Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (12 page)

Zak and I were pissed. We began arguing—we’d just wasted a four-hour drive from Las Vegas for nothing. We weren’t going to just leave the DVD there, so we decided to head over to Universal Studios and go on rides the rest of the day. Finally, late at night I got a call back from the agent telling us to come over.

It was late, but we headed back to his house and played the tape for him in his living room. We sat there and watched the whole thing with him. He said he liked it. “I’m in,” he said, but he wanted us to recut it this way and that way. We agreed, and back to Vegas we went.

We worked on trimming some of the fat from the film, eliminating a lot of the on-the-road footage and much of what were our attempts at humor. Looking back, we realized nobody thought we were as funny as we thought we were.

In cutting all that stuff, we really brought the film back to its original core: the pursuit of the paranormal. Without the goofy stuff, the scare factor was really amped up. We knew that was what would make people want to watch it.

I mailed the revised documentary back to LA.

The agent introduced us to a distribution company that had
a lot of ins with various networks. The distributors took the project and brought it to the SciFi Channel (which is how they spelled it back in 2006) as well as a few other places, but it was SciFi that showed the most interest. I couldn’t believe it. We had a shot at getting this thing on television on a real network!

At this point, we were talking about trying to get it released as a DVD or a limited run in select theaters. We didn’t know exactly what the best route was; we just knew we wanted people to see it. Zak and I were making phone calls constantly, dealing with a lot of hang-ups and rejection along the way. Finally, we got a response from our distribution company. SciFi was interested!

At the time, SciFi was looking for programming to follow their own paranormal shows, and they loved our film. They thought it would fit right in.

During this time, Veronique and I were on the move again. This time to Laguna Beach, California. I thought it would be good to live closer to Hollywood, and Veronique was able to get transferred to another Ritz-Carlton hotel out there. Life in California wasn’t easier for me, though; I was still commuting to Las Vegas to film weddings.

SciFi had picked up the documentary for seven air dates, and it did extremely well. The first night it ran, it drew a 1.7 rating, which is huge for a cable network. Close to two million people had tuned in to watch it, and the responses we heard were amazing. Everyone loved the fact that we were new, we were underground, and we were different from the other paranormal programming they were used to.

When it aired, we had a party and everybody got together to watch it on TV. I thought it was pretty awesome to see ourselves on television—and not only in the documentary itself, but also
in all the trailers and promos that SciFi had put together to promote it. Our film did so well, they even aired it an eighth time, one more than our contract had stipulated. (For anyone out there planning to sign a television contract, read the fine print!)

We were by no means TV stars at this point. From time to time I did get recognized on the street, but I still had to work my regular job. Nor did we really make much money from the SciFi deal—it made it easier to pay some of our bills, sure, but it wasn’t life-changing. In fact, we didn’t even pay back all our loans until well into season two of the
Ghost Adventures
series.

Once the film aired on the SciFi Channel, it just took off. It was all over the Internet. Back then, MySpace was very popular, and we promoted it all over there. By the time people were seeing it at the festivals, they already knew all about the film and were already fans. It was around this time that we started putting together the Ghost Adventures Crew, or GAC, an organization of like-minded paranormal investigators and fans of the film. We began taking those folks out on ghost hunts as well. It was a way to bring people to the locations where we’d experienced our paranormal encounters in the documentary. We wanted people to have the same experiences as us. Though it took a little convincing, Aaron agreed to be a part of the events. He was ready to get back into the haunts.

Even as we watched the documentary over and over again, we never really saw things we wanted to change. We stood behind our film, and people liked what they were seeing. From our provoking style of investigation to the raw feel of the film, it was a hit on every level.

Well… except for one guy. To be honest, it was the only criticism I can remember. In a magazine article, some guy bashed us
on every little detail of the film, including our provocation. It was pretty harsh. Our intention was never to piss anyone off. It was just to find our own way in the paranormal and take those who wanted to watch along for the ride. Unfortunately, though, most people are only going to love you or hate you. That’s a tough lesson to learn. There are still times when I dwell on the negative things I read online or in print. Even if it’s one complaint for every hundred compliments, it’s tough to not think about that one.

With all these successful showings on SciFi, we continued promoting ourselves online as best we could. We had about ten thousand friends on MySpace—a far cry from the two-million-plus followers
Ghost Adventures
now has on Facebook—and we were constantly filming small vignettes and posting them on YouTube, which was just starting to hit big around that time. From there, various media outlets found out about us, and soon we were the darlings of the paranormal television world.

Even as we were basking in the success we had created, we also had to start looking forward. Would we continue doing more documentaries? Would this concept have a life as a weekly television series? Zak’s brother-in-law knew a guy who knew a guy who owned a production company and had an in at a couple of networks. Sometimes, that really is the only way to get a foot in the door. So we stuck our feet out firmly and met with the guy in New York City… Maybe this documentary, this team of Zak, Aaron, and myself was destined for our own series. The circumstances that had brought us together were strange enough, but now something bigger was brewing on the horizon.

W
hen we were pitching ourselves to television networks, all we really had was a loose outline of what we wanted the show to be. We wanted the main focus to be the investigations themselves, but we’d also include the history, background, and a walk-through tour of the locations, as well as interviews with historians and witnesses to paranormal phenomena. Those were the essential elements, which we would need to turn into a formula. The three of us—Zak, Aaron, and myself—pitched the series as something that would always be real, always be raw. I didn’t know yet about a “sizzle reel,” which is a short version of your intended show that you put together to wow network executives and give them an idea of what it would be about, but I knew enough to cobble together some of our best moments of footage from the documentary along with some footage of the GAC events we’d filmed. It was four and a half minutes of the best of what we were all about.

