Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (3 page)

In 1994 my mom and stepfather announced that we were moving to Lake Tahoe, California. It wasn’t my first choice of places to live. I’d been visiting my dad in Chicago most years and had developed a good relationship with him and two kids up there, Phil and Sky, so instead of picking up stakes and moving to California, I left Florida in my senior year of high school and went to live with my dad in Chicago. Phil, Sky, and I became inseparable that year as we attended Glenbard West High School (the same place where the movie
Lucas
was filmed with Charlie Sheen). I loved that school, but my stay there was short. Because of good grades I was allowed to graduate in January 1995 instead of with the rest of the class in June. I never got to wear a cap and gown, but it didn’t matter to me. With the shackles of high school tossed aside, I was free to explore the world around me. So where did I go first? Detroit.

It’s not exactly the windswept Sahara or the Amazonian Jungle, but it was the first step on the road to anything. My father had family in Grosse Ile, just outside the city. I wasn’t there long (about eight months) when I decided to attend college at Western Michigan University.

Huge mistake.

Two weeks was all it took to realize college wasn’t for me. It wasn’t the academic work that made me so uncomfortable, but rather the overwhelming feeling that I was losing my identity. All around me I saw people whose goal in life was to commute to work, say hi to Sally the secretary, sit in a cubicle, and pretend to be happy for eight to ten hours a day just for the security of a fixed income. I guess you could say my mentality was like Peter from
Office Space
(although I would’ve loved to work with Milton and steal his red stapler). There was no risk, no edge-of-your-seat leap of faith into the unknown, no
joie de vivre
. It just wasn’t me.

As you can imagine, dropping out of college was an instant sore spot with my father, especially after such a promising high school career. He couldn’t understand my desire to do something that at least had the potential to be dangerous. I moved out, trying to find what I was looking for. I didn’t.

Instead, I moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, with my mother and stepfather trying to find . . . something. I got a job as a mobile DJ MC’ing a lot of weddings, and although I didn’t really care for the job, I recognized that it was an important day in many people’s lives, so I took it seriously. Plus, I loved music too much to turn it down (though to this day I can’t listen to “Celebration” without feeling nauseous). Music has always been a powerful influence in my life, and I have earbuds permanently embedded in my skull to prove it.

In Vegas I tried college again (this time Community). I did well, but found nothing but restlessness when I was accepted at UNLV. Reason told me I needed to get a degree and be a model citizen, but ambition always got the better of me.

I decided to move back to Detroit, and that’s when things got dangerous. 1998–2002 were the roughest years of my life. I was trying to figure out who I was and I held lots of crappy jobs, including selling urinal screens and sanitary services, being a valet, party host, landscaper, and DJ again. I was just waiting for something to happen and until it did, I focused on physical challenges.

It was during this time that I got hooked on mixed martial arts. Some people know it as cage fighting or ultimate fighting, and many are quick to label it as brutality. To me it’s the ultimate contest of skill waged by men who respect each other more than in any other sport. I traveled with my friend Dave Vitkay to many MMA tournaments, and I soon started training on my own. For the record, if I ever have to defend myself, I prefer to take a fight to the ground and pound my enemy out. It’s a natural fit for me.

The other natural fit in my life was weight lifting. I was always a skinny kid, but for my fifteenth birthday I got a set of push up bars and went crazy on them. I did a hundred push-ups a day and I suddenly started getting a chest. I started noticing that this skinny kid was getting stronger and was building confidence. Even my friends in Detroit noticed my physical gains. I weighed 175 pounds but could lift more than my 225-pound friends. Physical strength fueled me. All my life I had been suffering from panic and anxiety disorder, and my physical activity helped me battle them.

But despite these releases in my life, things were still going downhill. My friends weren’t problem starters, but we always seemed to end up in trouble and fights. I’ve never started a fight in my life, and in fact I don’t like violence, but trouble always seemed to find us. It wore me down, and my train was completely off the tracks and ready to plummet over the cliff. For over a year I’d been working at an AT&T Wireless store selling cell phones (I still can’t believe I stuck out a retail job that long) and just wasn’t happy. I couldn’t find myself and it was the darkest point in my life.

Suddenly, my mother enrolled me in the Motion Picture Institute of Michigan. Mom understood me. She could see that I needed something more. I fell in love with the art of documentary filmmaking and graduated with honors in an elite class. I went completely overboard with my final project, which was supposed to be a two-minute film that I turned into a full-length movie with a twenty-page script and local actors. It was called
The Red Butterfly
.

That was the first event that started pulling me out of the abyss I was staring down, but I was still unhappy. I started praying to a higher power. I knew that I had a very unique, specific purpose in my life and I asked Him what it was. God responded by slapping me.

In my wildest dreams I never imagined I could have an encounter with a ghost. It was the last thing I expected as an answer to my prayers. I was living in an apartment building on the edge of Elizabeth Park in the historic, gentrified district of Trenton, Michigan. In my apartment I could feel the presence of something that was not inviting, but I actually liked it. It was like being in the gray, murky water of Florida again by myself when most people ran for cover.

