Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (3 page)

I was only eight years old. Indestructible. It took years for this to sink in:
I could have died
. I was that close. To have your mortality tested that young changes your perspective. I couldn’t have known it then, but looking back I can see it clearly:
I had a near-death experience
.

Did this horrible accident at age eight make me more careful when throwing my body into an adventure? Hell, no!

As I mentioned earlier, our house in Salem was surrounded by woods—I spent a lot of time out there having adventures as a kid. About a year after my accident, I was out in the woods one fall afternoon on a big outcropping of rocks. There was a huge tree over the rock where I had attached a rope that hung at the edge of the top of the rock. Here’s how it worked: I would grab the rope and swing out over the drop-off—at least twenty feet above the ground. It was great fun—as long as the rope and tree held together, which, this day, they didn’t.

I had piled up a bunch of fallen leaves at the bottom of the ledge. You know what was under those leaves? Rocks. But the fact that I’d pushed some leaves over the rocks as a cushion proves I didn’t have a death wish, right? Right?!

I was out there alone on this day, swinging on my rope swing—the coolest daredevil in Salem. As I swung out I heard
CRACK
,
SNAP
… and then I was falling.

I landed on my back and my head slammed hard against the rocks under the leaves. Everything went black.

When I opened my eyes, I was dizzy, but I recognized the woods around me. I lifted myself up and stumbled around a bit. I reached my hand up to the back of my head and felt something wet. I looked at my hand and saw the blood… I’m thinking,
If this cut doesn’t do it, Mom is going to kill me
.

I dragged myself back to our house and found my mom inside.
Off to the doctor’s office we go, and three stitches on the back of my head later, I’m walking out to our car with my mother shaking her head.

Some might use the word “reckless” to describe my childhood, but to this day I say “adventurous.”

At age ten, after having suffered two bloody accidents—one that almost killed me—I had my first experience with a ghost. There is definitely a connection between my near-death experience and this sighting. Something in me was open now. Now I knew what to look for and I was beginning to understand what being in the presence of a spirit feels like.

It was a school day and I had just been dropped off at home by our carpool. My mom wasn’t home yet—she would usually show up five or ten minutes after me because she was working at my dad’s law firm during the days while my sister and I were at school. So I used my key to get into the house.

I went in through a door on the basement level. I remember walking up the stairs from the garage and I was getting a weird feeling. I was creeped out. I knew I wasn’t alone in the house. I should have been alone, but there was a presence there. It was like I was getting a premonition of something I was about to see. I was afraid and my senses were heightened by the fear.

I walked up the stairs and opened the door to the living room. I walked through the living room and into the kitchen. In our house, when you walked into the kitchen there was a dining room off to the right and a sliding glass door that looked out onto the woods in the back. I was really scared at this point and didn’t know why. I had come home to an empty house many times before and thought nothing of it. But something was different today.

I tiptoed through the kitchen, leaned into the doorway, and peeked around the corner of the dining room, where I saw a figure standing there right in front of the glass door. The figure was dark, almost black. A surge of energy ran through me as I turned and sprinted through the living room, back down the stairs to the basement, and out to the side yard. I didn’t stop running. Through our yard, into the woods, I jumped across a small stream and kept scrambling until I reached our neighbor’s yard. I turned around. Panting from the run, I put my hands on my knees to catch my breath and I looked at our house in the distance. Something was in there. Some kind of otherworldly intruder.

At this point the experience started to sink in. I couldn’t remember any features on this dark figure. I didn’t see a face. It was just a tall black figure and it scared the crap out of me.

A few minutes later I saw my mom’s car pull into the driveway, so I walked back to the house and went in after her. The figure, and the feeling of something being there, were now gone.

I didn’t tell anyone what happened. I wasn’t sure if anyone would believe me. With each hour that passed, I questioned myself. Was I just scaring myself? Was it real or not? I didn’t know, but I kept checking over my shoulder for days after that experience.

Over the years, this memory kind of drifted away, until I started working on
Ghost Adventures
. The more involved I became with ghost hunting, the more pieces of this memory started coming back to me. It was as though investigating the spirits as part of the show had triggered my memory.

It’s not like my family shunned talk of weird stuff when I was a kid. My dad had his law practice and my mom worked there too, so I spent a lot of time at Grandma’s house. My grandma often spoke to me about UFOs and other paranormal topics. Grandma was especially interested in aliens and spaceships. She lived on top of one of the biggest hills in Nashua. You could see for miles around from up there. She and my grandpa had bought the house in the early 1960s during the time when a lot of people were talking about the Betty and Barney Hill UFO abduction case.

Betty and Barney Hill were from Portsmouth, a coastal city about an hour’s drive from Nashua. On September 19, 1961, the Hills were returning home to Portsmouth after vacationing in Niagara Falls. While driving along Route 3 near the town of Lancaster, in the northern part of the state, the couple saw strange lights in the sky. Eventually the craft hovered so close that Barney stopped the car and they got out to look. Hill claimed that through binoculars he could see figures inside the craft that didn’t quite look human. He was panicked. The couple then recall hearing a series of beeping and buzzing noises and then the next thing they remember is being in their car driving and they’ve traveled about thirty-five miles south from where they had stopped to observe the UFO in the road.

