About

Eat My Ass, Spirits! is a catchphrase and image macro inspired by a screenshot from popular paranormal documentary series Ghost Adventures, showing main host Zack Bagans standing in a dark room sporting a spray paint mask with a device in his hand and supposedly yelling the phrase. It led to many parodies poking fun at the awkward scene as well as the idea of taunting ghosts, in a way similar to the Hey There Demons meme.

Origin

The earliest instance of the meme is a two-pane picture posted to the @findmeameme^[1] Twitter page on July 25th, 2017 (shown below, left). It depicts Ghost Adventures' main host Zack Bagans listening to a man warning him not to "fuck with the spirits" as the subtitles posit before showing him shouting the line "Eat My Ass, Spirits!" in the lower panel. It is unclear if @findmeameme created the image themselves or if they took it from an outside source, as the Twitter feed is a compilation of various meme-related material.

Both of these scenes were taken from the 2016 Halloween special episode from Ghost Adventures, titled "Route 666" (shown below, right), first aired on October 29th, 2016. However, both lines were never uttered in this episode.

Spread

During the first week of August 2017, the image began circulating both in its two-panel format but also as a still image,^[2] with people referencing its similarity with another trending meme from that period,^[3] Hey There Demons. This led to similar drawn-made parodies involving characters from popular tv shows and video games such as Darkest Dungeon (shown below, left)^[4] as well as an humorous staple form tweet-based parodies involving ghosts and the paranormal (shown below, right).^[7]

On October 3rd, 2017, Twitter user @hyyhye posted a reaction image featuring an asian man in a dark room with his eyes closed and grinning as if he was sobbing in terror coupled with a caption reading: "[Sobbing] Please, don't eat my ass spirits!" (shown below). It also featured a previous image parodying the meme and both photographs used seem to reference and represent K-Pop singer and BTS member J-Hope (Jung Hoseok) as the twitter thread discussed the band visiting a horror maze several days prior.

This variation appeared in CollegeHumor's top 12 memes for Halloween 2017^[6] and let to many mores parodies (shown below).

Various Examples

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External References