Read Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew Online
Authors: Nick Groff,Jeff Belanger
It was actually Aaron who noticed first. He started making some stupid comments to me, like, “I kind of liked skinny Nick a little bit better. Zak’s supposed to be the ripped one, I’m the overweight one, and you’re the skinny one!”
Of course, it’s funny now, because Aaron started eating right and he lost a ton of weight himself. Now Zak, he took it a little differently. Zak’s a competitive guy, and he’s always making everything into a competition. I’m competitive too—it’s always been in my nature and I hate to lose. Whether it was swimming, or basketball, or whatever, I’ve always had to win. I wasn’t looking to compete with Zak when it came to our bodies, but he kind of took it that way.
Zak and I were working out together one time at a shoot. We were in a hospital because it was the only place around that had a gym. I’d been keeping on top of my workout plan, eating right, keeping my weight up, all that stuff. And as we were working out, Zak looked at me and said, “Dude, how can you just go from 175 to 205? There’s no way you can do that.”
I knew where he was going with it, and I didn’t like it. I asked him what he was getting at.
He eventually laid off me, but he still tried to lift more than me that day.
It happens all the time, though, these little competitions. Maybe it’s just part of the male bonding. You know that game in some bars where you put in a dollar and punch the machine as hard as you can to try to get the highest score? Yeah, we do that anytime we’re out together and find one of those machines—thank God there aren’t many of those around anymore.
I took tae kwon do as a kid. My dad got me into it when I was five or six, and I followed it all the way through and earned my black belt. He got me into it because he knew it would help me stay in control of my emotions, but also if I got in a fight, at least I’d know how to defend myself. I continued it all the way through college at UNLV, even shooting some tae kwon
do videos with one of my professors. It was a big part of my life growing up.
So if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to throw a punch—and how to focus all my strength and power into my fist as I’m throwing it. I would punch the stupid machine as hard as I could, scoring 900 or something. When Zak took his turn, he didn’t score as high as me. He just kept feeding money into the machine until he beat my number. I ended up with bloody knuckles after missing and punching a hole in the wall on one of my turns. It’s funny how competitive we can get with each other.
Punching a wall offers an ironic lesson: If you’re going to work in the television production business, you need to be able to tolerate some pain. Sometimes you have to punch; sometimes you have to negotiate. You have to remind yourself that no matter how many disagreements, at the end of the day we all want the same thing: a kick-ass show.
Different locations and episodes have stuck with viewers for different reasons. One location that makes many fans’ top five lists is Bobby Mackey’s Music World in Wilder, Kentucky. I’d been dying to go to this place for years, and I’d mentioned it to Zak and Aaron as a possible future investigation just as we were finishing our documentary. As soon as we got the green light on the series, Bobby Mackey’s made our season one short list right away.
Bobby Mackey’s is a former slaughterhouse with connections to cult activity, suicide, and heartbreak. When you put all that together in one place, it will draw in negative energy and spirits.
Today, Bobby Mackey’s Music World is a popular nightclub full of song, dancing, and good times. The cheerful setting, however, also holds something more sinister. Some have claimed the building’s basement holds the gateway to hell itself—in an abandoned well discovered in the bowels of the building.
Many cultures have long associated water with paranormal activity. Some believe that spirits can’t cross flowing waters. So perhaps it is the rare northern-running current of the Licking River that keeps the dark forces trapped inside the building.
The roadhouse that sits at 44 Licking Pike has a bloody history and a shady past. On this site in 1850, a large slaughterhouse and meatpacking facility were constructed that would serve northwestern Kentucky and nearby Cincinnati, Ohio.
In the lowest part of the building sat a well to hold the unused blood, guts, and waste from the slaughtered animals. This was long before the days of electricity and refrigeration. On warm days the area around the building would reek of death.
The slaughterhouse closed in the 1890s and then sat empty, but not unused, according to many legends. Some researchers have speculated that satanic cult activity took place in the building around the well. Animals, and possibly humans, were slaughtered here for ritualistic purposes during secret meetings.
In 1896, the murder of twenty-two-year-old Pearl Bryan, a small-town girl from Greencastle, Indiana, made all the headlines in the region. Pearl’s body was discovered in a field less
than two miles from the slaughterhouse, but her corpse was discovered headless.
