Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (10 page)

Virginia Ridgeway led Zak and me in a séance where she became temporarily possessed. Though she seemed genuine, and you can see it all for yourself in the documentary, I’m still unsure how I felt about what was happening. Could she be caught up in the moment, or was she literally channeling a spirit? The weirdest part was the strange, unexplainable sounds going on the whole time. During the séance, I felt as if someone was lurking over us—some kind of presence was there among us.

With Virginia and Red in the building with us, I had some sense of comfort. These people knew the building and what to expect, but soon it was time for them to leave us for the night.

That’s when Red locked us in—I mean, literally locked us in. For the first time, we were in a true “lockdown,” which would become the signature of our investigations and our television series.

Zak and I suddenly saw what would make us stand out from everyone else. Other ghost hunters can run away if they lose their cool during an investigation. They are free to leave the haunted house if things get too intense. Not us. We wanted to face not only whatever entities were lurking inside, but our own fears
as well. When the audience understands that we’re trapped, the fear factor is kicked up. That fear makes us more sensitive to the paranormal. Our instincts take over. Fight or flight. In just that fleeting moment, we inadvertently found what would differentiate us from all the other paranormal seekers. There’s a big difference when you can’t simply walk out the door, no matter how intense things get. And things were about to go beyond intense in the Goldfield Hotel.

Once I heard that final lock click into place, that’s when the adrenaline really kicked in.
We’re trapped inside
. I kept hoping we’d get something—after all, we’d spent some pretty good money to get into the place. We didn’t have all that much left, and I was praying we’d capture something significant and not just a bunch of useless footage. The price we’d paid turned out to be a bargain.

Our motive throughout the entire shoot was to keep it raw. It was just the two of us, and that was what the investigation would be—nothing fancy, no camera tricks or odd angles, just straight documentation. We’d been reading up on proper investigation techniques and theories, and at the time orbs were the big thing. The strange balls of lights in photographs that show up on film but aren’t seen with the naked eye, which some people think are a sign of paranormal activity, are still controversial today.

Personally, I think that 98 percent of orbs can be thrown out and attributed to water vapor, dusts, lens flare, and all that crap we now know. But when you’ve spent years looking at orbs, you start to realize that not all of them can be so easily explained. When orbs appear in conjunction with other paranormal activity, that remaining 2 percent can only be described as balls of energy. I think true orbs are just that: energy. The paranormal is an open book, and there are new things to be discovered every day.

At that time, orbs were new to us, so we thought taking pictures throughout the Goldfield would be beneficial. As more and more things started showing up on film, there came a point when we were getting scared. Yet there’s nothing wrong with being scared on an investigation. It heightens your senses and perhaps makes you more in tune with your surroundings. It certainly did for me that night.

It’s not like there was a catalyst for the fear at this point. I felt my pulse quicken, felt a tingling sensation on the back of my neck, and sensed something ominous. There was no reason to have these feelings yet, but there they were. In the coming years I’d learn to pay close attention to those feelings when they happen.

As I was walking around shooting on my Panasonic DVX100A, Zak was ahead of me taking pictures. I followed him as we went down the hallway, past room 109, and up the stairs.

Room 109 was the room the locals had told us about again and again. The story goes that a prostitute named Elizabeth was chained to a pipe in the room and was killed there because she had become pregnant with the child of a former Goldfield owner. The owner had supposedly chained Elizabeth in this room until the baby was born, then took the newborn and threw it down an old mineshaft in the basement. He left Elizabeth to starve to death. When Zak first walked into the room, he immediately got chills.

As Zak was taking pictures, I was filming him, yet the whole time I could feel something following me. All I kept thinking was,
If there is something following me, when is it going to finally attack me?
These are the types of thoughts that go through your head.

Finally, I slowly turned the camera around to see if there really was anything behind me. Then I had to turn the camera a little more so the dim light from the LCD screen would shine down the pitch-black hallway to show me whether something really was standing there. You’re essentially putting all your faith, all your safety and sanity, in the light of a tiny LCD screen. For me, it’s still one of the creepiest moments in the documentary.

The activity intensified as the night went on. When we investigated the upper floors later on in the night, we captured a figure that was peeking around the corner and then just disappeared. We first saw it with our own eyes, although Zak had a better view of it from where he was. I didn’t completely buy it until I reviewed the footage. When I saw it captured on film, that’s when it got me, when I knew it wasn’t just my eyes playing tricks.

Even when I see something, my mind immediately begins trying to logically explain it. It’s just how I keep myself balanced, always trying to put an explanation on something. But when
something that is hard and factual evidence is being validated on a piece of equipment, you just can’t wrap your head around it. So you have to come to terms with it, and that pumps you up to keep searching for the answers. That was a big moment for me.

The night was getting more intense as we pressed on. We soon made our way down to the basement after hearing the sound of something metallic dropping onto the floor. I was tired and scared, and Zak and I kept getting separated from each other. The basement was so dark. I was thinking about the strange things we’d already seen and heard, and I wondered where I would run in an emergency. A hundred thoughts were going through my head at once, but one thought stood above all others:
Just keep filming
.

Another strange bang on a pipe somewhere behind us, and we’re now totally on edge. After Zak and I collect ourselves, we make our way down the passageway following the glow of our night vision cameras. We pan around the corner into a room and come to another dusty room. Our cameras settle on some debris for only a second when we see a brick levitate and launch across the room—all of it captured on tape.

At that moment, I panic. We both do. If some invisible force can throw a brick, then it can hurt us. That thought races through my head in the same instant my body is already turning to run.

