Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (2 page)

My parents, Maureen and David, tried to encourage me to be very athletic because I was always running around anyway. I was on the swim team by age four and got used to swim practice before and after school. I was a great swimmer and traveled all over the place for tournaments and meets. Looking back, I’m sure that’s where I got the urge to see the world and travel to different places. When you spend a lot of time on the road, you get a sense of adventure early on. Locations have an identity and personality of their own. Some towns are depressed, others are quiet, and still others burst with energy. The people who live in such places create that energy and feed off of it at the same time.

After Nashua, my family moved to Salem, New Hampshire. That was an amazing place to live. My dad built a house on a cul-de-sac in an area surrounded by forest. Trees and streams and hills were everywhere around me. I was six years old and spent hours exploring the woods and building forts. Sometimes I’d be out there with my friends, but I also spent plenty of time exploring on my own. I loved the woods, loved the mystery of it, the sounds you’d hear in the distance, the strange shadows cast by the trees. An underlying sense of fear got into my blood. Every shadow was a place for something to hide or for me to explore. Like any town, the woods have a life and personality too. Looking back, I can see this was a time when the paranormal was oozing into my bloodstream.

New England is full of ghost stories and paranormal traditions. With so much history, with tales of Old World witchcraft in nearby Salem, Massachusetts, and with a population that speaks pretty openly about its haunts, how could I not become who I am today?

Sports and friends were the two biggest parts of my life as a kid. I was an adrenaline junkie even back then. I was such a strong swimmer that I broke a national record for the fifty-yard freestyle when I was ten years old. I also played soccer and basketball. I was a rowdy athlete, and that sometimes got me into trouble in school and in town. I was ultracompetitive and always wanted to win, but I loved to have a good time too.

I loved making people laugh, because that made me the center of attention…and it usually meant my teachers would be pissed off at me for the disruption. My parents got a lot of phone calls and had plenty of meetings with the school. My dad was a lawyer, so he had to deal with people’s shit all day long, and then
he’d have to come home and deal with me. Sometimes I don’t know how he and my mom did it.

Don’t get me wrong—I was a good student when I wanted to be. I got C’s and B’s. I could be smart when I was interested in something. I was lucky to have a few teachers who helped me find my way and get focused.

When I was at St. Patrick School in Pelham, New Hampshire, I had one teacher who really got through to me. Mrs. Moran saw that I was always daydreaming and making up stories. I didn’t want to listen in class; I wanted to do my own thing. She helped me to develop my storytelling.

I had just seen
Cujo
, the movie about the rabid dog based on Stephen King’s book. In my head I was imagining a story about a three-legged dog that followed me and my friends home. Instead of dismissing me for having crazy ideas, Mrs. Moran sat with me and helped me put them down on paper. She helped me find something I really like to do: tell stories. I think I still have that story of the three-legged dog sitting around somewhere…and no, you can’t see it! (Just kidding…I will try to find it and post it on my Web site someday.) I’ve been a storyteller since a very young age. I still am. I always will be.

Movies were a huge influence on me too. I remember watching
E.T.
as a kid. Both the movie and the subject left a huge impact. I was blown away by the idea that UFOs could visit us, and by the incredible characters and the experiences everyone went through. Paranormal themes spoke to me even as a wide-eyed kid munching popcorn in a dark theater while watching a Steven Spielberg masterpiece.

In fact, I can’t think about my childhood without also thinking about movies. I was in love with every part of the moviegoing experience. When I sat down to watch a movie, I escaped everything. Everyday activities, anything that was frustrating about home or school was gone when the movie rolled. I would put myself in the movie—I was right there with the characters having an adventure. And when I left the theater, those adventures would continue, in the woods and in my head.

Growing up, we had only one TV with big rabbit-ear antennae, so we didn’t get many channels, but of course we could rent movies. I was about six years old when I walked in on my sister watching
Alien
. I joined her, and it scared the crap out of me.

Every time I’d watch a horror movie, it would give me nightmares. I’ll never forget Wes Craven’s
A Nightmare on Elm Street
and the character Freddy Krueger.
Cat’s Eye
,
Pet Sematary
,
Children of the Corn
,
It
,
Twilight Zone
—all these movies scared the shit out of me. I was a huge Stephen King fan back then. I loved the adrenaline rush that only fear can bring—although sometimes that made it tough for a kid to sleep. My parents would sometimes wake up in the morning and find me sleeping on the floor in their bedroom near the foot of their bed. I didn’t care. I still wanted to see more horror movies. Fear made me feel alive.

I’d do anything to get my hands on more scary movies. One
time I was at the video rental store trying to rent
Dr. Giggles
. It was rated R and I was just a kid. The video clerk told me that I couldn’t rent it without a parent’s permission. I pointed to a woman across the store and convinced the clerk that she was my mother. When I got home, my
real
mother was pissed that I had rented the slasher film.

Maybe it was the horror movies combined with my overactive imagination, but even my room frightened me. I was scared of what might be under the bed. Some nights there was nothing and I slept fine, but on other nights I had this sense that I wasn’t alone in there. It could have been just in my head, but danger lurks in funny places. By looking for ghosts and monsters, I would learn to face fear, to control it within myself.

I know children are more sensitive to the supernatural. Over time we learn to forget what we feel because adults tell us it can’t be real. But what if you don’t believe that? I know we say ghosts aren’t real because we want to protect our children, because we want them to feel safe. Knowing what I know now, I can see I was sensitive as a kid. I’ve lost most of that sensitivity over the years, but not all. I don’t feel I’m psychic, which can be a good thing when you’re looking for ghosts. I know that if I see something it’s not some psychic sense. It’s real and right there. And if I can see it, my camera can see it too. I can tell the difference between my own psychic impression and what’s physically in the room with me, but that skill took dozens of investigations to develop. An impression is almost like a memory, even though the event is happening in the present moment. If the spirit is manifesting in the room right now, then I’m using my regular senses to experience the entity.

