Does anybody know what a mass turbulence is? As in, “the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947”? Google hasn’t yielded any answers, so it must either be something really obscure, or just a term that Aykroyd made up. If it is indeed the latter, I wonder what he based it on. Were there any symmetrical book stackings in 1947 Philadelphia? . . . A ghosthead’s gotta know these things.
I thought it was just another term for strong psychokinetic activity and in relation to the Philadelphia incident, took place in an area with books like a library and one of the phenomena observed was symmetrical book stackings hence why Ray recalled the event as he saw the Gray Lady’s book stacking.
Turbulence is violent movement of air, but the word can also be used to mean chaos or distrubance. So “mass turbulence” would mean “widespread disturbance”.
Or a disturbance of mass…
It might be an Aykroyd mixup between the:
1947 Roswell incident
1943 Philadelphia experiment
Aykroyd couldn’t get his dates right on a great many things.
Although it has long been incorrectly transcribed as a “mass turbulence”, at least as early as the book Making Ghostbusters, analysis of the first draft reveals the correct word to be “manse”.
These are pics I took just now of my photocopy of the draft dated August 5, 1983. [This copy was given to me by James Van Hise, the writer of the NOW Comics Real Ghostbusters title, sometime prior to June of 1989.]
On page 40, Ray is talking to Winston (who is in the story much earlier in this version).
STANTZ: (emphatic) These are documented. Did you ever hear of the **Manse Turbulence? **Farmhouse in **Pennsylvania **– major structural damage, multiple full head and torso manifestations – ecto fluids. Boy, the walls were alive on that one.
It’s reiterated on the next page as well.
STANTZ: About us being on the verge of a rip… massive rip like the Manse Turbulence or the Tunguska Blast… you know, a four-fold crossover.
Just what is a manse? Aykroyd says it’s a farmhouse, but its definition can be:
-
A cleric’s house and land, especially the residence of a Presbyterian minister.
-
A large stately residence.
-
Archaic The dwellings belonging to a householder.
[Middle English manss, a manor house]
- (Ecclesiastical Terms) (in certain religious denominations) the house provided for a minister
Go back and listen to the scene again, but ignore the subtitles. You can hear the /n/ sound in there when he says it. It’s manse, not mass.
Alex
Awesome find man
I’ve owned that script for so long, I just always mentally think of the line as Manse Turbulence, without really remembering why. But actually, Google DID yield the answer for me.
When I googled Philadelphia Manse Turbulence, I got this helpful page from the GB Wiki, which also shows up when you search for it as Mass.
With my memory successfully jogged, I sifted through the stack of GB-related books that sit about three feet from my laptop and extricated the First Draft script which I keep in a three-ring binder, and snapped the pics.
My gut is that it was based on a real event, although it may be a rather loose interpretation. They took an awful lot of real world events and tweaked them slightly. The name Gozer was partly inspired by a real-life haunting, the PKE test scene was based on a real experiment, the drilling a hole in your head line is based on an actual scientist who wanted to do that, and there actually WAS an inexplicable event in Tunguska in the early 1900’s, though Ray is off by a year. It was in 1908, not 1909.
He got the Tunguska date wrong, and was again off by one digit on a Biblical allusion. What others are there?
Bear in mind, the script was written in a day and age without the internet. I have done a lot of research projects the past few months, all of them on topics where I consider myself to be very familiar with the details. In at least three instances, when I went back to double-check my ‘walking around knowledge’ against the source material, I realized I’d mis-remembered a detail. In at least one case, I had conflated two unrelated events in New York City into a single idea simply because both of them had to do with a fountain.
Even on this thread, I knew the word was Manse, but couldn’t remember where I had seen that.
And just like at the moment, I can picture an explanation of the Tunguska blast being described in greater detail by Ray Stantz, but I can’t figure out where I got that from.
Got to do a little more digging.
Alex
Wow, what awesome information. Thanks so much!