The flying-brick moment is the biggest event in the entire documentary, and it’s the evidence for which we have become best known. And despite what others have tried to say for years now, it’s 100 percent legitimate.

A lot of people like to point to an edit cut in the footage, but everything is in real time. What you see there is a cut from one camera to the other, and I’ll take you through the entire
sequence of events that led up to what I feel is historic evidence of the paranormal.

Just prior to entering that portion of the basement, Zak was like, “Hey, we’re going to confront this thing.” Later, when we were about to enter that room, he said, “Nick, you going in first?”

I could understand Zak’s apprehension, because prior to that, the activity had already been amping up in the basement. As I was walking through the complete darkness, I was looking at where I was walking using the LCD screen. From the moment we stepped off the staircase, we could tell the environment had shifted.

After a while, it just felt as if we were walking underwater, just a very heavy feeling. As we walked down the creepy hallway peering into rooms, the banging sounds suddenly got louder. That’s when we both started to get nervous. In the film, you hear Zak suggest I sit down for a second, and I respond, “I’m not sitting down. I don’t know where I am. I’m not, you know—Why would I sit down?” It’s funny what comes out of people’s mouths when they’re nervous.

Eventually, we gathered up enough courage and adrenaline to push forward and search out whatever was making those sounds. That’s when Zak suggested I go into the room first, but I wasn’t having any of that. So the shot you see is actually the view from Zak’s camera; then it switches to mine, so you can see the brick from the best angle. And it wasn’t just the brick—other items were being thrown; scraps of metal were flying. This was true poltergeist activity. When you’re confronted with that—something you’ve never experienced before—everyone is going to react differently. I don’t care how tough you are—it’s a scary moment. Being new to the paranormal, we reacted the way we
did: we ran. Zak went blazing out of the room, and as I took off after him, I was surrounded by this completely weird feeling.

I lost him in the dark and began drifting off in a hazy fog, like I was only partly conscious, wandering through rooms on my own. I lost myself in the moment, enveloped by this strange energy that seemed to be guiding me. I had no idea what was going on, and total confusion had set in. I wasn’t even aware until watching the footage that Zak had run upstairs and then come back down to find me. That’s when I had the creepiest moment of anything we’d caught on film—I realized I should have heard him calling for me, but I hadn’t. I’d never responded.

Perhaps something had control of me, keeping me from hearing Zak call out to me. I think I didn’t hear him because I was so scared, I just didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I was going to get attacked, if something else was down there with us. I imagine it’s kind of like being behind enemy lines—maybe that’s the best way to describe it. If you’re behind enemy lines in combat, you’re not going to start yelling out to your fellow soldier and give up your location.

I was totally drained of energy, and I was scared that if I called out to Zak, I would give myself away. I might get thrown or clawed or something terrible like that. And when we reviewed the footage, we caught a disembodied voice saying my name—so it knew just where I was. You hear it say “Nick” and then there is a burst of energy that fluctuates across the frequencies. It was the first time I heard an entity say my name, but it would not be the last.

We captured a similar disembodied voice on Zak’s camera just before he shut it off, which I believe he did accidentally—he must have been shaking so much he accidentally hit
STOP
on his recorder.

We knew then that it was time to get the hell out of there. But with the doors locked, the only way out was off the second-floor fire escape. A lot of people have accused us of making up that part of the story, saying there’s no way we could have survived a two-story jump unscathed. But you’ve got to consider a couple things—first, we were in good shape, pretty athletic, and it wasn’t as big a fall as you might think. The other thing was that our fight-or-flight instinct had kicked in. People are able to do some pretty amazing things when faced with danger. If a mother can lift a car off a baby pinned underneath it, then it was no big deal for me and Zak to jump off a second-floor balcony.

Of course, it’s different now. Over time you learn how to get out of certain situations. And now we’re locked into locations all the time, so we’re used to it. These days I let the shit hit the fan, but right then I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.

When we got in the car and took off, it was around five a.m. The day was beginning to dawn, and at that point we’d been up for twenty-eight hours straight, between driving up there and filming, and now we were on the road back home. We were about three hours out of Las Vegas when I began blacking out as I was driving. Zak was already in a deep sleep, and I began drifting on the highway.

I pulled over and told Zak I couldn’t drive anymore, that we should just sleep in the car for a while. He said he could drive, no problem, but then he started drifting off while driving as well. Finally I made him pull over again and I drove the rest of the way. That’s why today we have a production crew member drive us after a long night of investigating.

Once we got home, I slept for an entire day before I started going through the footage. What I saw blew my mind. Zak and
I reviewed everything over and over again; it seemed we must have watched it a million times. We began showing it to family and friends, and they had the same reaction. We knew we’d hit it big. We’d found something that we had to show the entire world.

But we also knew that what we had was going to be scrutinized from every angle. I thought it was important to get other people’s opinions and put them on camera. That’s when Zak found Victor H. S. Kwong, a physics professor at UNLV, to analyze the footage of the moving brick. When he couldn’t explain it away with his vast knowledge of physics, that just made the footage that much more impactful. We also had Slim Ritchie, who has an impressive background in the video profession, take a look. He analyzed the video through a variety of filters and programs and stated on camera that he saw no evidence of tampering or trickery.

That was what we needed. We needed others’ input to give it gravitas. We were the ones who’d experienced it, so our analysis might be somewhat skewed. We felt it was important to bring in a third party to analyze moments like those, and over the years on the series we’ve done it more and more. Even though we’ve become much sharper at analyzing things ourselves, it’s always good to get other people’s opinions.