years of local fame, Ernie passed the ghoulish baton off to Ron Sweed, then left Ohio to seek his fortune in Hollywood. This was all before I was born and well-documented elsewhere on the web——consider this a little lore appetizer. Sweed took Anderson’s creation and ran with it, rebranding the character “The Ghoul,” keeping a lot of the gags and catchphrases while adding some of his own, including wearing sunglasses with one lens out and a recurring amphibious sidekick. Sweed brought the character into the seventies and added more of an edge. For a more detailed backstory, check out this great article/interview in the Metro Times from 2001.

The Ghoul was at the zenith of his Michigan career a couple years before and after I was born, so I pretty much missed it. He went back and forth between local TV markets in Detroit and Cleveland, but moreso the latter in the 80s and 90s. His local legend lingered and I caught glimpses of him in the periphery of my budding awareness of the Metro Detroit cultural zeitgeist. If I’d been born a handful of years earlier, I would’ve adored his absurdist antics, comic anarchy, and live-action Looney Tunesesque behavior. The way he constantly tormented his beleaguered sidekick Froggy was particularly cartoonish——except for the time he ditched the puppet and blew up a real frog on air which got him run out of town (or so goes the infamous story). Instead, I was only vaguely familiar with him as someone who had been around and was now gone, but not forgotten. I loved watching TV as a kid and ate up local horror hosts. Sir Graves Ghastly was on my radar as a very young child, then WOMC DJ Tom Ryan brought his goofy Dracula-lite “Count Scary” to our local small screens and I was a big fan. The Ghoul somehow managed to haunt the scene even in his absence, perhaps because of it.

Dan Augustine is a few years older than me, so his memories of The Ghoul are a lot clearer.

“I can remember being at a Chatham supermarket (10 Mile and Van Dyke) with my mom. Probably around ‘76 or ‘77. A wood-paneled station wagon came driving through the parking lot and The Ghoul was hanging out the window of the backseat area and just yelling nonsense. I thought it was the coolest thing. My mom just thought it was ridiculous. I remember watching him on TV a lot but one moment that stands out for me was there was an episode at the very end where he got into a scuffle with one of the crew and he wound up tearing the shirt off the guy. For some reason that struck me as real funny when I was just a kid and I remember laughing like I just witnessed the funniest event ever.”
–Dan Augustine

Much like Doctor Who, I dig the aura and aesthetics of The Ghoul more than the shows themselves. By the time I was a teenager, the shtick felt dated. I was gifted a VHS “Best of the Ghoul” tape by a friend’s dad and I really wanted to love it. The Ghoul was like MTV before it existed, but I’d grown up with MTV proper——watching rowdy raconteur rock stars with Ghoul genes like David Lee Roth, so when I saw the real deal in his original element, it didn’t impact me as much. He’d been defanged and watered down by all those who came after. Watching his old shows is sometimes cringey, other times too tame or hokey/corny (lots and lots of dad jokes). That said, I can still get into the spirit of The Ghoul. I can tap into what it might’ve been like to catch him on TV in the 70s, before cable, when there was nothing else like him on TV. Unlike David Letterman or Conan O’Brien, The Ghoul never went mainstream, never cleaned up or modernized the act. Ultimately, I respect both the commitment to the bit and the soul of the bit itself.

A year or two after I got The Ghoul VHS tape, I had a chance to attend this live show in Ferndale. Seeing The Ghoul live was a whole lot of fun! The crowd gets super into it and his antics feel fresh and charmingly silly face-to-face. He creates an atmosphere where you can feel like a kid again. This was the summer after I graduated high school and I was shooting skits that would appear on episode 8 of 30 Minutes of Madness during this time. I knew some of the public access guys filming the show (maybe that’s why they cut to Dan and I so often). While PATV was a step down from The Ghouls 70s and early-80s heyday, I admire his tenacity and longevity! He put on a fantastic show with tons of energy, connecting with the audience and giving us his all.

I never saw The Ghoul again, but Dan did. . .

Hey-ya zowie-wowie, Dan here again! Let me tell you a little bit about these photos where it looks like I’m partying hearty with The Ghoul! This happened sometime in the early 2000s. Maybe 2003 or 2004, so a decade after the event at the Magic Bag. It was a Halloween Show at The Magic Stick in Detroit and The Ghoul was the host! I was there dressed as a spaceman. After doing his shtick on stage, he just hung out with the crowd; drinking and being obnoxious! Why not? It was Halloween season and we were all in a party mood. I remember talking with him several times during the night. At one point these photos were taken, and that’s really all I got for ya! As Jerry pointed out to me after I scanned and emailed these photos to him: how bizarre that I go from seeing him as a kid zip through a Chatham supermarket parking lot in a wood-paneled station wagon, to being an adult and having him hang all over me like a drunken buddy that I go way back with——which I guess I did (in a way). Back to you Jerry!

Thanks Danton!

Wrapping this up, Ron Sweed was forty-four years old when we saw him perform in Ferndale and I turned forty-four the year he died. I was living in Los Angeles at the time and, to pay my respects, I dressed up as The Ghoul for Halloween that year (2019). I think I did his costume justice, though no one at the parties I went to had heard of him. I’d love to see Paul Thomas Anderson make a movie about his dad and his ghoulish legacy as continued through Ron Sweed. A movie that’s kind of a cross between Boogie Nights, Ed Wood, Elvira: Mistress of the Night, and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. A period piece that spans the 1950s through 2010s, set in a magical realism Midwest. Damn, I’d watch the hell outta that. Well maybe I shouldn’t wait for PTA to make it——maybe Dan and I can work on the script and make it ourselves, overdey!!

Until that happens. . .

stay sick, climb walls!

GHOUL POWER!!

Dan dressed as The Ghoul at a costume party in 1997.
Another shot of Jerry as The Ghoul from Halloween 2019.

Bonus Vid

Don’t forget, there’s only one Bill Bonds!

The Ghoul’s 30MOM plug

After the show, The Ghoul signed autographs in the alley behind the Magic Bag. I waited until the line was finished and The Ghoul was about to go back inside before asking him to plug our show. You can see how generous (and playful) he was, despite having no context for what he was plugging. I even gave him a little attitude for getting the name wrong at first (I was a teenager and thought he was razzing me), but he rolled with that graciously. The edited version of this plug serves as the opening to 30 MINUTES OF MADNESS #8. It may seem like a really small thing, but to me this gave 30MOM a bit of legitimacy. With The Ghoul on our show, I felt connected to his legacy of local lunacy!

Thank you Ghoul!!

Hiya, gang. Hiya, hiya, hiya!