Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (5 page)

He hadn’t called my name. My shoulders slumped. I was angry and sad at the same time. I went up to the coach and said, “I don’t understand what happened. You said if I came here I’d be redshirted for the first year. You’d at least give me a chance. You’re not even giving me a chance right now.”

He just said, “Well, your SATs weren’t good.” That’s the only reason he could give me. I came to suspect that politics also played a big part. At a Division I school, they’ve already selected their players regardless of who shows up for tryouts. Finishing first in the sprint may make the coaches rethink their choice, but really they know who they want ahead of time.

I now had to face the fact that I wouldn’t be on the team. A lot of kids don’t realize it, but if you haven’t made it in your sport by college, it isn’t going to happen for you. Still, I was depressed. I wasn’t cut out for Division I soccer. I was crushed. I felt like a failure.

I never have and never would give up playing sports. I still play basketball in pickup games almost weekly, but I had to accept that I didn’t have a sports career ahead of me.

I rewired my brain and began to think of sports as my escape, something for fun, and I turned my full focus toward film. Back then, it was my biggest disappointment in life so far, but now I see that it was the best thing that could have happened, because it woke me up. I came to realize that film would be where I’d leave my mark.

I’d begun college as a telecommunications major, but halfway through I realized it wasn’t for me. I had been working at the UNLV television station and was learning to do everything—I operated the dolly, pulled the wires, did the camera and the props. I wanted to know how to do everything in television production. There was a guy working there who really knew his shit. I went to him a lot when I wanted to learn more.

“You want to do movies and all that?” this guy asked me.

“Definitely,” I responded.

“Then you need to change your major to film,” he said.

That was it. I changed my major to film. The conversation we’d had was just a few seconds, but everything was so clear when he said it.

I started seeing all these other students wanting to be directors, writers, actors, editors, cinematographers. I started taking film classes, shooting on 8mm and 16mm film for projects for
cinematography class, and I began learning everything about the field. I was grasping how to break out and be open-minded when it comes to visual storytelling. I think either you have it or you don’t. If you can’t think outside the box, you don’t belong in film.

I threw myself into the subject. I learned screenplays, I learned acts, I started to grasp everything—all of the logistics involved. If you’re going to capture great stories and events like haunted places and the paranormal, you need to have both the creative sense and a logistics sensibility. You may have a great idea on a camera angle or perspective, but if it requires cranes and helicopters to get that shot, it’s going to be expensive and will possibly break your budget. In film, you always need a plan B. School drilled that into us, but I’d later learn just how important this concept is.

During this time I was teaching myself video editing—that’s one thing I didn’t learn in school. Editing takes a ton of time and focus. There’s so much that goes into the process: where you cut, how you match up the video to the audio, what to leave in, what to take out, keeping the narrative moving at a good pace, building suspense, and so much more. Editing is filmmaking.

My sophomore year at UNLV was a time when I started making exciting connections. I was never much of a student, but give me a subject I love and I throw myself into it. I had my parents ship me their Hi8 camera so I could start filming more, and I was eating up everything I could on the subject.

One night at school, a film pro, who had just produced a small movie, gave a lecture about his experiences in the business. There was a fee to attend his talk, which I gladly paid. The roomful of people listened to him talk about the industry, how to get projects going, and where to take them. When the talk was over, I waited to chat with him about what I was doing. I told him about the film I was trying to make and how I was going
to get my own thing off the ground. I was talking this guy’s ear off, until eventually it was just two of us left in the room with the filmmaker, seeking advice. The professor looked at the other guy standing there and said to him, “You want to make movies? Work with Nick.” I introduced myself to the other straggler, and we shook hands.

“I’m Aaron Goodwin,” he said.

Aaron and I kept talking about filmmaking. I came to find out he wasn’t even a student at UNLV; he just loved film and wanted to be in the business. There are people who go to film school and there are people who are straight-up filmmakers period. Aaron is a filmmaker.

We continued talking, and he told me about this project he was working on—some funny skits called the “Aaron and Brad Show” where he and a friend walk down the Vegas Strip and do things to hurt themselves to get a laugh—like
Jackass
before
Jackass
. And I told him about this short horror film I was working on for college. I asked him if he’d be willing to help me shoot it, and he said, “Hell, yeah, I will.”

So Aaron helped me on the project and we became fast friends. Our first project together was a bloody horror short. Veronique’s in it too—she gets a crowbar to her back and blood comes spilling out. I would never hurt her in real life, but she was always game for being a victim in my school film projects.

It was a cool short, but I didn’t understand editing back then—that takes years to develop. Nonlinear editing was just getting started and I was trying to teach myself how to use it. Most people didn’t have the right computers to do this stuff then.

