Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (15 page)

It’s possible that all of the sad energy that has built up can take an emotional toll on the place. I’m not saying that this location is completely to blame for what happened between Zak and me, but it could have played a part.

The argument started because I didn’t put a wireless microphone on Zak before the lockdown began. I assumed that he could do that himself, but he assumed I would do it for him. Neither of us was right and neither was wrong, but it just escalated into a shouting match between us. We should have just suited him up with the microphone and moved on, but instead the tension that had been building came to a head and we were yelling at each other.

As anyone knows from watching
Ghost Adventures
, Zak has a strong personality. He knows it, and he doesn’t shy away from it. But Aaron and I also know a different side to Zak than you’ll see on TV. One of the questions I am constantly asked is why I allow Zak to tell me to “shut up” all the time. There are many instances in early episodes where he tells Aaron or me to be quiet. But it’s not that he wouldn’t allow us to have our say; it’s just that Zak is in the moment of the investigation, and
he’s so involved and engulfed that he doesn’t really mean it as harshly as it comes across. Normally he might say, “Hey, guys, just be quiet for a second, okay?” But when the shit is going down, when paranormal activity appears to be happening, Zak is on edge and his words just come across a little more sharply than he might intend.

My approach to investigating is to listen more than speak, but it’s inevitable that you’re going to have to tell the other two guys to shut up at some point. Aaron and I handle it differently than Zak—everyone has their own way about them—and as a result it sometimes looks like Zak is being rude to us on investigations.

That comes to a head sometimes, as it did at the Houghton Mansion. So Zak and I yelled at each other, but the issue, of course, wasn’t the wireless mic—it was everything. As we were in each other’s faces, every thought went through my mind: Are we going to come to blows? Is this the end of the show? Do I want to keep putting up with this shit?

No punches were thrown. After the standoff we both walked away for a minute to collect ourselves, while poor Aaron was left running back and forth trying to calm us down. We were under pressure we hadn’t been under before, but we both quickly saw we had a job to do, and we both wanted to check out this haunted mansion. I’m glad we yelled at each other—it broke the tension and made things better in the end. At the end of the day we looked at it as a brotherly bond.

Late in filming season one, Zak realized how it was coming across when he told Aaron and me to shut up, so we started taking a lot of it out in the edit. We thought it made Zak look bad even though we knew it wasn’t personal; it was easier to take it out than to constantly have to address it. And over time,
Zak became more chill as an investigator. As we did it more and more, he became less on edge and more mellowed out. It was just part of the learning curve for all of us.

People who want to parody Zak—and there are some good impressions out there, as even he’ll admit—will always say, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” They’ll also throw in repeated use of the words “dude” and “bro,” which, actually, all three of us are guilty of overusing. Some people have even made a drinking game out of it—every time one of us says “dude” or “bro” in an episode, they take a drink. Good luck with that! Play that game and you’ll probably be toast before we even get to the lockdown!

Dude, when we’re in the moment and forget there are cameras on us, that’s what we become. We say it a lot and it just flows from us, especially in moments when we’re not exactly thinking about what we’re saying and are instead focused on what we’re experiencing. When we filmed in Tucson, we had to trim out so many “dudes” in editing that it even annoyed us, bro.

The way we talk and react is, I’m sure, part of the reason I’ve received so many compliments over the years on the show. People perceive us as genuine. If you go through some big-time experience, your reaction probably won’t sound like a Shakespeare sonnet. It’s more like, “Wha… wha… what the fuck was that?!”

During the filming at the Houghton Mansion, some of the executives from Travel Channel showed up to check out the operation. Matt Butler was one of them, and even though we had become friendly, I was still a little intimidated by all these network people hanging around. It only added to the stress between Zak and me, since we wanted to impress those guys and show them we were pros.

I wasn’t a network person; I wasn’t even all that familiar with the television industry. When Matt started asking questions about the Houghton Mansion, about its history and the reported paranormal experiences, I felt more like a kid facing a pop quiz. It turned out the guy was just interested in the place and what we were doing. I realize now that his questions were just the kinds of questions we needed to answer for our viewing audience through the course of the show. Working with the Travel Channel helped us evolve our project in a big way.

I wanted to impress the network execs, but I also wanted to stay true to our original vision for the series. After signing on, we had meetings with the network about what we wanted the direction of the show to be. One of the biggest things I told everyone when we first started the series was that I never wanted our show to go “Hollywood,” to become some big production. It’s easy to get caught up with bigger budgets and want to do fancy effects, but I wanted it to stay raw, because that’s what made viewers connect with our documentary in the first place. I thought it made for more gripping storytelling from a filmmaker’s point of view, and it would be more true to an actual paranormal investigation.

The paranormal research groups that go out and investigate film all that stuff on their own. There’s no big camera crew following them around, no audio technicians, and they don’t just hand off the tapes to some editor who compiles them into a television show. If we had a polished Hollywood-style show, it would take away from the true nature of paranormal investigation.

We wanted to be in charge of 99.9 percent of our own stuff. We wanted to do our thing and keep it raw. How could we trust the editing hand of someone who wasn’t there? How could we
trust them to know what is paranormal and what isn’t? Even for us, it took a long time to figure out what was truly paranormal evidence. It takes a lot of research; we had to develop the skills to discern what is anomalous. In season one, you probably saw a lot of orbs and stuff like that, which could have been spirit, but could just as likely have been dust, bugs, water vapor, or some other mundane crap. The reality is we’re always learning.