The Hill case became world famous. The couple had experienced missing time and a close encounter. People still talk about it in New Hampshire. I think deep down my grandma was a little jealous. I’m sure she would have wanted that same experience for herself, even if it was to validate what she suspected: that aliens have visited us before.

Not a lot of people ever knew that my grandpa worked for RCA on some of their national defense projects. He had some serious clearance and wouldn’t even talk about what he did with his family. But I know he and my grandma had had some deep conversations about UFOs and extraterrestrial technology. I can only imagine the things he saw and knew.

My grandma was a smart lady. She died of a stroke when I was in college. I miss her on so many levels, but I’ll never forget all those fascinating discussions we had about extraterrestrials, ghosts, and the like. She’d really thought about this stuff. She’s a big part of the reason I’m interested in this subject today. My aunt Missy lived with her, and she was also into the paranormal. When I was a kid, we would all talk about what it would mean if there was life out there, and Aunt Missy had her own thoughts on the paranormal too. But she was more interested in ghosts.

At Grandma’s house Missy had this creepy old doll, which she kept in her bedroom. I’ll never forget it. It was an antique—brownish, made of leather, and with a little bell on its hat. When I would sleep over—on the very couch where my grandpa had died—Aunt Missy told me that the doll would walk and even run around in the middle of the night. The idea had me panicked to sleep there. There was also something about this house. Now that I’ve been in so many haunted places, I can look back and know what I was feeling at my grandma’s. There was something
there in that house. It’s this feeling you get when you know there’s something else present—almost like there’s an electrical charge.

One time I was staying overnight sleeping on the couch, and I swear I heard the jingling of the bell on this doll’s hat. It was moving around the room and throughout the house. I was frozen with fear—I pulled the blankets up to my chin, ready to duck under them to hide. Maybe it was my mind messing with me, or maybe it was real, but either way I was paralyzed. The next morning I asked Aunt Missy, “Was the doll in your room or was it somewhere else?” She let my imagination run. I know Missy was playing a trick on me, but she did believe in the supernatural. I’m sure part of her wondered if maybe the doll
had
sprung to life. To this day I’m still not sure what really happened.

From dealing with spirits so often and having had many unexplained encounters since I was a child, I’ve been able to piece together these paranormal pieces of my early life and figure out how they got me to where I am today. Powerful physical and emotional events like near-death experiences
do
make you more sensitive, but paying attention to the signs along the way and then focusing on the haunts is a sure way to have more ghostly experiences.

I think about these events from my life as if they were scenes from a movie. Each one builds on the last, and I’m different after each one. Little did I know back then that one day my job would involve living out my own horror movie, going from one haunted building to the next looking for answers and facing demons.

T
he love of my life has always been Veronique. We met in the sixth grade. The funny thing is, if I hadn’t been such a problem child, I might never have met her. And if I hadn’t been such a problem, I might never have been introduced to the world of video production and television. Thank God I was trouble!

St. Pat’s was a Catholic school for boys and girls. I had a great teacher or two, but for the most part I don’t think the school could handle me. I was basically kicked out. The principal was a nun who didn’t like me because I was a hellion. I was “a distraction in class”—that’s probably how she would have put it—but I just wanted to make everyone laugh. I was a smart-ass to the teachers, and always distracted. I had a hard time sitting still. I wanted to run around, climb the walls—do
anything
but sit there. I wasn’t a complete punk about it, but I’m sure if I had been a teacher I wouldn’t have wanted me in class.

The teachers at St. Pat’s figured putting me on the soccer team would help me burn off excess energy. The soccer team was awful. They didn’t score their first goal until I joined the team.
Imagine game after game not even putting up a single point. It’s demoralizing. I hate losing. Plus, running around after school playing soccer wasn’t enough to tame me the rest of the day. But I did love soccer—that would stay with me.

Thinking about it now, I didn’t really get kicked out of St. Pat’s. It wasn’t exactly, “Hey, we’re kicking out your son.” It was more like, “Hey, you should put him in another school because he’s too much trouble and we can’t handle him here anymore.”

I was upset because I felt I had let my parents down—I’d let myself down. I wasn’t proud of being asked to leave a school. And feeling not wanted sucks. But everything happens for a reason. Although this reason would take some time to show itself. So my parents sighed and moved me from St. Pat’s to public school.

It was a big change moving from a small private school where everybody knew everybody’s business to a large public school. At St. Pat’s I was this tough dude—I didn’t worry about bullies or anybody. Pelham public school was a different story. I was the new kid, so I had to prove myself. There were bigger kids, crazier kids than me.

When I left St. Pat’s, there was a girl I was dating—at least as much as you can date in fifth grade—who was two grades ahead of me (yeah, she was a real cougar). She told me that the boys at Pelham were going to try to beat me up when I got there, but she was friends with a guy who went there who would look after me.

I didn’t take any shit from anyone before and I didn’t plan to start now. But still, it’s not cool to hear that people you haven’t even met yet already hate you. I guess you could call this training ground for having a paranormal television show. It’s kind of like the critics and cynics who post shit about you online after watching you on television—they don’t know me, but still they launch attacks. A tough public school will thicken your skin right up. That’s a lesson you can take with you.