Pearl was pregnant, so her boyfriend, Scott Jackson, a student at the Ohio College of Dental Surgery, urged her to come to Cincinnati, where he could arrange an abortion for her. Jackson and his roommate, Alonzo Walling, attempted the abortion themselves, but something went horribly wrong. To cover their tracks, they brought Pearl’s body out to an empty field and cut off her head so she couldn’t be identified. They might have gotten away with the cover-up, but they’d left Pearl’s shoes on her feet. Shoes made especially for her in her hometown of Greencastle.
Pearl’s severed head was never discovered, though some have speculated that Jackson had ties to the satanic cult that held rituals in the old slaughterhouse. Some believe the head made its way to the basement of the building to be used for dark incantations.
Scott Jackson and Alonzo Walling were both sentenced to the gallows. Police investigators pleaded with the men to disclose where they’d hidden the severed head, but the men maintained their innocence. They were executed on March 21, 1897.
The slaughterhouse was razed in the early part of the twentieth century. The lot sat empty until the 1920s, when the property was born again with a new building that served as a casino, nightclub, and eventual speakeasy during Prohibition.
When Prohibition ended in 1933, E.A. “Buck” Brady bought the building and called it the Primrose. After more than a decade of successful operations, his casino caught the attention of Cincinnati mobsters who tried to muscle their way into the operation. When Brady refused to sell, the violence
escalated with fighting and threats to customers in the parking lot, until 1946, when Buck drew a gun on a local mobster named Albert “Red” Masterson. Soon after, Brady was charged with attempted murder and left the casino business.
Then, in the 1950s, the building reopened as a nightclub called the Latin Quarter. It was during this time that the club’s most prominent ghostly figure traces its roots. It’s the classic story of forbidden love. Johanna, the daughter of the nightclub’s owner, fell in love with a singer who performed there. She got pregnant and intended to run off with the young singer. Her father forbade the romance, however, and used his criminal connections to have the singer killed. When Johanna discovered her lover had been murdered, she attempted to poison her father, then took her own life in the basement of the building.
The dark past of 44 Licking Pike came to an abrupt end in 1978, when a series of fatal shootings at the rough-and-tumble nightclub forced local authorities to close the establishment.
Later that same year, a young country singer named Bobby Mackey bought the building and turned it into the music hall and tavern that still stands today. Paranormal phenomena have been present since day one. Though Bobby himself is skeptical, he’ll admit that he doesn’t doubt the words of many eyewitnesses over the years who have experienced something powerful and unexplained in the building.
Nightclub employees, local police officers, and even patrons all have accounts of being shoved by unseen forces, witnessing specters walking throughout the building, and even cases of demonic possession. Though clergy and psychics have tried to help, there’s a dark force that still lingers inside.
Legends are curious things. They’re created by people, but there’s always some root to them based in fact. We don’t know for sure about the cult activity, we don’t know if there’s a connection between Pearl Bryan’s missing head and the building, but we
do
know the place is haunted. We spoke to the witnesses who had been pushed down the stairs. We saw the video footage of the exorcism attempt on Carl Lawson, a former employee and caretaker of the building who actually lived in an apartment upstairs from the bar for several years. The reasons for the haunting may be in dispute, but the fact that it’s an active dark place is not.
As soon as I walked in there, I felt on edge. This was the second location we filmed, though it was the first to air. The reason for the switch was because of all the insane activity that happened. This place got personal really fast.
Though we were still new at
Ghost Adventures
, I had been on enough paranormal investigations to know that you can sit for hours with nothing happening. Bobby Mackey’s wasn’t like that. This place was active the entire night. I was wiped out by the end just trying to keep up with everything.
Even when I was taking a short break something happened. We knew from talking to witnesses that people had been assaulted in the men’s room in previous years, but you don’t think about that when you have to piss, you know? As I walked into the bathroom, suddenly I heard a loud bang that sent me running out. When we went back in with cameras, it happened again. My heart was racing the entire night. It’s so rare that things happen in the same spot just as you’re watching—that’s somehow more frightening than experiencing the paranormal in a place you don’t expect.
After the strange banging sound in the bathroom, Zak started provoking just outside the men’s room. He yelled at whatever entity might be listening when he suddenly felt a burning sensation down his back. When he lifted his shirt, we could see three scratch marks!
Holy shit
was the only thing I could think at this point. Banging noises and seeing shadows are passive. It happens in the building, you know? Getting scratched is a physical assault. It occurred to me for the first time that what we were doing might put me in danger. It was incredible enough that we’d already captured the banging and the scratches on camera. But there was more to come.