Eventually, we had a meeting with Travel Channel. We sat in a huge room with a very large table in the center, dominated
by a gargantuan monitor. I felt like we were sitting in Frank Cross’s office in
Scrooged
, all spread out around the table and pitching to just this one guy. After visiting so many networks, we had become kind of nonchalant about the whole thing, not as gung ho as we might have been when we were first starting out.

We started talking with this exec, telling him about the film. Right as Zak was in the middle of the pitch, the guy got up and said, “Hold on a second.” He’d just seen a friend of his walking by the door, someone named Matt Butler, a guy who would change our lives.

The exec told Matt he had to come check out our film. As it turned out, Matt is really into the paranormal—he’s the guy who brought
Most Haunted
from British television over to the Travel Channel in the United States.

So we all watched the DVD together. When it was over, Matt said, “Wow, that’s amazing. Awesome.” We could tell he was really into it. We started talking more about it, and when we saw his enthusiasm, it really gave us a good feeling about where the meeting was going. We’d come so far doing everything we’d done—all the craziness that had led up to this moment. I tried to express that to Matt as best I could, and I could see he understood. There was a moment where I felt like we just connected, almost as if I had known this guy for a long time. We were all kindred souls, and the whole thing started taking on an “it was meant to be” feeling, which we so often hear about but so infrequently experience.

We left the meeting feeling great. Since it was one of our first times in New York, the three of us decided to head over to the Statue of Liberty. It was while we were waiting for the boat that we got the phone call from the production company that had set up our pitch meeting.

They basically said, “Travel Channel is really interested. They gave us an offer. They want to do it. They’re going to give us eight episodes.” And our response was, “Hell, yeah!” Before this point, we’d had offers from Discovery, Biography, and some other networks, but they all wanted us to film a pilot. We felt we had essentially done that already with the documentary. Travel Channel was offering the promise of something real—eight episodes—and that was the opportunity we truly wanted.

We got to the Statue of Liberty feeling like we owned New York, even after exhausting ourselves climbing all those stairs to the top. As we stood there and admired the expanse of the world around us, I could feel like it was ours for the taking. After all our hard work, opportunity had come knocking. But now, instead of just opening the door, we had to invite it in, make it feel at home, even cook it dinner. It wasn’t going to be an easy undertaking turning our ghost adventures into a series, but nothing worthwhile ever is.

Right away I thought about how now we could explore Bobby Mackey’s Music World, Moundsville Penitentiary, and all those other places my cousin Justin and I had been researching for the last couple of years in the hopes of filming a second documentary. We could investigate the paranormal on our terms, gain access to the places where others might not dare to go. It was all happening the way I’d dreamed.

We headed back into Manhattan to the Travel Channel offices to begin breaking down just how the series would work, and we signed all the necessary paperwork. All these suits were asking us questions like whether we were members of the Screen Actors Guild. A lot of “reality” shows out there today feature out-of-work actors sporting SAG cards, but that wasn’t us. We were
just three dudes who’d made our own documentary, financed it ourselves, and devoted ourselves fully to it. And the executives were very happy about that.

But at the same time, they were taking a huge chance. We were three unknowns, both in the paranormal world and in the world of television and filmmaking. This was in the years following 9/11, when there was a lot of economic uncertainty. The job market, the housing market—nothing was stable. Yet this network believed enough in what we could do to give us this amazing opportunity.

They saw us as three individuals who could work well together with no bullshit, and what you saw was what you got. I think Matt Butler was a big push behind it, and we later became good friends. One night we were hanging out together in a bar in New York. He told me that what had really sold him on the series was that flying brick. So whatever that malevolent force was trying to do when it launched the brick at us, it probably didn’t have the intended effect.

Now we would be coming at those dark forces armed with a renewed sense of purpose. We had better paranormal equipment, better filmmaking equipment, and a better budget. It would still be just three guys locked into these locations hunting down the unknown. But now we didn’t have to worry about all the other distractions we’d had to concern ourselves with when we’d filmed the documentary.

It was 2008. I was twenty-eight years old and getting ready to produce a television series for a major cable network. Yet I wasn’t really concerned, not even when they pushed contracts and numerous other binding legal documents in my face. As far as I was concerned, that was all just business. I wanted to get
that part over with so I could move on to what I love. I knew in my heart that I was ready for this leap.

The series was going to be different from our documentary. We wanted to keep the raw feel, but a television show needs structure. We couldn’t just make up the narrative as we went along.

Sounds easy, right?

The show would also no longer be just me, Zak, and Aaron on these investigations putting together the show. There would be other crew members and production people involved—a prospect we found both exciting and daunting at the same time. We knew we still wanted the investigations to feature just the three of us, but we’d have to learn to put our trust in a whole bunch of strangers and hope they would stay true to our vision.

The production group who works on our show is small, and everyone has to do a lot of different things. Because Zak, Aaron, and I would be wearing multiple hats for the production, we really needed a first-rate researcher to help us with all the background. We needed someone who could do the research and the write-ups for a location, then make the phone calls to secure interviews with people there. This was going to be an important job, because it would all have to happen well before our team arrived to film. So we couldn’t trust it to just anyone.

We looked at a couple of people for the job. We reached out to my cousin Justin since he’d been such a big help so far, but he couldn’t do it because he had a job already.

Zak got in touch with radio personality Dave Schrader, who we really trusted. When the documentary had come out, we’d done ghost hunting events in Virginia City and Goldfield with Dave. These were some of our first Ghost Adventures Crew
events. I liked Dave from the start, but I was unsure of what he actually wanted. He would tell me things like, “Be careful of the people you work with in this industry,” and to watch out for this or that. Why did he care so much about helping us out? What was his endgame?