My childhood was not one paranormal event after the other,
but I can look back now and see that there were events that couldn’t be explained. There were connections between adventures, accidents, and life experiences that molded me into who I am today. The same could be said for all of us—we are all a product of every moment of our lives up to this point. But this is how I was drawn into the paranormal and how I launched a career on television. It wasn’t a single event, but a bunch of small moments that steered me to this. Two seconds here, two seconds there, and you end up exactly where you are now.

Throughout these pages I’m going to answer some of the most common questions you’ve asked me on Facebook, Twitter, and in person, and I’ll bare it all. We’ll go behind the scenes and into my own life because I want you to see the world through my eyes. I want you to know more about the history of the locations I’ve investigated, and I want you to understand why I’m chasing spirits.

T
here’s no question that fear sharpens your senses. When you’re in a situation where your heart is racing and adrenaline is pumping, you’re wide awake, you see and hear things you might not hear otherwise, and you’re extra sharp. Tapping into that fear can be helpful in a paranormal investigation. Knowing fear means to know yourself. Standing in creepy, abandoned buildings frightened of what might be lurking there is one thing. Facing the real possibility of your own death is another.

My brush with death occurred when I was only eight years old. Did I mention I was a hyperactive kid? Indestructible? Looking back, I wonder if this event left me more open to the supernatural. Could coming close to my own death have brought me closer to understanding the spirit world? I’m not talking about some psychic awakening—though I know all of us have certain abilities and intuition. I mean just knowing that the spirit world is there. Recognizing the paranormal when I see it because I faced it as a kid.

Since my sister, Dianna, and I were swimmers, we spent a lot of time at the YMCA in Nashua. We had practice several times a week. My practice ended before my sister’s, so my mom would take me outside and let me run around while we waited for Dianna to wrap up.

On one of these practice days, my mom sat down on a bench to read a book while I ran off to the small park behind the building. I wandered farther and farther away until I found an old tree that was begging me to climb up it. This tree stood out from the others: it was old, its branches like wrinkled arms and legs sticking out from a knotty trunk. It called to me, and soon it would punish me for my curiosity.

Part of the tree was rotten, but there were plenty of branches for me to pull myself up with. I climbed up one branch, then another. Soon I was about twelve feet off the ground, but I wasn’t thinking about the height—I was thinking about the one branch that was sticking out on its own. I leaned out and grabbed the branch with my left hand, putting all of my weight on the old limb. It seemed to be holding me, so I reached out with my right hand to grab it as well. I swung my legs out from the branch I was standing on and…

…I didn’t look down—not that it would have mattered had I seen the old, rusted chain-link fence directly below the branch. I wasn’t thinking about falling—I was thinking about pulling myself
up
on the branch…

…
CRACK
… the branch snapped and I was falling.

I don’t remember the fall. I don’t even remember hitting the cyclone fence or the ground below. I do remember opening my eyes and seeing the tree and sky above me. I tried to stand up and look for my mom, but then everything went black and I
collapsed in a heap back on the ground. Again I opened my eyes and pushed myself up. My mom was running toward me… something felt wet and cold on my left side. I looked at her and said, “Mom, I love you,” and again it all went black and I collapsed to the ground.

What happened next was like flashes of a movie. I opened my eyes and my mother was huddled over me working on something near my body—I couldn’t tell what it was. Later she told me that my left arm was ripped completely open two-thirds of the way around—the cyclone fence had sliced me up like a rusty razor. She could see my bone, my muscle was torn, and I was bleeding everywhere. I wouldn’t know that until later, though at that point I did know something was very wrong.

…I opened my eyes and I was inside the YMCA building with a group of people standing around me.
I have to
die—that was how I felt. Like this was my time to go and that there were angels standing over me looking down. “It’s going to be all right,” someone said. I looked at my arm. There were T-shirts wrapped around it and everything was red, soaked with my blood.

I was in and out of consciousness, but I didn’t feel any pain. I realized much later that my body was in shock—my brain had turned off all pain receptors in an effort to spare me further trauma. I opened my eyes again and was in an ambulance…
black
… I opened my eyes and was in a hospital operating room. Dianna was in there sobbing…
black
… I opened my eyes and could hear doctors working on my arm, but I still felt nothing but gentle tugs on the skin of my arm…
black
…

…this time I woke up in a recovery room. My mom was there. When my foggy head cleared, I heard the whole story. When I’d fallen, the top of the chain-link fence had ripped my
arm open to the point where my biceps was hanging from my bone like bloody meat. Had I fallen just a quarter inch differently, the fence would have sliced through a major artery and I would not have survived. Had my mother not seen me fall and had I lain there a few extra minutes, I would have bled to death. Had my mom not been a former nurse, had she not kept a cool head and wrapped a T-shirt around my wound to stop the bleeding, I would have died. Just a few seconds had made all the difference.

I had fifty stitches on the inside of my arm and fifty stitches on the outside to pull my arm back together. You can still see the deep scar that goes almost all the way around my left bicep.

I was in a cast for a long time, and it hurt like hell after the cast was removed. My parents and coaches forced me to get back into the water and swim again as soon as the cast was off. Every stroke was painful for weeks. I know why they did that to me. I was raised to not give up, no matter how bad the setback. Had my arm been amputated, I’m sure I would have found a way to swim, to compete with only one arm.