Dan Aykroyd lives in a haunted house. The white clapboard farmhouse on a lake near Kingston in eastern Canada has been in his family since his great-great-great-grandfather Samuel Aykroyd--a provisioner for the British army during the War of 1812--settled the land in 1826. Another Aykroyd ancestor who lived there was a spiritualist who held seances, had the farmhands hypnotized to explore their past lives and corresponded with fellow spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The gabled rooms have been home to dozens of apparitions and paranormal events as well as to generations of Aykroyds. "The house has a history of spiritual activity that would blow your mind," Dan Aykroyd says. He has been kept awake by otherworldly noises and ectoplasmic tubular lights at the top of the stairs, and his relatives over the years have been thrown out of bed or jolted from sleep by slamming doors or covers being yanked off by invisible hands. To the Aykroyds, Dan's script for the movie Ghostbusters was just another family story.
Aykroyd has spent almost every summer of his life at the farmhouse, and his two-year-old daughter, Danielle, was christened in the local church. Although his medium is comedy, he views his position as scion of a distinguished family and proprietor of the patriarchal farm with complete seriousness. "This house is about a continuum, an unbroken line of family tradition. This is the place that guarantees me a final refuge."
His father, Peter Aykroyd, gave Dan and his brother the choice of three parcels on the land. Dan Aykroyd picked the larger one, and two years ago, decided to renovate. By then the farmhouse was "seven hundred dollars' worth of rotten lumber," he says. Walls were crumbling, floors were crawling with wood beetles, and the original cornhusk-and-old-newspaper insulation was coming through the boards. The sensible thing would have been to tear the place down. "How could I bulldoze the home of my namesake?" Aykroyd agonized. One afternoon as he was sitting on the porch trying to decide between sense and sentiment he heard a strange knocking. "It was a kind of electronic snap coming from everywhere in the house," he says. "It sounded three times. I took that to mean that they wanted me to restore the house. You know, the Chinese believe that one should revere family places and keep ancestors' memories alive. I understand that."
"Doing this farmhouse was not about redecorating," says Los Angeles designer Craig Wright, who breakfasted with wood beetles and bathed in a copper bucket on early visits to the farmhouse. "It was about re-creating another time, a time in the past when there was less pressure and more style." Wright, who grew up in Southern California and bought his first oil painting at the age of nine, studied architecture and art history before his passion for antiques led him into design. He was hired by Aykroyd's wife, actress Donna Dixon, on the basis of work he had done for Michael and Diandra Douglas.
The casual mix of feminine flowered chintzes, vivid, heavy colors and furniture that fills the rooms--three rooms and the master bedroom downstairs and two small bedrooms under the eaves upstairs--is a collaboration between Craig Wright's experienced skill and Donna Dixon's playful imagination. "Donna has a story for every room in the house," Wright says. "The big downstairs room is called the professor's parlor. It's the study of a Canadian professor who has retired and moved back to the family farm. He's married to a woman from a better family who has been to France and wants to furnish the house with French things." The books and brass-trimmed trunk, the old typewriter and the lithograph of Abraham Lincoln belong to the imaginary professor, Wright explains. The swags of Rose Cumming fabric and the ruby-glass oil lamp were bought by the professor's wife.
Donna Dixon has another story for the kitchen, where one pane of the stained-glass fanlight was left clear because it was broken by a fictional baseball a long time ago. She wanted that room to look like someone's weekend cabin, the kind of place that would be filled with wonderful hand-me-down things," explains Wright, who used knotty-pine paneling for the room, which he based on his own family's weekend cabin at Lake Arrowhead, California. "I know that this land is where Danny's heart and soul and spirit lie," says his wife. "It had to be wonderful, and it's decorated with everything I love."
But first Wright had to gut and rebuild the original house, renovating the big screen porch and adding a triple-flued fireplace, a bay window in the downstairs bedroom and a large kitchen. To create the hand-me-down look, he and Dixon shopped in flea markets in Paris, London, New York and Los Angeles, where the Aykroyds have another house. In the downstairs master bedroom, Wright combined antique drapery panels that Dixon found at a Paris flea market with an antique iron bed from a Los Angeles store and some rolls of a flowered wallcovering bought in New York. In the professor's parlor next door, another panel of lacy drapery fabric from Paris hangs next to a photograph of Aykroyd's hero, Broderick Crawford, one of television's great television lawmen, while an old typewriter of Aykroyd's sits on a delicate antique wicker table.
Dan Aykroyd has played many parts in his successful career, which began when he was a television writer in Toronto and took off in 1975 when he went to work with his friend John Belushi on Saturday Night Live in New York. "I loved the farmhouse so much," he remembers, "that I used to commute from Saturday Night Live to Kingston on my motorcycle. When John came up to visit me he was so happy to be here that he just got out the car and did a cartwheel on the lawn in front of my father."
Since his move into films, Aykroyd has portrayed a blues singer, an undertaker, a ghostbuster, and criminal and a cop An actor who is known for being taken over completely by each role he plays, Aykroyd is fascinated with the law and lawlessness. Another ancestor was a Royal Canadian Mountie , but Aykroyd himself was kicked out of a seminary school for misbehaving. His friends say that his fantasy would be to commit a crime and then arrest himself for it. A day at the farmhouse begins with a sleepy Aykroyd ambling down the lawn for a swim in the icy lake. Then there's breakfast on the screen porch and a ride on the jet ski--sometimes ten miles down the lake to the family island for a picnic. Some summer evenings Dixon packs a hamper and they all pile into "Flossie," the antique yellow convertible with red leather seats from the vehicle barn--a building which houses Aykroyd's Pierce Arrow, his collection of Harley- Davidson motorcycles, an old milk truck, a 1941 Buick straight eight called The General, an amphibious car made for a James Bond movie and assorted other engines on wheels--and head for the local drive-in movie.
There are occassional trips into town for ice-cream cones and newspapers and gossip around the cash register in the general store, which is owned by a man whose grandfather sold ice-cream cones and newspapers to Dan Aykroyd's grandfather. "It's a place I go to recharge and where my family can be secure," Aykroyd says. "It's a gentle, bucolic life--there are cows and deer, foxes and raccoons and even porcupines. My daughter will be the seventh generation on the land."
In the spring the Aykroyd gather armfuls of lilacs from the forest of bushes at the edge of the wheat field, and the house is filled with their sweet fragrance. In the fall there are family harvest dinners and a full-dress Thanksgiving. At the end of the day, after dinner, one of the Aykroyd men builds the "ring of fire," a circular bonfire in front of the house where the lawn cascades down to the lake. Then everyone goes out to sit on Adirondack chairs or on the grass, finish their drinks, tell ghost stories, watch darkness drop slowly from the northern sky and admire the constellations, tracing the Big Dipper to find the North Star, as the family has done summer after summer, twilight after twilight, year after year, for as long as any of them can remember.
Article by Susan Cheever (text) and John Vaughan (photography)
Transcribed by L. Christie