when did ghost hunting first become popular
"Touchdoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooown Auburn"
shareI can't tell if that is your signature or just something random you wrote.
Anyway, ghost hunting has always been a thing... to a degree. Adolescents throughout history have gone in search of the paranormal as part of initiating rights, seeking thrills / chills, or out of pure boredom. Like in native cultures trying to find and speak to your spirit guide was a right of passage. Or teens in American history wanting to check out supposed creepy old haunted houses or go into the woods and look for a witch etc... Even Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s trying to communicate with spirits became a big thing amongst many adults, especially the wealthy elite. So seances and psychics popped up all over the place. Why? Because they were bored, rich, looking for thrills, and wanting to find out some form of truth. The most famous person in modern history who actively believe in all of these psychic and mediums etc... was Hitler. He thought that these people could help give him insight into his future, and just further inflamed his ego. So the long answer is there has been some form of trying to find evidence of the paranormal throughout human history.
However, if you are wondering when modern day ghost hunting began I would say it really started to take route with the Warrens / Amityville Horror / Exorcist pop culture stuff in the 1970s. It probably faded out a little bit, but then in the 1990s SciFi (now SyFy) had a show called Sightings and Beyond Belief that featured things about the paranormal and that seemed to be when people started becoming more interested in the paranormal again. Then by the early 2000s you had reality shows starting to come out about ghost hunting, such as Most Haunted and GHOST HUNTERS. Ghost Hunters was the spark that ignited the powder keg of peoples' interest in finding evidence of the paranormal - in particular ghost hunting. I was in late high school when it came out, so 2004/2005ish I believe. I thought it was absolutely fascinating, which was odd considering when I was a little kid I believed my childhood home to be haunted (as an adult I am a lot more skeptical). But Ghost Hunters seemed to be a reality tv show that was trying to use somewhat scientific methods and evidence to prove the existence of otherwordly entities. I was enamored with the show, because it made me feel like they were on a quest and one step away from proving the existence of a spiritual realm - something that would have solidified and prove my childhood experiences. So in a bizarre way even though I tried to forget the hauntings of childhood, I became interested in ghost hunting. I dabbled a little bit in my senior of high school and in my early years of college. I liked Ghost Hunters because they tried at least proving things without bring along a bullsh!t artist (aka a psychic / medium). I tried copying their methods, but with a lot less resources (and of course with some crackpot friends who believed they had 'gifts'). However, after a few years I grew up / grew out of watching the show and grew out of ghost hunting. I think I matured and the magic of it all left me. However, I know Ghost Hunters in the early / mid 2000s sparked the ghost hunting craze that we have seen for the last decade. Also, the flourish of shows about ghost hunting, Cryptozoology (in particular big foot-esque creatures across America) and other paranormal beings has certainly flooded the pop culture industry within in the last several years - so much so, I would argue it has ruined and tainted many formerly intelligent / academic tv stations, such as: National Geographic, Discovery Channel, History Channel, Science Channel, and Destination America (which might as well be renamed to Haunted America). A few shows are fine, and enjoyable, but when the market is flooded by them it becomes too much. But I would say the modern day link could be traced back to the 1970s Warren couple / Amityville Horror / Exorcist, which by the 1990s made a resurgence in paranormal shows on SciFi, which lead to shows like Ghost Hunters in the early / mid 2000s, which has now lead to the flood of paranormal shows currently on TV.
I hope this diatribe was what you were looking for.