Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (25 page)

The room is cold: thirty-seven degrees, to be precise. Just enough to slow down decomposition.

As I walk in, I’m okay for the moment. I see bullet holes in one guy. I see a woman’s foot that looks like it melted in a fire. I see an obese man splayed out on a table, and another man with half his head missing. Then I start to see their faces and it hits me that these were living people. That energy that makes
us human was there and now is gone. All of us are destined to end up like this.

It’s powerful when you walk in the valley of death like that.

Before Linda Vista, I was on this quest because I was a believer—just an inexperienced believer. In that dark hospital ward, my beliefs became validated.

That moment in July of 2009 was like the first chapter of my new life. I couldn’t wait to see what happened next.

S
ome people might look at what I’ve accomplished and say, “Dude, you’ve made it.” I played a big part in making a popular documentary that aired on national television and helped create a very popular television series. I’ve been on
Maury
and the
Howard Stern Show
, been interviewed on countless TV news stations, and been profiled in magazine and newspaper articles.

But that’s what I’ve been able to accomplish in the entertainment field, and I don’t think I ever “made it.” That makes it sound like it was an overnight thing, as if somebody handed us a television show and we became an instant success. “Made it” also sounds like I have nothing left to accomplish—and I know that’s far from true.

I’ve worked hard over the years to get to this point. Everything was a building block, a stepping-stone, and it wasn’t until season five of
Ghost Adventures
that I stopped looking over my shoulder or waiting for the other shoe to drop. During season five, I felt like I could get back to some of my other passions: music, screenplays, and other television show ideas.

The weird dichotomy of making this show is that we’re actually serving two masters: the television viewers and the paranormal community. They’re not mutually exclusive, of course, but there’s a difference in what we owe each one. If
Ghost Adventures
ever stops being interesting to people or generating ratings and advertising dollars, it will be canceled. That’s pretty straightforward, and we knew that was part of the whole package going in. But the other side of it is the place we’ve carved out for ourselves as paranormal investigators. For better or worse and certainly not through our own doing, we’re considered leaders in the field and innovators for the approach and the equipment we use. That wasn’t our intention; we just wanted to conduct the best investigations we could, and that meant being cutting-edge in technology, technique, and theory.

I’m still finding my way in the paranormal field. There’s so much we don’t know, you can never be comfortable enough with what you do know. No matter what you believe, something can come along in an instant—like the spirit I saw in Linda Vista—that shatters all your preconceived notions. It’s not the paranormal that’s evolving, but our understanding of the paranormal.

It’s always bothered me that when you think the paranormal exists, it’s called belief and subject to ridicule and mockery. But when you buy into religion unabashedly, it’s called faith, and that’s perfectly acceptable. “Belief” is a word that has grown to have almost negative connotations. But “faith”—well, faith is all right, as long as it doesn’t step on someone else’s faith at the same time.

Lots of people believe in the existence of the paranormal, and especially ghosts, but they’re operating on faith. It’s different once you’ve had that faith rewarded by verifiable proof, and that’s something not everybody gets to experience. I will always consider myself lucky that I did.

Since my Linda Vista experience, my life has accelerated. I’ve grown as a person, I’ve grown spiritually, and my family has grown as well. Veronique and I always knew we wanted to have a family. It was only about six months after Linda Vista that Veronique got pregnant. Once that encounter had soaked into me, I got a healthy reminder of what’s really important: my family, my wife, my friends, and living.

My daughter, Annabelle, was born on December 7, 2010, at seven a.m. I was right there for her birth. It’s nerve-racking to be at your wife’s side when she is in labor, but there’s not much I could do except be supportive. But there was a single moment, just a few seconds after Annabelle was born, that something forced me through a flood of emotions.

Two seconds…

…I heard my daughter’s first cry.

Every single emotion poured out of me at once. Joy, pain, laughter, sorrow at the thought of family members who were no longer around to see this perfect little girl—all of it came out. A switch was thrown inside of me. I’m Annabelle’s dad now. Now I am fully alive and awake.