Seven nights in a row during the summer of 2002, a female ghost would scream my name, Zachary, at the top of her lungs. At first I thought it was a dream, but then I realized it was happening and I could not control it. On the seventh night she upped the ante to get her point across. I was lying in bed, face down, when she screamed my name and then pressed down on me so hard that I couldn’t get up. I was pinned to my bed, unable to move, and started panicking. As strong as I was I couldn’t escape the weight she brought to bear on my back. When she finally let me up, I turned over and saw her looking at me. There was eye contact and I felt a shockwave of energy from her. I stared at her, unable to look away. This spirit wanted me to see her and to this day I have not looked at an apparition that looked into me like this. I stumbled outside and tried to rationalize what had happened, certain I was going to die from a heart attack. It was an unmistakable moment that created a new dimension in my mind and opened it up to the paranormal.

When there’s a common threat, people become one and find a purpose together. I finally felt like I had a purpose in life. I was so close to joining the other side, but instead those on the other side created a path for me to avoid going over the cliff. That path led me to Las Vegas, which led me to where I am today.

I want to be clear that I was indifferent on the topic of ghosts at the time. But every night this harbinger was there, taunting me, daring me, challenging me, because that’s the way I saw it. Everyone responds to a paranormal experience differently. Some run from it. Some embrace it. I was traumatized and frightened, but also incredibly motivated to understand what had happened.

I had a thousand questions, mostly of a physical nature. How could an ethereal being have physical properties? How could a dead person make sound and create force? Does she sleep? Is she bored? Is she mischievous? Does she know she’s dead? How did she know my name? Does she know the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? I wanted to know if life is just rock, soil, air, water, and fire—or if there is more. Are there spiritual aspects that people ignore?

But it wasn’t the time for answers yet. I couldn’t stay in Trenton and wrote “this place is haunted” with a permanent black marker on the back of a cabinet just before heading back to Las Vegas. Detroit is a rough town, and though I love it, I’m happy to be alive after some of the things that happened during that period. That book is closed, locked, and sent to the bottom of the sea never to be reopened again, but those times made me strong and banished my fears of the physical world. From the adversity of those years I came out feeling invincible and hungry for success.

But the voice of that spirit was ever present, a calling that made no sound, yet I heard it clearly. She kept telling me to find answers and I was convinced that I finally had meaning in my life. I felt I was chosen to immerse myself in the unknown and unlock the mysteries of our world.

Destiny? Is That You?

I met Nick Goff during a wedding and found him to be an instant kindred spirit. Like me, he attended film school and had a paranormal experience years earlier. By mid-2003 we were partners making high-end wedding videos, commercials, and video projects for Vegas acts like Penn and Teller, Siegfried and Roy, and Rita Rudner. Then one day he told me about his experience on a ghost hunting trip in Virginia City and the mining towns around it.

Click.

It was all clear to me. At that very moment I saw a way to combine my curiosity in the afterlife with my passion for filmmaking. Nick and I decided we would set out on a mission to document an apparition on film in the historic haunted mining towns of the area. But we knew two cameras weren’t enough. We needed a third, and it had to be cheap; someone willing to work for nothing, since that’s all we had. Nick threw out Aaron Goodwin’s name and we met him one night at The Road Runner in Las Vegas. It felt right. The three of us had good chemistry and we decided to go for it. But there was an obvious problem. We weren’t paranormal investigators. We were simply three curious guys armed with cameras and in our youthful exuberance, thought that was actually a good thing.

A road trip through Nevada’s desolate mining country might not sound like fun, but I reveled in the moment. We drove to remote towns like Goldfield, Gold Hill, and Rhyolite, which turned out to be scarier than the filming. We started in the windswept town of Tonopah, where coyotes outnumber people. Our first paranormal investigation (which it could only loosely be called) was an old hotel called The Castle House. I swear the original owner invented the telegraph it was so old.

The current owners clearly thought we were nuts when we unloaded bags of equipment and a Ouija board during the worst thunderstorm I’d ever seen. The lightning was so intense that I swore I was going to get struck and killed carrying a tripod. Not my preferred way to die. Inside the hotel was a macabre scene of playful horror. Over a hundred dolls were strewn about an upstairs room staring at us like a jury of weird. Things happened that evening that didn’t make it into the documentary. Doors opened and closed on their own as if someone was using them, aromas of perfume wafted through the air like scarlet women, and of course there was static electricity—enough to power Las Vegas for millennia it seemed.

In Virginia City our quest morphed from fun adventure to deadly serious mission. The people of the desert were affectless, like walking puppets of the dead. We chalked their demeanors up to having daily ghostly experiences and left it at that. Being in Virginia City was like going back in time. I was told a prostitute had killed herself in the bathtub of our room at the Silver Queen Hotel, so to tempt fate I slept in it. Several times I heard water splashing around me from what we thought was a lady spirit who didn’t like people in her room. In the middle of the night, Nick and I heard knocking on the room’s door and saw a mist coming through it at the same time. We captured it on film and knew right then that our lives were about to change.

But it was another event that changed our lives forever. At the Goldfield Hotel in Goldfield, Nevada, we felt a heavy force bidding us to leave. It was hard to move, like walking through a pool with ankle weights. Nick wasn’t himself. He was lethargic and moved in and out of coherence. In the basement of the hotel, we knew something otherworldly was present with us. Discarded bricks in a dark corner drew us in when suddenly one flew across the room in an arc that scared the living crap out of us. It was almost painful when it happened because it honestly felt like arrows shooting through our skin. The message was clear—“Get out of here!”