Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (17 page)

The New Jersey hospital was an intense place. It was dirty and dusty—the first time we had to use air masks—and the activity seemed to be everywhere. Some viewers found the breathing masks distracting; some even called us pussies. But seriously, when you spend days in dangerous asbestos-filled locations that are closed off to the public, your lungs fill up with that crap. You should see some of the liability waivers we’ve had to sign to get into old buildings like Essex County Hospital. I’m not a lawyer, but let me quickly sum up the gist of what these waivers say: “There’s a ton of bad shit in this building—bad shit to breathe in, bad places to step, and weak structures. There’s a great chance you’re going to get hurt, sick, and maybe even die. You agree not to sue us for anything, ever. Have a great time! Sign here:______________________________________”

I’m in no rush to become a ghost myself, so occasionally I’m going to wear an air mask on the show.

When you get into a location where very few have gone before, it’s like whatever is inside finds you immediately because human activity is so rare.

This investigation wiped me out. Being a self-sufficient facility meant Essex had its own morgue. This was the first time I would get locked inside one of these things. Even though I’ve been a daredevil since I was a kid, this was something different for me. I went inside with my camera and audio recorder, and Zak locked me in. You know what? For the first few minutes it wasn’t a big deal. I could handle it fine. But the minutes stretched longer and longer and soon the silence was deafening. That tight space starts to mess with your mind. Now I’m hearing things—I know the sounds were in my head because my audio recorder didn’t pick them up. I’m sweating in there… I start to imagine, maybe even channel what it’s like to be a corpse inside that unforgiving box.

Then I hear the sound of shuffling feet outside the morgue door when Zak and Aaron are nowhere near me. I can hear something pushing against the metal door of the locker. Now I’m starting to sweat. My heart is racing. Later I would see from the stationary camera we’d aimed at the body locker I was in that there was a force moving the door. Inside the box I’m trying to keep cool enough to record an EVP session. I captured only one spirit voice there. It said, “Die.”

Panic is starting to set in; then I see a glowing face down by my feet and I lose it. I start kicking against the door. I can only think about getting the hell out of that box right now! Zak hears the pounding and screaming and finally runs in to let me out. That experience was some of the most intense fear I’ve ever experienced.

Once I got home, those bad feelings got worse. The location may have played some role in what I was going through, but there was much more. I edited that episode by myself, and when I got about halfway through I just felt like I couldn’t do it anymore. I was exhausted. I never would have guessed that I’d be working on a television show and be this overwhelmed. I thought there would be help with this stuff, that we’d have a support staff. The reality is we didn’t have a huge budget, so we all had to pull a lot of weight. And given that this was the seventh out of eight episodes in the first season, I wasn’t sure I could go on. I was staring at the computer doing nothing. Just staring straight ahead for minutes at a time. I felt like I had no life—nothing but work. Every muscle in my body wanted to get up, walk away, and turn off the lights behind me.

And that was just what I did. I walked away and went outside for some air. Probably the only thing that made me turn around and get back to the edit was the simple fact that I’m not a quitter. I was going to finish this fucker, and do the next episode. After that, I could rest and rethink everything. I became singularly focused to get this and the next episode done. My background in sports helped me a lot. I had flashes of those UNLV soccer tryouts where I’d physically pushed myself past the breaking point. Being a competitor has taught me that my limits are almost always in my mind—they can be overcome.

We were almost finished filming the first season when the first episode premiered. All those hours of work, the arguments, the amazing moments, the effort of the entire production team was about to come together. Friday, October 17, 2008—a day I’ll never forget. It was the best feeling in the world, seeing
promos all day long on the Travel Channel, and then, as nine p.m. was drawing near, I was giddy inside. It was like watching the original documentary on the SciFi Channel… only times a hundred. We had little parties and get-togethers for the new episodes as they premiered, and I started to realize that we really did have something great. It was unique, it was gritty, it was real, and I felt like we were making our mark both as filmmakers and as paranormal investigators.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the level of fame that came as a result. I was used to getting recognized at paranormal events or asked to critique evidence because of the documentary, but this was a whole new level of exposure. After four or five episodes, I was starting to get recognized in public.

Let me say this: our fans rock. They are amazing, they’re dedicated, and we love them as much as they love us. But it’s still a little jarring when you’re standing at the airport in Manchester, New Hampshire—one of the tiniest airports around—and you’re getting recognized. When people are driving by in a car and start screaming “Ghost Adventures! Ghost Adventures!” out the window, it’s pretty bizarre. But at the same time it’s really
cool. This thing that had started as a dream in my apartment was now a hit television show.

But I also know that fame will never change who I am. I always stick to my roots, where I came from and who I am. I’ll never say no to anybody or act like I’m too big for them. I’ll take a picture with anyone who asks, I’ll sign an autograph, because there are already too many egos in the television industry. Me, I’m just a human being like anybody else, and this is my job.

Though I did change in certain ways. I watched myself on the episodes and wanted to be better. I went from being the guy who had told Zak that I just wanted to be behind the camera, not in front of it, to being the guy who started editing myself because I felt too much of what I said sounded stupid or lame. I became conscious of what my image was going to be to the public, and started to care more about how I came out looking from this whole experience. I thought about the clothes I was wearing, what I said, and how I said it. That may sound like a compromise from keeping it raw and real, but I look at it more as wanting to put some polish on what I was already doing. If I was going to be successful at taking the audience into a haunted location with me, I didn’t want any distractions. So I took the time to think about what to say and what to wear.