Down by the old well, we caught a shadow figure on camera. You have to understand that any one of these events is a once-in-a-lifetime capture for a paranormal investigator. We had it all happen on the same night.
After we were done with the shoot, Aaron said something sinister followed him home. To this day he won’t go into much detail because it’s so deeply personal. But he later admitted on camera that he believes whatever it was broke up his marriage.
The stuff we captured was so amazing that we called the network and told them they had to move that episode up to being the series premiere.
And the network did it too, which was no small feat. The first episode had to be scheduled months in advance, because of all the programming involved, the release of show information, the promotion and commercials to publicize the series, and everything like that. So it really meant a lot that the Travel Channel was willing to stick their necks out like that and move up the Mackey’s episode. It meant they put their trust in us.
We made it through filming that first season, but that’s not to say there weren’t times when I felt like I’d had enough. In fact, the seventh episode of that season, at a mental hospital in New Jersey, was when I first reached my breaking point. Filming there freaked me out. Thousands of people had died at that old place over the years, and it was very creepy.
How do you avoid bumping into things in complete darkness?
I do bump into things… often! I’ll show you the scars and bruises sometime. One problem with showing us walking into stuff on the show is that it will make you laugh and break the mood of the location and moment. So fortunately—or unfortunately if you’re the kind of person that likes to see us get hurt—those moments end up on the cutting room floor.
Getting into this location to film and investigate was a trick. We had to agree not to name the location in the episode because the town was afraid that tons of people would come there after seeing it on
Ghost Adventures
and break in at night. That’s a legit concern. The more popular our show has become, the more people want to go where we’ve gone and become part of the legend.
I can tell you now that the place was Essex County Hospital. Of course, within minutes of the episode airing, some people recognized where we were and posted the name online.
Built in the late 1800s, Essex County Hospital and the surrounding buildings were constructed on hundreds of acres. The site was intended to be self-sufficient—the facility grew its own food, produced electricity, and even had its own fire department. The objective was not to financially burden the surrounding community while helping the patients live a somewhat normal life away from the torment and nightmares that waited for them inside their own minds.
In the early part of the twentieth century, psychology was still in its infancy. Practices that we’d consider barbaric today were commonplace in treating the mentally disturbed. Shock therapy, ice water baths, and even lobotomies were just some of the techniques used on psychiatric patients. Sometimes the treatments were worse than the affliction—driving some further into madness, and others to murder and suicide.
Psychiatric patients were often the unwanted of society. In some cases, the mentally disabled were abandoned by their families, leaving large institutions as their only hope for their basic needs. But life inside could be grueling, to say the least.
The hospital suffered a major catastrophe in the winter of 1917, when the hospital’s heating plant broke down. For weeks patients went without heat, and twenty-four people died within twenty days, some freezing to death in their beds. Though the hospital brought in oil-burning stoves to offer some relief from the cold, the stoves were forbidden in the
criminally insane building because the administration feared the patients might use the oil to set fires.
During the Great Depression, thousands of Americans were homeless and hungry. People were having themselves committed to institutions like this one because it meant a roof over their heads, but soon these facilities became dangerously overcrowded. Hospital staff simply could not care for so many people, and the overall population suffered.
Working at the hospital was a challenge even under normal conditions. The screams, unnatural laughs, and painful moans of the patients could eat away at even the most hardened orderly’s nerves. Attempts at escape, violence among the residents, and the occasional patient abuse by staff pushed to the brink have left a permanent mark on this facility.
During the 1970s, funding for large psychiatric institutions dwindled, leaving many struggling to provide basic care. Advances in medication meant that some people could move out of institutions and back into society, but some were simply turned out onto the street, where they had to fend for themselves.
As funding and patient population declined, Essex County buildings were shut down and left to rot. Slowly the paint peeled away and the surrounding forest grew closer, threatening to swallow the land and reclaim it. Several years ago the few remaining active buildings shut their doors for good, leaving the massive complex to decay into obscurity and legend.
For years, stories have circulated about disembodied voices echoing through the empty hallways. The firehouse is said
to be haunted by a former fireman who died after a tragic fall within the building. In some of the patient wards, even darker forces have been reported. The phantom cries of tormented patients seem to be a residual haunting—a kind of psychic recording that plays over and over.
Other forces are both interactive and dark. Black shadows have been seen lurking in the buildings and in the network of underground tunnels. Those who have ventured into the patient wards have reported a threatening, unwelcome feeling—these witnesses ran away and didn’t catch their breath until they were safely out of the building.