Read Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew Online
Authors: Nick Groff,Jeff Belanger
Once Zak was outside and settling down, I felt a little better. But, crap, we were in a foreign country and didn’t speak a word of the language. On that tiny haunted island I’d never felt so far from home and safety.
Once we’d split up to take solo vigils, the location got even more intense for me. When I went into the ruins of the main hospital building, I stood still for only a few moments to let my eyes adjust. Some ambient light came in through the windows—just enough so I could see shadowy figures moving around in the
dark. There’s no fear compared to when you know you should be alone but you realize you’re not.
Our best capture of this investigation happened when I was in that hospital building. Sure enough, our night vision camera caught a shadowy figure darting by, which validated what I was seeing. I’m always blown away when the evidence backs up our own personal experiences.
I’ve never felt so grateful to see the sun breaking on the horizon as I was the next morning on Poveglia Island. In some respects, this location was easier for me to put behind me. Something about the island made these entities feel isolated to me, as if I knew they couldn’t follow me. They were stuck there, thousands of miles away in the Laguna Veneta.
Is there a location you’d really like to do a lockdown?
Since our first season I’ve wanted to investigate the Kings Park Psychiatric Hospital on Long Island, New York. This giant hospital closed in 1996 after more than a century of operation. The big abandoned buildings just speak to me.
The Washoe Club in Virginia City keeps calling me back. As I’ve said, I feel some kind of personal connection with this place. The more I go there, the more I feel like I should go back.
The strangest experience I had inside this storied building didn’t happen as part of a
Ghost Adventures
episode, though.
It happened during a paranormal event we held in town for our fans, in October 2007.
One of the highlights was taking the attendees into the Washoe Club with us for a séance. There were about twenty of us sitting in a circle in the upstairs ballroom, which was the exact spot where I’d caught that apparition for the documentary. EVP specialists Mark and Debby Constantino were there, as was Janice Oberding, a longtime author and paranormal researcher who’s been on a couple of
Ghost Adventures
episodes. And my friend Dave Schrader from Darkness Radio was sitting next to me.
The group took up the whole ballroom. We were all holding hands and getting quiet. I’m not usually one for séances, but I figured if I was going to try this, then I was really going to focus. I concentrated on my spiritual side.
Pretty soon different women in the circle claim they’re being touched. One woman says her hair was just pulled; another says she just got her hair yanked. These women aren’t even sitting next to each other—they’re spread around the circle. Whatever this thing is around us, it’s getting more aggressive.
“So, you want to be a tough guy?” Dave Schrader calls out.
I jump in: “All you can do is push girls? What’s up with that?”
Together, Dave and I say, “Why don’t you do something to us?”
I look over to the hallway next to the ballroom—exactly where I’d been right before I’d caught that apparition—and I see a man standing there leaning against the doorway. I know this is in my mind’s eye because no one else is reacting to it. He’s looking at me—it’s like he knows that I see him. He kind of looks like that creepy old guy in
Poltergeist
II—the black hat and clothes, but not as old. When I see this figure I feel like I’m going to throw up. My head starts sweating, and the room
feels like it’s going to spin on me. I keep seeing flashes of this guy—almost like a strobe effect.
Aaron is standing across the room from me—he doesn’t participate in séances like this—and has a clipboard tucked under his arm. Suddenly the clipboard comes out from under his arm and goes flying down the hallway, like someone’s just grabbed it and thrown it. I’m thinking,
Holy crap
.
I get up, Dave gets up, people are getting hurt, I’m getting sick, and I want this to be over. We are all unnerved, so we break the circle and the activity dies down.
This was that moment when I knew that the spirits knew me there. And I knew them.
I would be validated when Mark and Debby Constantino went there for their own investigation years later. They captured EVP that had my full name, “Nick Groff,” even though I was hundreds of miles away at the time. So it was a no-brainer for us to go back and film another episode here in season three.
I know I’ll be back there again and again. I don’t know when, but it’s destiny when it comes to the Washoe Club.