Now I’ve definitely become better at figuring out true anomalies from natural phenomena. I do believe there are orbs that are indeed balls of energy or are indicative of spirits. I get thousands of people e-mailing me or sending me pictures on Facebook asking me, “Can you tell me if this is an orb or just dust?” Most of the time, I have to tell them it’s just dust.

When checking out an anomalous photo, I can tell if it’s something incredible or not right away. I do have to admit, there are some that have made me sit up and take notice. With some of the more interesting images, I’ll get a little more in-depth with the person who sent it, asking what they think it is. A lot of people will say, “Well, my family member died there and I captured this. Could it be that family member?”

In my experience, a genuine orb produces its own light. On video it might flutter or pulsate; on a still picture it would light up the area around it. These are rare, but do happen.

My response when someone shows me an orb picture is always the same: I wasn’t there, I don’t know the conditions of how it was captured, so it’s hard to say. But if you think it is Aunt Sally, then maybe it is.

That’s the problem: you don’t know who or what you’re dealing with. The person who took the picture could have emotional issues as a result of the death of a loved one. There are a lot
of people who just need validation for what they think they’ve captured, and because I’m on television, they think my opinion matters more. I’m a stickler about it—I ask very blunt questions, like whether or not there was a flash, or a window that might cause reflection. I’m straight up with folks, which some people appreciate, but others don’t. But it’s just too hard to be sure something is paranormal, and I don’t want someone running around with a doctored photo claiming it got the “Nick Groff Stamp of Approval” (no such stamp exists anyway). I have to protect my name and my integrity as a paranormal investigator, something I learned early on in filming season one.

I know how easy it is with today’s technology to digitally “add” ghosts into photos. You can do it pretty easily with Photoshop, and there are a number of smartphone apps that will automatically do it for you.

To help us decipher truly unexplained audio, video, and photographic anomalies, we reached out to, and soon became friends with, several known experts in the paranormal community. Mark and Debby Constantino are two EVP specialists based out of Reno. They are a husband-and-wife team of paranormal investigators who get EVP almost everywhere they go. They’ve become a magnet for spirit activity. They have captured literally thousands of spirit voices and have helped us get better at recording our own EVP. Because we’ve also become friends, we also find ways to mess with those guys.

On a flight one day, Billy Tolley, the
Ghost Adventures
evidence reviewer who comes with us on most of our investigations, took a photo of me sitting in my seat on the airplane. He used a ghost capture app for the iPhone to plant a semitransparent ghostly figure in the empty seat next to me. I sent it to Mark
and Debby and told them our plane was haunted. It was hokey enough that they knew it was a fake, but we all had a good laugh.

The fact that people were turning to me with their evidence meant we were making a connection with people. When we were out filming season one, we were traveling all over, just the three of us. We didn’t like being cooped up in motel rooms on the first two nights of filming, so we’d always go out, meet up with the locals, and see what’s up. I love socializing in new places, and we were starting to find that wherever we went, people were recognizing us from the documentary that was airing so often on SciFi. And every one of them had a story to tell. Everybody likes to make that connection with another person.

I’ll always take the time to talk to fans when we’re traveling. Not only do I enjoy the exchange, I also get to hear firsthand what parts of the show resonate with them. Most often, it’s the lockdown. Viewers like to see the actual investigation and the evidence we turn up.

Going out on the town on one of the nights was pretty much our only downtime on the shoots, though. On the third night, we’d go in for the lockdown, and then head home after that.
Then it was right to analysis and editing, which would keep Zak and me holed up in one room together again until we were done.

That process alone was nerve-racking. What if they lost the tapes? We’d be screwed! I had to mail them everything—the hard drives, the master tapes. I was still new to Final Cut, so it was taking longer than I would have liked. Plus, the rendering time to get the footage loaded onto the computer was killing me. Even when I’d finally got the hang of the new software and the editing process in general, I still couldn’t believe how much time was being wasted waiting for the tapes to render.

We decided the simplest solution would be to compress the footage from high definition to standard definition for our edit, and then when we sent it to the production company in New York they could recapture it in HD. It was still time-consuming, but it was our best option, and also a learning experience. It was my first time working in real television, and I was figuring out how to make it all work. I was pretty damn proud of that.

All the stress and long hours started to take a toll on our lives outside the show, and with our family and friends. I tried as hard as I could to keep some semblance of a normal relationship with Veronique, but it wasn’t easy. I give her a lot of props for all her patience. I’d be on the road, then get home, and still she wouldn’t see me all day and sometimes all night. My body paid a price for it too.

In fact, I got so damn skinny filming season one that I had to do something about it. I was on the road, which is a strain in itself, but then I wasn’t working out or eating properly. Even when I wasn’t traveling or spending all night investigating, I spent every other moment chained to an editing suite. It was hell on my
body. One night I came home and Veronique just stared at me. “Wow—you’re so skinny,” she said. “You’re way too skinny.” I never would have thought filming a television show would be that tough on my health.

When we wrapped up the first season, my cousin Justin came to live with me for a bit. He’s really smart about things like personal training—he’s been ripped since high school, back when he played football. He can lift twice his body weight. He’s one of those dudes that you just don’t want to fuck with. While he was staying with me, we were working on things like scripts and concepts for other TV shows, but we also worked out quite a bit. He got me ripped, and I went from being a scrawny 175 pounds to being 205 and all muscle. I started drinking protein shakes, and I was jacked. Justin had me kicking ass in the gym, which made me feel better about myself.