Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (21 page)
Read Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew Online
Authors: Nick Groff,Jeff Belanger
What’s the most difficult part of paranormal investigations?
Communication with the other side and not knowing who you are speaking with. To me that is scary, because there are evil beings out there that can harm the living world. You need to keep a clear head and stay focused and balanced when talking to the spirit world so you can tell what’s real from what may only be in your head.
By the time we interviewed former patient Betty Potts, I thought I was going to seriously break down. She’s a wheelchair-bound woman who had been forced to come to Pennhurst when she was eight years old. When she described her life there, I felt
tears welling up in my eyes as I tried to focus. She explained how they tied her down to her bed and placed her in seclusion. She would bang her head against the wall, she said, so she could get some attention from the staff. This poor woman—this human being like you and me—not only witnessed this, she lived through it.
When we were done interviewing her, I went outside to catch my breath and have some time alone for a minute. I glanced around at the buildings. These structures had been designed to help people, but instead became houses of torture. When you walk into a prison, you know what to expect—those people are there to be punished. But people went to Pennhurst because they needed help, at a school and hospital, a place for kindness and assistance. Instead they got torture.
Standing there at Pennhurst, glancing around, I realized that I—me, Nick Groff—am partially to blame for the type of abuse that went on there. And so are you. Because Pennhurst is an example of when society fails. When the institution was finally shut down, fingers were pointed in many directions, but the fault for the poor treatment lies squarely on the shoulders of society. Society didn’t understand these disabilities, society didn’t want to deal with these unfortunate people, and society didn’t demand that their government allocate more resources for facilities like Pennhurst to take proper care of the people who needed the most help.
After those interviews and before the lockdown, Pennhurst became personal for me.
My mission was to tell the story here—not just the ghost story, but the personal story that represents the reason behind the haunting. That had always been the idea with
Ghost
Adventures
, but at Pennhurst this idea hit my heart. In that episode I felt I understood why this place was haunted. It
should
be haunted. Every soul who walks in there should be reminded of the screams from the past, and I wanted to remind our viewers of this too.
The Pennhurst campus was so huge that we rented a helicopter so we could film the place from above. It was eerie how vacant and hollow the place looked from above. As the helicopter came in for a landing, I felt myself reconnecting, getting mentally ready for this lockdown.
This location was a little different from the others. Because parts of the buildings are dangerous and falling apart, and because people are constantly trying to break into the buildings to thrill seek, vandalize, or steal scrap metal, we had security guards positioned outside for the entire night. In fact, the night before we arrived at Pennhurst, some kids had broken into one of the buildings and had to be chased out. And one time, one of those trespassers pointed a gun at the security guard. I swear, it’s always the living you need to fear more than the dead. So we had a radio in case we needed help. The security guards locked us into the building for the night, so the only way to get around was through the underground tunnels that connect many of the buildings.
The tunnels beneath the buildings are so dark. Even if it’s noon and sunny outside, these tunnels are black. As we were making our way down the passageway to the first building, I moved along the wall with only my night vision camera to light the way. I completely missed a metal chair lying on its side in front of me and I went tumbling over. A searing pain shot through my hand.
After Zak shined his flashlight on me, I saw that my hand
had just gone into broken glass and shards of metal on the floor. I saw the blood dripping down my arm. It hurt, and the worst part was I couldn’t even remember the last tetanus shot I’d had. I made a mental note that I’d need to get one when I got back home. But I had to go on. We wouldn’t get another shot at investigating this place.
The whole building had a feeling of sadness, but beyond the sadness, there was something else there. This sinister force. Something we didn’t show on the episode was what happened to us on the top floor of the Mayflower building.
What are your top three most frightening moments on Ghost Adventures?
At the Washoe Club in Virginia City I heard my full name, “Nick Groff,” come out in an EVP. That really freaked me out because the voice was so clear. At Moon River Brewery I was scared because I had never experienced something taking over my body like that before—I will never forget that. But my most frightening experience happened at Linda Vista Hospital when I locked eyes with a spirit. She still haunts me.
Some of the isolation rooms for the patients were on the top floor of the Mayflower. We were all hearing these voices. Now, part of the reason security was stationed outside all night was because they’d told us stories of finding trespassers in here before. So the only way in was through those tunnels—and right outside those locked tunnels were the security guards.
We’d heard enough disembodied voices on our investigations to know what was paranormal and what was not. The sounds we heard up there didn’t seem paranormal at all. We heard voices, then the sounds of running feet. We were sure some kids were in there fucking with us. The more we listened, the more we were positive it was just some kids pulling a prank. Maybe they didn’t even know we were there. I was pissed, you know? We were trying to investigate and film a show here. I started yelling, “Hey—we’re calling security if you don’t get in here right now!”
The voices and running continued, so we got on the walkie-talkie and asked security to come up and deal with this. On the episode you don’t get to see what happens next. Security unbolted the door and ran a pretty good distance to come find us.
They did a sweep throughout the building and found nothing—not a trace of any break-in, not a soul. And there was no way out except through the tunnel we’d come in! Now we were a bit freaked out. These guys shrugged their shoulders and said, “It happens here.” Then they walked out and locked us inside again.
We didn’t collect a ton of evidence at Pennhurst, but there was this overwhelming feeling of sadness all around. The most interesting paranormal occurrence was when a rock was thrown at us by an unseen force. We caught the small stone bouncing by on camera. Though the paranormal activity on the night of our lockdown wasn’t as intense as other locations, Pennhurst will haunt me forever. I’m fortunate to have had the chance to investigate there and proud of the story we could bring to light again. We can never have enough reminders that we must take care of our fellow human beings.