Early on during the filming of season two, we knew we had a hit show. Our ratings were solid, and the Travel Channel was thrilled to be working with us. That’s when the network brought up the idea of doing a live Halloween special. In the past, they had done this with the
Most Haunted
program from the UK, and this year it would be our turn.
The concept was a seven-hour live program where we
investigated a location. I didn’t even have to think about it. I believe my exact answer was, “Oh, hell yeah!” I looked at this as a new challenge. The only part of live television that concerned me was the technical aspect: How would we cut from one camera to another? How would we transition? And what other elements could we bring in?
Doing what we do live wouldn’t be any different for me because during our lockdowns we only ever get one take at capturing paranormal phenomena. The cameras are always rolling, and we’re always ready for what might happen.
But—and it’s a big but—I also know that hours can go by when nothing happens. I know from filming our lockdowns that setting up our equipment and base camp isn’t riveting television. When we walk from one section of a building to another, it’s just walking. No one wants to watch that. This live show would take some planning.
We kicked around a few different location ideas but eventually decided on the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia. The place is huge and haunted—and, come on, it’s a former asylum. That’s GAC all the way.
The building itself presented some technical issues. Because the walls were so thick, we wouldn’t be able to use wireless cameras to send the signal to the broadcast booth. And the building is huge, which meant we would need miles of cables for everything.
That also meant that the three of us would need to have cables dragging behind us. I wasn’t happy about that, because when you have thirty or forty feet of cable behind you it can get caught on things like doors and chairs and cause dragging noises far away from you. But there was no other way in this case. We would have to work around it.
On each floor, Aaron and I would have to plug into a wire in a predetermined position. Those transitions had to happen quickly. We decided we would preproduce short segments ahead of time to play during those transitions. The segments would include interviews with witnesses who had had experiences in the sections of the building we were about to investigate.
To help us out during the investigation, we brought in some of our friends and leading experts in the field. We had psychic Chris Fleming, Mark and Debby Constantino,
Ghost Adventures
fans who were going to join us for part of the lockdown, and a support staff inside to review our evidence as we gathered it.
In 1858, workers broke ground on an ambitious new building complex: the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. For the next twenty-three years, employees toiled to construct the largest hand-cut stone masonry building in North America. Earlier, in 1848, psychologist Dr. Thomas Kirkbride had developed an asylum design that revolutionized care for mentally challenged people. Instead of locking these folks in prisons or chaining them up in basements like some dirty family secret, Dr. Kirkbride proposed that sprawling campuses be built that could be self-sufficient. Staff, and some patients, would grow their own food, make clothes, and cook their own food. Kirkbride’s plan worked. When the mentally challenged were treated like human beings, they enjoyed some happiness and learned some
skills. The plan was copied all over the United States and soon there were more than a dozen Kirkbride hospitals in America.
Following the Kirkbride plans for mental asylums, the Weston facility featured expansive wings in a staggered formation, which allowed as much sunlight and moving air as possible for the patients inside. Originally designed for 250 people, the complex reached its peak population in the 1950s, when numbers swelled to 2,400 patients in overcrowded and poor conditions.
This impressive campus of buildings found itself caught in the crossfire during the U.S. Civil War. Construction had begun using Virginia funds, but when West Virginia seceded from the Confederacy to join the Union, construction was halted and the grounds were used for training soldiers to fight for the North. Today there’s a Civil War wing of the building that appears to be active with spirits from that era.
Construction was completed after the Civil War and the building was renamed the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane.
As with so many Kirkbride hospitals, Trans-Allegheny went from cutting-edge and humane treatment, to overcrowded conditions, to underfunding, and finally to ruin. In 1994, the building closed its doors, leaving the paint to peel, the wood to rot, and the metal to rust. But even before the doors were locked, staff knew there were more patients present than they could account for. Nurses reported hearing disembodied footsteps and the cries of mentally tormented patients.