Putting this into words is so difficult for me. It’s like the paranormal—until you actually experience it, it’s hard to comprehend. Anyone who is a parent can understand. Annabelle’s birth completed my transformation. I understood that part of my place in this world would be to provide for her and love her
unconditionally. She’s counting on me, and I will be there for her forever.

I had to leave for the next
Ghost Adventures
shoot just four days after Annabelle was born. That was really difficult—it was our Jerome, Arizona, episode. It’s ironic that it was there that I could sleep for the first time in four days!

As sleep deprived as I was, I’ve never felt so spiritually strong as I did in the months following Annabelle’s birth.

Although some religious zealots might disagree, the principles of faith that allow some people to believe in ghosts are the same ones that allow others to believe in heaven. It’s all about believing that there’s more to life than just what we experience in this plane of existence, and that there’s something more to death than just a fade to black. It all boils down to the same question: what’s next?

That thought is never too far from my mind. In fact, I thought about it to the point where I started writing some lyrics to a song I was kicking around in my head. It’s called “What’s Next?” Using music, I could explore how I feel after all that I’ve been through. What is next? Do we die and just go into the ground, our consciousness extinguished as our bodies turn to dust? I don’t see how that’s possible, since I know energy doesn’t die. The energy lives on. So does it travel through another dimension, or does it linger in this dimension in which we live our lives? Maybe the Buddhists are right, and energy is reincarnated into a new physical form. But then again, maybe that energy travels through a wormhole into some other, alternate dimension, where our same self is reborn.

Music has been a part of my life since childhood. To be a good filmmaker, I need to understand how music can express
emotions that aren’t always said by the people on-screen or expressed in the visuals. Music can make you uncomfortable in a
good
way at the right moment. If someone is lurking down the hall and you know the killer is just around the corner, some tense string instruments can feel like knuckles running up your spine. Though I put my focus on filmmaking and television, I’ve never forgotten about music.

Through Facebook, I was able to reconnect with my childhood friend Danny Bedrosian, the musical master now rocking with George Clinton and his band. He and I had been talking for the last couple of years about making music again—it’s been a long time since our band, Dysfunctional Family, played at a school dance. It was fun to reminisce, but then I realized how much I missed having that creative outlet in my life. During the summer of 2011, I was writing tons of lyrics and jotting down song ideas
beyond just “What’s Next?” Then, in the fall, the two of us got together in Tallahassee, Florida, to start putting down the tracks.

When I started writing music again, I had no agenda or plan. But when you create something artistic, you have to go with what you know. Looking for ghosts and trekking through haunted places is a huge part of who I am now. I didn’t mean to, but I found myself writing music about the big questions the paranormal brought up inside of me. Death, life, afterlife, what it all means. Evil, good—all those things were swirling around in my head.

I’ve found a lot of meaning in my life through the paranormal, and that came out in my music. Here are the lyrics to one of the songs on my album,
The Other Side
.

These are the thoughts that go through my head. I am by no means trying to make you buy into one belief or another—what you believe is your own business, and I respect whatever choices you make—but we must remain open-minded to the
many possibilities. Science cannot prove or disprove what happens to us after we die. And to be honest, neither can religion. Perhaps the paranormal field is the closest we can get to finding that answer, and even that is a long way off.

The Other Side
is all about overcoming obstacles, and I wanted to put in as much positivity as I could. I know some folks will buy the music just because they’re
Ghost Adventures
fans. That’s cool, but it gives me an opportunity to get a message across too.

I realize my position now is to bring awareness more than anything, rather than manipulate people into buying into any set of beliefs. Follow your own faith; I’m no prophet. Nobody in the paranormal field is. I still can’t figure out why I’m on this earth, why I was born into this life in particular. We all like to think we have some kind of destiny, some greater importance to our existence, but think about it: in the grand scheme of things, just how significant are our lives? We live for a blink in a cosmic eye, where fifty or a hundred years is but a nanosecond.

I want to live my life as an open book. Out on the road I meet so many people who are interested in what I do. Even skeptics, the ones who actually do keep an open mind, have to raise an eyebrow at some of the experiences that I share with them.