We improved in front of the camera pretty quickly. We filmed a lot of videos for the Travel Channel’s Web site in which we recounted some of our experiences at a location, and those were good because it was just us and the camera. We also started doing other specials, like “Best Evidence” and “Scariest Moments.” Those helped me gain confidence too.

I learned that if you want to get better on camera you need to film yourself and watch yourself in an objective way. You’ll see
your flaws pretty quickly—we all have them. We might slouch a little bit, or use too many “ums” when we talk, and that stuff can be fixed.

Life as a television personality is different from being some young guy in a documentary. You even start to look at yourself differently. For one thing, I looked back at the documentary and cringed at the shorts and stupid shirt I was wearing.
I wore that?
I wondered.
Couldn’t I have worn some cool jeans or a cool shirt or something?

Hey, I said I didn’t change who I was as a person. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t get a better sense of style.

Besides, we must have done something right. Before the Travel Channel had aired all eight episodes in our first season, they had already decided to sign us for season two! This little documentary and now series was turning into a hit.

T
he more you investigate the paranormal, the more you start to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. Each location is different, so what works at Bobby Mackey’s Music World may not work on Poveglia Island.

One lesson
Ghost Adventures
has taught me is that this stuff is real, and it’s a lot more prevalent than I’d previously thought. I’ve picked up a lot of ideas on how to investigate and how to get results from each location. Does it work every time? No. I’ve had plenty of misses, but I’ve also had a lot of successes in gathering profound evidence of spirit contact.

Going to so many haunted places has caused me to think about what might be out there and why our equipment helps us make contact.

When I was a kid, I thought a ghost was some apparition that comes into our world to scare us. That’s what ghost stories taught me, and it’s the theme that Hollywood ran with. But now I realize an apparition is only one version of the ghost experience. It’s also the most rare.

Here’s
an experiment you can try right now: Think of a friend from your childhood. Go ahead—close your eyes and envision that friend. You can actually see that person. Your memory fired some electrochemical impulses in your brain that allowed you to visualize your friend. Energy made that happen.

Energy can’t be created or destroyed; it can only change forms—that’s a law of physics.
Not
a theory of physics—a
law
. It’s called the law of conservation of energy. It means that if you take an isolated system, such as a person, the energy contained in that person can’t be destroyed. It can change forms from chemical energy—like the signals that travel down your nerve pathways—into kinetic energy, the energy required to move your arm, for example, but the energy is always there.

This law makes sense to me. It means that when we die, our energy must go somewhere. The flesh and bones—the empty vessel—is left behind, but the energy survives.

Every time we remember someone who has passed on, we are using an electrical impulse in our brain to call up that person’s image. That memory and image gives you a connection to that person. This is why so many people have visitation experiences involving their deceased loved ones.

The ghost experience isn’t just seeing an apparition. People can sense ghosts, like the way you can tell when someone walks into the room behind you. People can smell ghosts—I can’t tell you how many times witnesses have reported smelling perfume or a cigar when no source can be found. Smell is closely related to memory, so that scent may call up something specific in the case of a deceased loved one. People hear ghosts—sometimes we hear disembodied voices in a location. And then, of course,
there’s actually seeing something. The ghost experience involves our senses. There’s no way around it.

So if spirits are energy, and if we need our senses to experience them, then we have a lot of equipment available that can be adapted to help us validate what we’re experiencing in a haunted location.

It’s been a learning curve—we’re always experimenting with this stuff—but we’ve seen that our gear is clearly a factor in connecting us to what we experience out there.

Let me start with the basics. Ouija boards. There’s no item in the paranormal discussion that’s more controversial. The Ouija board is actually a brand name—a trademark that belongs to Hasbro. It’s kind of like how people call a tissue a Kleenex or a photocopier a Xerox machine. The generic term is a “talking
board” or “spirit board,” for any device with letters and numbers on it and some kind of pointer, or planchette, used to spell out messages. The Ouija board came around in 1891 and has been the most commercially successful talking board ever.

Ouija was first manufactured by the Kennard Novelty Company in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1891, five men invested thirty thousand dollars to mass-produce a new kind of board game. Their bet paid off. In 1967, this “game” outsold Monopoly. There is nothing inherently evil about cardboard and plastic. But like anything else, it’s all in how you use it.

I understand the talking board. If I were turned into a spirit right now, I could use one of these devices. I mean, I know how to spell, and I can move the pointer around, so I could get a message across. The reason this board is so controversial is because it has a stigma attached to it. That stigma dates back only to the 1970s, when the book and then movie
The Exorcist
came out. There’s a brief scene in the movie where a young girl named Regan MacNeil (played by Linda Blair) uses a Ouija board in her house by herself as she communicates with an entity she calls “Captain Howdy.”

Ever since the 1970s many paranormal investigators have pointed to this movie as an example of why you shouldn’t use Ouija boards. These critics will say you shouldn’t use them because you don’t know what could be coming through on the other side. Here’s the thing: we never know what’s on the other side—whether we use a Ouija board, an EMF meter, an Ovilus, or any other method. We’re invoking the spirit to come to us and communicate. Each method has its risks. If you feel the practice is dangerous, that’s fine—I understand. But in that case, it’s probably best for you to stay away from paranormal
investigation entirely. I also understand those people who say they get better results using one method over another—that’s fair. What I don’t understand is calling one method a doorway to evil and others safe based entirely on hearsay and rumor. The Ouija board’s reputation, for one, has a powerful effect on people. Some people are afraid to use it, and that fear doesn’t serve you in the paranormal. Having confidence in yourself and control of your thoughts and emotions does.