Gozer was based on a haunted name? I figured as much because the etymology sure is not ancient Sumerian. That language has names that usually end in a vowel, U or I, as in Enki, Anu, Ninki, Apsu, etc.
Gozer always sounded to me like a derived Germanic word with the -zer ending. In fact apparently its Yiddish. The current forms Geezer (UK) and Gozer (NL) mean “a guy”. It’s from the original Hebrew word (Chatan) meaning husband, or the chosen one.
Same with Shandor, Sandor is the Hungarian version of the name Alexander (like the Turkish Iskender also is). It apparently stems from Urdu (Shandar) and means marvellous, excellent, high stature. But again nothing to do with Sumerian.
Yes, according to a footnote on p. 97 of Making Ghostbusters by Don Shay.
*“Gozer is based on several things. For one, there’s a Gozer Chevrolet dealership in upstate New York. A little more to the point, though, is the fact that Gozer was a name that related to a documented haunting in England – the one *Poltergeist *was based on, in fact. During this particular haunting, the name Gozer appeared mysteriously throughout the house, written on walls and things. So we figured we might as well take something that had been reported in the public domain as an actual occurrence and use it in the film as our main demon and supernatural force.” *~ Dan Aykroyd
This came up before in another thread… How did I miss that?!? (Ghostbusters '84) - #585 by ecto1matt - General Ghostbusters Discussion - GBFans.com
Here’s what I dug up on this topic back in March.
There’s an online summary of the book This House Is Haunted by Guy Lyon Playfair, about the Enfield Poltergeist in Middlesex England from August of 1977 to April of 1979.
The second page of the online article states that a medium named Annie Shaw was brought in and while in a trance she moaned, “Gozer, Gozer, help me. Elvie, come here.”
After waking from her trance, Annie explained that ‘Gozer was a user of black magic and Elvie was an elemental (a form of lower spirit who is generally used by other spirits to do things for them) who was being used by Gozer.’
I observed in the previous thread that this account seems to be in keeping with the way the fictional Gozer uses subordinate creatures like Vinz and Zuul.
Alex
I took my copy of the first draft with me while I was parked outside my son’s school for the afternoon pickup. Was a very mellow read, listening to the GB Score at the same time.
Found the original Tunguska discussion scene.
Remember that Spengler and Stantz had already mentioned the term to Winston on pp 40-41, but now apparently Venkman is hearing it for the first time.
VENKMAN: What’s the Tunguska Blast?
STANTZ: Tunguska Blast? The unexplained flattening and disintegration of ten thousand acres in Siberia.
WINSTON: (unimpressed) Sounds like the Russians detonated a hydrogen bomb.
STANTZ: It happened in 1909.
And then Janine comes and tells Venkman about Peck being there.
Yeah, even in the first draft, he got the date wrong.
I also found a History Channel clip with some interesting footage of the devastation in 1908.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiXpp-i442s
It reminds me of something that I saw in January of 2014. I had left town before dawn for a five-hour drive to Jackson MS.
Just as the sun began to peek over the horizon, I found myself in this area where there were flattened and denuded trees as far as the eye could see, in every direction. The dawning light and the layer of frost gave it all a monochromatic look, as if it were just shades of ashy grey.
It was the swath cut by a killer tornado almost three years before in Hacklesburg AL. Here's a pic I found online, as it was too dark for my camera to have captured the eerie stillness.
Appropriately enough, the reason I was heading to Jackson was to see Dan Aykroyd, so this somber view definitely put me in a Tunguska Blast frame of mind.
AlexWow. You rock, Alex!
Unless Aykroyd admitted to getting the date wrong, I always liked to think the events of the Tungunska Blast of 1908 set up the blast of 1909. All the suffering, strife and negativity… and maybe even the location set the stage for an interdimensional cross rip one year later.
Plus, we are talking about a fictional universe and not all historic events or chapters of a book have to be the same thing as real life.
But it was neat to see Tristan Jones do a little take on events in the Tobin story a few years back.