Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (11 page)

But even authenticating what happened to us didn’t have as much impact as when we went back to Goldfield and showed our footage to Virginia. She said what we’d documented with our equipment was pretty much the same type of phenomena that she herself had experienced there for years.

As we were leaving Goldfield for the last time, the thought came to me for a final climactic scene of Zak walking through the Goldfield cemetery. It proved to be just another weird moment
in a series of weird moments that would always happen when we film
Ghost Adventures
. We found a grave with
ELIZABETH
engraved on the headstone, and at that moment we saw a sort of rainbow forming over the town that seemed to go directly toward her grave. I knew it was an amazing moment, so I set up the camera as fast as I could. Then I swung the camera around just in time to capture a cool flash of lightning. We were getting these amazing cinematic shots, and we felt they would close the documentary off perfectly.

The Goldfield experience definitely had a lingering effect on me, and it became the basis of what the
Ghost Adventures
series would become. But it also became our paranormal proving ground, the place where the evidence we captured would forever be either put on a pedestal or dragged through the garbage. It thickened our skins as investigators for our experience that night in the hotel, and it thickened our skins as researchers for the slings and arrows our evidence has endured.

Back when we first started showing our documentary to people, I would get frustrated when they didn’t believe it was authentic. It’s sort of like if you’ve painted a picture, but then everyone tells you it’s too good to have been painted by you. That’s what’s so frustrating to all paranormal investigators—if someone hasn’t experienced it themselves, you’re never going to fully convince them of what you’ve captured on film.

Looking back, maybe I was that way before we started making the documentary. Maybe I myself would have said, “Wow, that’s cool, but I don’t necessarily buy your story.” But now, having had my own experiences, I really listen to the thousands of people who want to share their own ghost experiences with me. Everywhere we go, someone has a story to tell. Now I listen
and, instead of judging, I embrace. It’s their experience and it happened to them, and it has meaning to them. It’s exactly what happened to me at the Goldfield Hotel.

The only difference is, I had it all on film.

O
nce filming was completed, the real work began. It was time to take our adventures and turn them into a coherent, linear story and begin the process of editing all the footage together.

I had built my own computer, and I had my own editing software and an editing deck with a small TV monitor. How I’d rigged it all together was very complex, and I was the only one who knew how to use it all properly. Video production has come a long way in just a few years, but back then what I had rigged worked for what I needed it to do.

I asked my buddy Mike Mouracade, who’d written the music for
Malevolence
, to create music to amp up some of the more suspenseful moments in the documentary. Zak and I felt it was important for the viewer to feel what we’d gone through emotionally, and music would help express that.

I also had to balance all the audio and edit together all the takes. Add in the time it would take to capture the video footage to the computer’s hard drive, and it’s easy to see why it took a good, long time for it all to come together.

Zak came over every day and we would work on it together, including writing the whole narrative. We would brainstorm, script the voice-overs, and then Zak would go into the bathroom to record them. While it wasn’t exactly Skywalker Sound, it got the job done.

I got a rush showing Zak some of the cool montages I’d put together. One example was during the Goldfield segment, when we were conducting the séance. I really wanted to paint a visual image of what we were experiencing emotionally, so I overlaid visual shots over the séance footage to convey what we were going through. It was very complex and took a lot of time, but the result was well worth the effort. I felt I was able to bring the viewer into that séance with us.

Looking back, I realize it was one of the craziest projects I’ve ever worked on in my life. It certainly took a ton of effort and resources. Some mornings I’d wake up and get right to work without even taking a quick shower. Veronique would come home and find me still unshowered, still editing, looking like a zombie in front of the computer monitor. When I look at the
Ghost Adventures
series now, I find it amazing how far we’ve come.

But it was about to get even crazier.

I’m not saying the original documentary was cursed, but there was an unusual energy surrounding the entire project. Even during the editing process, strange things began to happen. Some of it may have been my own fault—at that time, I didn’t see the value in backing up my video editing projects because it took too much time. That was lazy of me, and I would pay the price later. Always trying to cut corners and get things done quicker, I thought that since I knew the technology so well, the technology would never fail me.

Boy, was I wrong.

While editing the documentary, I had four 300GB external hard drives all linked together and tied into my computer with one FireWire cable. I was too cheap to go out and get more FireWire cables. To this day I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I think I unplugged the FireWire cable from the first hard drive and tried to plug it into another. That interrupted the flow of data to the computer, and essentially crashed the hard drives. Every time I tried to open the timeline for the project, the screen would read,
FILE LOST—ALL CORRUPTED.

Anyone who has ever had a computer crash and kill a huge project knows how this feels. I went into a rage, kicking myself for not being more careful. There’s no worse anger than when you’re mad at yourself.

I would have to start from the beginning and work it out like a puzzle, figuring out what piece was missing so I could get the project to open up. But panic began to set in when after the tenth time trying to reopen it—after restarting the computer, restarting the hard drives, and whatever else I could think of—still nothing happened.

Finally, I just called Zak and said, “You know, I’ve got a problem. I don’t have any of the timeline from point A to point B of the documentary. All the shit we put together is gone.”

I was panicking, saying over and over that I didn’t know what to do. Zak just kept uttering an occasional “What?” I wasn’t sure if he was confused or if he thought it was a big joke. I ended the conversation by telling him to just bear with me, that I would figure it out.

I hung up the phone and spent the next few minutes bitching and moaning, but then started going through a process to
evaluate everything. I started crossing out the lines and trying different things. To be honest, I don’t know how I did it, but I was able to rig one hard drive to another and get the project to open. It was still corrupted and I had to rework some things, but in the end I salvaged the film and you’d never know there had been any issue. The one major loss was a blooper reel I’d cut—that one I never got back after the crash. I wish I still had it. It would have been one for YouTube for sure.

