Read Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew Online
Authors: Nick Groff,Jeff Belanger
“Jesus, man, are you all right?” Zak asked.
To me, this was the most frightening part of the experience. All I was thinking was,
Kill you, kill you, kill you guys
. Zak
didn’t look like Zak to me; he was this weird figure. As drained as I was, I was also enraged. I looked at Aaron and I could think only about killing him. I told them both what was going through my head and they backed away from me and left me alone by the equipment for a minute. I’m sure they weren’t far from me, and I’m positive they didn’t have their backs to me.
Then Zak and Aaron heard something and moved toward the bar area.
That’s when I snapped. I knew those thoughts I was having weren’t my own. I knew I had been taken over by some entity in that building, so I grabbed my camera and started rolling as I made my way to the bar. “Fuck you!” I yelled. “You’re going to do this shit to me?! I’m coming to get you now.”
It’s irrational, I know. I couldn’t see this thing, but I knew it was around me somewhere. I wanted to fight, but on terms I could understand. I wanted to hit this thing and hurt it. I headed back downstairs to near the pool table. I went down alone. I didn’t care—I wanted a piece of this thing.
I had never felt so violated in my life. I wanted revenge. Pure rage consumed my mind. From the stairway I heard both Zak and Aaron yelling at me: “Nick, get back up here!” A second later I heard them running down the stairs—they both knew I shouldn’t be down there, especially alone.
They grabbed me and dragged me back upstairs to where I was able to get ahold of myself. The sun was going to rise soon; we had only about forty minutes before they were going to let us out. So from around two a.m., when I was overtaken, until about four a.m., all this crazy stuff was happening, but none of it made it into the episode.
Zak, Aaron, and I have had a lot of discussions about what
we do as investigators. I’m not a big believer in cleansing yourself or anything like that. In my experience, you need to leave these things where you find them. But I also got to thinking after Moon River that we go looking for these evil and dark entities at locations all over the place. When you do that, when you dance with the devil over and over again, eventually these things are going to take an active interest in you. This negative energy was starting to surround me. What happened in that basement was just the pinnacle of what I’d been doing for over a year at that point.
If we put out positive energy from ourselves, it forms a bubble that keeps the bad stuff out. I’m human, I don’t feel positive all the time, so sometimes that positive energy I try to put out gets weaker and the bad stuff seeps in like a virus.
Now I know to work hard at putting out that positive energy, especially right after we finish a lockdown somewhere. Those are the days I need it most, so I can leave the bad stuff behind. Moon River Brewery taught me this tough lesson.
Up to that point, I thought this stuff couldn’t happen to me. I wasn’t even sure I believed it was possible at all. When I saw other people get overtaken, I thought they were either just faking it or under some kind of delusion. But this happened to
me
. If these entities can jump into my body, what else can they do? This shook me up, and it didn’t end when we left the building.
Being locked in a morgue or sitting alone in a solitary confinement cell is just a scary dare. Having an unseen force take control of me was fucking frightening.
When I got home from Savannah, I felt nauseated for days. I was still shaken up and processing what I had gone through. Veronique noticed I was distant. I tried my best to explain what
I had gone through, but that would take time. I was still too close to the event.
Each day I worked to get my focus back—to try to increase that positive energy bubble around me. It seemed like each day was half as bad as the day before. After a little over a week, I could say that the attachment was over.
This wouldn’t be my last brush with an entity trying to take control of me, but it taught me valuable lessons about staying focused during these investigations.
After Moon River Brewery, I have an understanding of how we can fall under the influence of entities that are out there around us. I was lucky because I had a strong will, mind, and spirit. Under different circumstances I may have needed some serious help fighting this thing.
Though I’ve had the chance to be in hundreds of these situations now, I still learn something new about the paranormal and about myself while doing this work. Every investigation changes me in some way, but a few leave a lasting impression—almost like a scar to remind me of what might be lurking around the next corner.
O
nce we got past the first season of
Ghost Adventures
, investigating so many locations and living a life on the road was turning into something I loved. Getting off an airplane in a new place, seeing different landscapes, all of that is an adventure. Traveling allows you to connect with people because you voluntarily put yourself at their mercy. When you’re in a strange town, you sometimes have no choice but to trust a stranger on advice like where to eat, where to shop, what local haunts to check out, and directions to the coolest bar in town.
Now that we all knew what we were doing, I could look forward to the locations and the lockdowns instead of worrying about every aspect of the production. The Travel Channel was pleased with the response from the first season, so this time they signed us up for seventeen episodes! That huge order was validation that this was way more than a good concept. That little idea Zak and I had kicked around was now beginning to look like a hit TV show.
Every location means something to me. We look at dozens of
potential sites before choosing one we feel is
Ghost Adventures
worthy. We look especially for places where dark, tragic events have taken place and where the spirit activity is malevolent. If people are being pushed, scratched, hit, or possessed by entities, we want to know about it.
Once we decide on a location, we really dig into it. Our researcher, Jeff Belanger, provides us with notes on the history, on what eyewitnesses have experienced, and where the hot spots are located. These notes get us ready for when we hit the ground.
Once you walk into a haunted location, you become part of that story forever. Given we’re going in there to not only investigate, but film a television show, I recognize that I’m becoming a big part of the story of a haunted place. I take that seriously.
I know there are other ghost investigating shows out there—and I enjoy watching them! Really. Even though
Ghost Adventures
fans sometimes say, “Ooooooo,” at the mention of another show, I have no beef at all. They do things their way; we do things our way. Watch both if you want different perspectives. There are some locations the other shows investigated first, and there are plenty where we investigated first. Our aim is the same. I am especially curious to see what the other guys find when they go to a place we’ve already been.