In recent years, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum has enjoyed a rebirth as a tourist destination. Though the building offers historical tours during the daytime, it’s the evening ghost hunts that bring in visitors from all over the world. With so many people in anguish while the place was open, it’s no surprise that ghostly accounts still pour out of the giant compound. Many of the hauntings seem to be residual, a kind of psychic imprint left there. In fact, residual hauntings are the most common kind. It’s not a trapped spirit, it’s not interactive, it’s just a sort of memory of the location.
There are accounts of these types of hauntings at Trans-Allegheny, but there are also stories of dangerous interactions with spirits. One tour guide was assaulted by an unseen force in the stretcher room of the main building. She was pinned down and flailing when two of her friends came to her rescue. There are still rooms and hallways that staff and tour guides avoid. Every part of this building has some reported activity, and though some seem to be benign former patients, others are out to harm.
Asylums are havens for negative energy. All of that torment and human drama leave a stain. The conditions inside Trans-Allegheny were sometimes inhumane. I spoke with one former volunteer who told me how, when she was counseling a patient going through an alcohol rehab program, she watched cockroaches crawling out from under his sleeves. The place was so dirty that patients didn’t even bother to wipe the bugs away anymore.
If you could get an EVP from one person from history, who would it be and what would you ask them?
I was so close to my grandmother that I’d probably reach out to her spirit and ask her what happens after you pass on from this world. I’ll admit I’m afraid to actually try this because I don’t want her spirit to linger.
Doing the live show here was exhilarating for me. I loved the pressure of no second chances, of everything having to work properly the first time. During the episode viewers were asked to text in where they wanted to see me get locked in alone. The choice was between two buildings and the former morgue. Of course the viewers picked the morgue. More than five hundred thousand people texted in to vote.
That night we captured multiple EVPs on our digital recorders and were able to play them live during the show. We also had personal experiences like cold spots, and during one session with Chris Fleming, Zak heard an audible spirit voice next to his ear.
After seven live hours, all the amazing feedback, and the thrill of seeing it all come together, I was beginning to understand just how popular we were with fans.
People could connect with us because we’re just regular guys who put themselves in extreme situations. When it’s scary, we freak out. We’re not afraid to laugh at ourselves, and we’re willing to go the distance when it comes to exploring the most extreme haunts around.
It’s not all demons and tense moments on
Ghost Adventures
shoots. We have a lot of fun too. If you check out Aaron’s vlogs on our YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/gaccrew) or at my channel (www.youtube.com/NickGroffVlogs), you can see hundreds of our wackier moments.
When you’re sitting around all day waiting for equipment to arrive, or interview subjects to show up, or you’re stuck in a hotel, you need to amuse yourself.
During our shoot at Letchworth Village in New York, Zak was sitting in the front seat of the rental car trying to record voice-overs for an episode we’d already shot. With Aaron rolling his camera, I walked up to the car carrying a boom mic and dropped it over the car near the windshield so it looked like I was trying to record Zak’s audio through the glass. Aaron came around to the passenger window to catch Zak’s reaction. The whole goal was to break his concentration. At first Zak started to smile as he was trying to read a serious voice-over. Then he started to laugh. Aaron and I were cracking up. When Zak came out for a mock-interview, I kept rubbing the big fuzzy mic against his face until he chased me off.
For our Valentine’s Day special at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, we were staying at a nearby hotel
that put out cookies in the lobby for the guests. It’s not like they said, “Just take one,” so I took the whole plate. It was almost one a.m. and Aaron filmed me walking down the hall with the plateful of cookies. I knocked on Zak’s hotel room door and handed him a cookie. Then I started placing chocolate chip cookies at the doorways to other people’s rooms. We were all trying not to burst out laughing. It was so late, and even though most of the rooms around us were taken by people in our production crew, we didn’t want to wake anyone else up. We were tired from a long day of filming and everything was funny at that point. The more we tried not to laugh, the funnier everything was. Everyone who’s seen this video on YouTube thinks we were all stoned. I promise you we weren’t—we were just giggly for a late-night snack. Cookie, anyone?