In a way, I’m glad the crash happened. No good lessons are learned without some significant pain. When you’re faced with losing hundreds of hours of work, you get a good scare and a reminder to be more careful in the future.

Aaron wasn’t involved much with the editing because he had to move on to some of his other film projects. When he would come over to hang out, I’d show him different clips and get his feedback. He dug what we were doing, but at the same time the experience had freaked him out. He wasn’t interested in reliving some of those moments any more than he had to.

Other weird things happened early on as we were putting together the documentary. Once we felt the film was ready, I thought it would be cool to have a screening at my parents’ house and invite over some of the neighbors. I wanted them there because our closest friends already knew about the experiences and what we’d captured. I wanted to bring in new people who didn’t know, and see the expressions on their faces when it all played out on the screen.

We created a spooky atmosphere, lighting some candles around the room and turning off the lights. We placed speakers atop the television. About halfway through the film, the speakers inexplicably flew off the TV, hitting the candles and
sending wax flying everywhere. The neighbors got up and left the house, they were so scared. Some of them later told me they had nightmares after that, and others felt like something had followed them home.

Now, I don’t know if what happened was anything truly paranormal. It could have been something as mundane as the vibration of the bass causing the speakers to move. But the undeniable fact was that our film had made an impact, even on the people who saw it first.

After everyone else had left scared, the only people remaining were me, Aaron, Zak, and Veronique. I had kind of planned it out so that once we were done watching our film, I could turn on a television special that was coming on about Bobby Mackey’s Music World and the haunting there. The legend was that there was a portal to hell in the basement of this former animal slaughterhouse, because there was a satanic cult that performed rituals there many years ago. Plus there was the ghost of Johanna, the daughter of a former owner who’d killed herself in the building. I had to know more about this place. My cousin Justin loved digging into the past of haunted and notorious buildings. After all the research we had done into this place, I knew it would be the perfect fit for another adventure. Even while I was editing our documentary, I would show clips to Justin and he would keep reminding me about Bobby Mackey’s.

I told Zak and Aaron that we had to go check the place out, but even after they watched the television special, they didn’t seem that excited about it. Their response was basically, “Well, you know, whatever…”

I couldn’t believe they were being so dismissive of a location that was obviously a great fit for our vision. But we eventually
made it there, and it turned out Zak and Aaron had some of their craziest personal experiences there. But that wouldn’t come until much later. At this point, all we had was a rough cut of a documentary that a handful of people had seen.

During the documentary editing process, things in our apartment were getting really tough. Veronique and I were broke. That was the point at which we had to move into my parents’ house in Las Vegas. We were bummed out to be losing our own space, but I knew we’d get back on our feet as soon as I finished and sold this documentary.

The first room I unpacked and set up in my parents’ house was my editing studio so I could get right back to work.

Sitting in my new studio, I wondered how we were ever going to get this thing in front of people. We had this unbelievable footage. We had an apparition caught on camera, the brick at the Goldfield Hotel, this poltergeist activity. Yet I was starting to panic that the only people who were going to see it were the media in Las Vegas. While I continued to work on editing, we’d put our first rough cut out to some local media.
Vegas Weekly
reviewed the documentary and liked it, and the local Fox affiliate had us on their news program for an interview. But nothing came out of that. No big breaks.

I tried to enter the documentary into all the major film festivals, like CineVegas, Sundance, and so on, but it was turned down. We did, however, make it to some of the smaller events and even picked up some accolades. We won the Grand Jury Prize for “Best Documentary Feature” from the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival in 2006, and we were nominated for “Best Feature Film” at the Eerie Horror Film Festival that same year.

I knew smaller film festivals wouldn’t be enough. We’d need an agent to get it out there. This was a powerful documentary; everyone needed to see it. So I started hustling. I looked up hundreds of agents online, then went down the list and called each one. I heard all kinds of responses:

“Send it to us to review.”

“Do you have representation?”

“Have your lawyer send it to us.”

“No, thanks.”

After a few of these phone calls, I got better at pitching it over the phone. No agent wants to deal with someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing—which is why breaking into the business is so hard. But I learned the business end of things fast.

My phone calls went from “Hey, could you maybe look at my documentary and represent me?” to “I have this amazing documentary. Some of the most compelling paranormal footage ever caught on tape. It’s already won awards at film festivals.”

I noticed the conversations with the agents were getting longer and more interesting.

I was on the twelfth page of agents when I had a guy say, “All right, sounds interesting. Why don’t you come to LA tomorrow and show it to me.” I agreed. Then I was like,
Fuck. How the hell am I going to do that?
But you don’t say no to an opportunity like that. I called Zak and convinced him to meet me at my house early the next morning.

At the time I was working for a place called Cashman doing wedding videos. I had to walk in and tell my boss, “Look—you know that documentary project I told you about? I need to take tomorrow off because I’m going to meet with this agent.”

“If you do that, you might get fired,” he said.

I told him I understood, but I had to do this. It was too big of an opportunity. In the end, he respected me for following my dream, and let me off the hook.

Zak and I hopped into my Echo and drove all the way to LA. We got to this house on Mulholland Drive—weird, like in a David Lynch movie. We walked up to the giant mansion and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. “Hello? Hellooo?” we were saying. Finally someone came out and told us the agent wasn’t here. I called him on his cell phone and he told me we’d have to come back later.