Poveglia Island was another location I had heard about years before. Located off the coast of Venice, this place seemed like it could be one of the creepiest locations on earth. We tried to go there during our first season, but foreign travel and filming can be very expensive, so our budget didn’t allow for it. During season two, Zak and I pushed to get there. I’m glad we did.
Off the coast of Venice, Italy, there is an island that legend says was formed from the ashes of all the dead who were buried there. Poveglia was once home to an insane asylum, but today the entire island is abandoned.
Locals and tourists alike are forbidden from setting foot on the island. Fishermen avoid the area because they say it’s cursed. Poveglia Island
is
Italy’s darkest haunt.
In the south lagoon between Venice and Lido sits this small island that has been a place of refuge, a stronghold, and a dumping ground for the sick, dying, and deceased for many centuries.
In AD 421, Poveglia Island saw its first inhabitants arrive. Barbaric invaders had come to the mainland, so locals took their boats to the nearby island for protection. The island was highly defendable and, considering its relatively small size, not worth the trouble for invading armies.
In 864, two hundred followers of Doge Pietro Tradonico settled on the island after Tradonico was assassinated by Italian nobles. For centuries the small group managed the island and avoided many taxes and laws that would have applied to them on the mainland. The population dwindled and eventually the island was abandoned in the fourteenth century.
When the bubonic plague arrived in Venice in 1348, many islands, including Poveglia, became lazarettos—or quarantine colonies. Venice was particularly harsh in dealing with the infected. When citizens showed signs of the plague, they were carted off—against their will—to islands like Poveglia. This was almost certainly a death sentence.
Near the center of the island the dead, or those too sick to protest, were burned in giant pyres. The corpses of tens of thousands of those who’d perished in Venice made their way to the Poveglia pyres.
The bubonic plague killed one out of three Europeans. People lived in constant fear. Families turned on one another as the dying lay in torment. But 1348 wasn’t the last plague to hit Venice. In 1630 another disease spread through the city. Again the nearby islands like Poveglia were used for the sick and dying. There was so much death that a psychic scar was left on the region forever. Ghostly reports on the island go back centuries.
Between 1798 and 1801, during Napoleon’s military campaign through Italy, he used Poveglia Island as a place to store gunpowder and weapons. He knew that between the ghostly legends and the island’s defendable position, his weapons cache would be safe.
In the late 1800s, an asylum was constructed on Poveglia Island. Isolated from Venice and from the world, the mentally disturbed couldn’t bother anyone else. Likewise, there was very little oversight in regard to the facility’s caregivers. Locals will tell you the rumors about a doctor in the 1930s who conducted strange experiments on patients, butchering his victims. The doctor eventually went mad, and jumped from the tall bell tower. Though the bell in the tower was removed decades ago, locals still report hearing a chime echoing from the old tower.
By the mid-twentieth century, the facility had been converted into a geriatric center for the elderly to live out their final days. The place closed for good in 1975, leaving only the shell of the building behind to remind us of what was once there.
In recent years, construction crews attempted to restore the former hospital buildings. But, inexplicably, the crews stopped working, leading some to speculate that they were driven away by some dark force on the island.
Poveglia is an island—it’s surrounded by water. Like many investigators, I believe there is a connection between water and the paranormal. These spirits, these entities seem to be trapped here, unable to cross the watery plane. Maybe the water amplifies the activity here—it’s a theory we’d be able to test during our lockdown.
None of us speaks Italian, so there was a language barrier here. But we learned a few phrases before the investigation. One key phrase:
Usa la mia energia
, or “use my energy.” While
trying to record spirit voices there, I was curious if we’d capture EVP sounds and if the words would be in English or Italian.
Why don’t you guys use your thermal camera more often than your other gear?
We use the thermal camera quite a bit—almost in every location. The reason you don’t see it in every show is because sometimes we don’t capture anything. Sometimes we’ll let that thing roll for an hour, looking in every corner of a building, and get nothing. We’re not going to bore the viewers with that. But then again, sometimes we capture some amazing footage with the thermal.
In the Gettysburg episode we captured that dark blue human-looking figure down near the train tracks. The blue color means the figure was colder than the environment around it. At the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel we saw that reddish-colored figure move out of one of the rooms. We believe that red color meant the spirit was sinister.
At the Hales Bar Marina we captured a solid-looking figure up near one of the locks standing by Aaron. So the thermal can be an amazing piece of investigation equipment, but we don’t get results with it at every location.
This lockdown was also different for us in that there were no doors to lock us in with. Well, we’d been dropped off by boat for the night, so if we wanted to leave, we’d be making a swim for it. Now that’s a true lockdown.
Usa la mia energia
became a point of contention between me and
Zak at Poveglia. Zak would yell back at me, “No! Don’t say that.” He didn’t think it was a good idea to allow these spirits to use our energy. I should mention here that we had machetes to get around the island because the vegetation was so thick in some places.
One weird thing was that there was no electricity running to this island, yet we were getting EMF readings, and the batteries on my camera were being sucked dry. When that happens, I feel like something big is on the horizon. Soon it wasn’t just my batteries—I felt the energy draining out of me. I was getting dizzy and nauseated, and then I saw that it wasn’t just me. Aaron and Zak were also feeling strange. It hit us all at the same time. Then Zak started to get into this prepossessed stage. Something was attaching itself to him. Shit was getting weird now and we had nowhere to run.
Zak started going nuts and was hitting the wall. I’d been through this before. I could see we needed to get Zak out of this room right away before there was a full-on attachment. He was going into a blind rage… and the dude had a machete strapped to his side. I pulled him out of the room so he could get some air.
I was getting really uncomfortable at this point. There were only three of us on the entire island, we were all feeling drained, and now Zak was about to have an attachment. There was no exit plan.