When you go looking for ghosts, sometimes you find something amazing and sometimes you get nothing. It’s not fair to claim a place is haunted or not haunted based on a single visit. Some locations could be quiet for weeks, then be active for days at a time. We just don’t know what’s going to happen and when.
When you’re in an old abandoned building, why do you think knocks and other strange sounds are ghosts and not rodents or birds?
I
do
assume that most bangs and knocks in old buildings have a natural cause. What you don’t see on the show is how many times we debunk an odd noise. We’ll hear some scratching sound coming from the wall, for instance. We’re initially freaked out—it’s dark, we can hardly see a thing, it’s tense, and then there’s this sound behind you. We turn on the flashlights and then see some big ol’ raccoon in the next room scratching away. That stuff usually doesn’t make it to the screen. What you see are the sounds we couldn’t immediately find an explanation for. That doesn’t mean it’s paranormal; it just means we don’t have an explanation for it.
Some of my favorite investigations involve locations that are big and decrepit. When I walk into these places, it’s like stepping into a horror movie. Those old buildings come alive when I’m inside walking around in the dark. I tune in to them, they tune in to me. Here are a few of the locations that have been most important to me.
During the second season we had the chance to investigate the former Pennhurst State School in Spring City, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia. Rather than an actual school, Pennhurst
was an institution for the mentally and physically disabled. I had seen pictures of this place and had heard about how some of the patients were tortured inside. The institution was controversial. It’s been called “a monument to shame” because thousands of patients were abused over the almost eight decades the huge facility was in operation. At a quick glance, it almost looks like an old college campus. There are dozens of stately brick buildings, but today the trees and weeds are literally reaching up to engulf these structures as if nature were attempting to swallow this abomination.
The Pennhurst State School episode is one I’m most proud of because we were able to not only capture amazing evidence, but remind viewers of what can happen to people who sometimes don’t have a voice. We even submitted this episode for an Emmy, but we didn’t get a nomination.
Even when Pennhurst was in full operation, these walls held something sinister. Ten thousand patients came through these doors, but not everyone left. Some were unwanted, others were thought to be beyond help, many suffered in conditions that were inhuman.
The horrid conditions the mentally and physically disabled patients were subjected to at Pennhurst pushed some of the staff and patients to the breaking point. Mistreatment, abuse, rape, and murder all took place in this vast network of buildings.
There’s a scar that’s been left here, and by many accounts it will never go away. It still lurks in these buildings.
In 1908, the state of Pennsylvania took a bold step in treating people with mental and physical disabilities by constructing a massive complex of buildings to house those with special needs. First called the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic, the facility was quickly filled with adults and children of varying needs.
The patients were separated into different buildings based on their level of intelligence. Some people could mostly take care of themselves, but others were so profoundly disabled that they spent their days and nights in metal cribs, unable to wash themselves, and some could hardly turn themselves over.
Many heart-wrenching cases were brought to Pennhurst. Mentally retarded and autistic children were often dropped here at a young age because their families didn’t know how to care for them. In many cases, the children never saw their families again—they were abandoned to become wards of the state.
Because of a lack of funding, the limited number of doctors, nurses, and orderlies could only do so much to help the suffering populace. Reportedly, some of the worst cases were starved so badly for any kind of human contact that they would smear themselves with their own feces so staff were forced to take care of them. The lack of staff also led to drastic measures in dealing with unruly patients. In some cases, people were drugged into submission or chained to their beds because the staff didn’t have the resources or time to offer proper care.
Family members would visit their loved ones and find bruises, cuts, or much worse. Some patients were isolated for such long periods that they regressed; some even ceased talking. Some patients were killed by other patients—sometimes it was an accident; other times it was murder.
There were rules at Pennhurst. If a patient bit someone, they were punished. If they bit again, they were sent directly to the dentist’s chair and had all of their teeth pulled. Scores of patients at Pennhurst had no teeth as a result of this extreme treatment. Thousands of teeth were pulled in a rusty dentist chair that still sits in the tunnels beneath the complex.
Exposés on the poor quality of treatment were written as early as 1912—just four years after the complex opened. But the abuse would continue for decades. In 1968, Philadelphia television news reporter Bill Baldini produced a multisegment exposé on Pennhurst called “Suffer the Little Children.” The piece, with its powerful imagery of the suffering inside, drew the public’s attention at last. Baldini did a real service with that piece, and I was proud to have him back for the episode of
Ghost Adventures
.
A massive lawsuit followed, further exposing some of the atrocities that had taken place at Pennhurst. In 1977, U.S. District Judge Raymond J. Broderick found the Pennhurst State School guilty of violating patients’ constitutional rights.
The facility closed for good in 1987 and was left to decay. Up until a few years ago, it was owned by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and mostly neglected… and left to the ghosts, the angry spirits, the tormented victims who continued to inhabit the buildings and the land.
Once I knew about Pennhurst’s past, I felt a lump in my throat. When I stood where these awful things had taken place, I thought I would cry. That powerful emotion would only get stronger as we interviewed people who used to work there, folks who could describe what Pennhurst was like in its day. Imagine putting a hundred profoundly retarded people into a room and just leaving them all day? They had no one to care for them, no interaction, and almost no supervision. Some were naked, some were violent, and many shut down. They weren’t treated like humans, so they stopped acting like them.
It’s easy to get angry at those who worked at Pennhurst, but that isn’t the answer. Many of those employees—like the ones you saw us interview in the episode—were really good people who tried their best to help others, even to the point of volunteering on their days off. But one person can only do so much.