When you make your early projects, you think you’re heading for the big time. At the time, it’s the best piece of work you’ve
ever produced. Now I can laugh at that stuff, but I had to learn, I had to grow as a visual storyteller and filmmaker, and the only way to do that is to keep plugging away.

Soon Aaron and I were getting together a lot to cut short videos. All the while we were learning how to edit.

Aaron Goodwin wasn’t the only discovery I made my sophomore year. This was also the year I found Virginia City.

With spring break coming up, Veronique and I decided to take a road trip… and what better place to visit than paranormal hot spots?

We drove north to some of the old haunted mining towns. We drove up into Tonopah, a town whose biggest claim to fame has always been that it’s the halfway point between Reno and Las Vegas.

About a century ago, Tonopah was one of many Western boomtowns where miners flocked to look for gold and silver. At its Belmont mine, seventeen men tragically lost their lives in a fire in 1911. People said the mine, the Tonopah cemetery, and other places nearby were haunted. When you start talking to locals and you can get them to open up about ghosts, you learn a lot about a community.

Keep in mind, this was back in 2001. There weren’t all the ghost hunting shows on television that we have now. Plus I wasn’t on TV, so no one knew who I was back then. When I walked up to someone to ask if they knew of any haunted places, I often got funny looks. It was way different than today, when people seek me out to tell me about their local haunts.

Eventually we got some locals to open up and learned about a place called the Mizpah Hotel. We heard about a “Lady in Red” who had been seen walking the hallways and by the windows
of the fifth floor. The story goes that she was a former mistress of one of the building’s owners, who kept her in a suite on the fifth floor. But trouble came calling when the woman’s boyfriend found out about her situation and strangled her to death in the hallway outside of her room. Apparently, she mainly haunts the fifth floor, but also makes her presence known in some of the other guest rooms.

We couldn’t get inside the building because it had been shut down and closed up. So Veronique and I parked our car across the street from the Mizpah around midnight. I took out my camera and began videotaping the windows. It looked really cool, because the moon was right over the building. As I panned across the windows on the fifth floor, I saw something weird. “What the hell?” I exclaimed—you hear me say it on the videotape.

I zoomed into this thing in one of the top windows. I was like, “What is this?” I looked at it and then outside the car. I was looking for reflections, maybe a car light, maybe a neon light on a building across the road—but nothing. So I looked back and saw it start moving from one room very slowly into another room, passing the inside frames and into the next room before the glowing stopped and it disappeared. Veronique watched the same thing. On the tape you can hear us talking about this weird light. We couldn’t explain it. It was wild, and I’d captured it on camera.

There we were in the parking lot staring at this anomaly, and I knew I had to get in there to look around. It would take another ten years to finally get the chance.
Ghost Adventures
filmed at the Mizpah in season five. You never stop thinking about some haunts.

After Tonopah, Veronique and I went by Area 51 near Rachel, Nevada. We drove all the way up to the fence where they’ll shoot
you if you go any farther. There are a bunch of zigzagging roads with small black boxes that I’m sure contain cameras and other devices. They must have known we were coming for miles before we got there. After zigging and zagging for miles, we eventually found the fence. We even saw the military jeep parked up on the hill watching us. There’s a vibe there. You see the sign, the jeep, and you have no doubt that if you try something stupid, you may very well get shot. As much of a daredevil as I am, I’m not completely stupid. As I got out of the car, I wondered what would happen if I put my big toe over the line, then thought better of it. I got back into the car; we turned around, and kept driving north.

We made our way to a small town called Virginia City. As soon as we pulled into town, heading down C Street, the main drag, I could tell I was in love with the place. The mountain views are amazing, the air is clean and thin, and it feels like you’ve just stepped back in time a hundred years into the miner days.

Veronique and I first paid a visit to the Silver Queen Hotel. We’d heard it was haunted by a prostitute, so we asked about it in the bar. The owner looked at us a little funny. Again, this was before the ghost craze. Today when you ask for the most haunted room in a hotel, you might have to get on a waiting list because everyone wants to stay there. But back then it wasn’t something the hotel promoted.

We’d barely walked into and out of the bar, and yet there was a feeling to this place I couldn’t explain. We also checked out the Washoe Club. The old-time saloon and former Millionaire’s Club resonated with the past. I knew I wanted to check out this place in a big way, but that would have to wait for another trip. After Washoe, we went over to the Mackay Mansion in town. At the
mansion, I filmed the tour guide and asked him questions about the haunting. He told us about the ghosts of children who’d died from disease in the area, and the apparitions of some former owners, including the original owner, George Hearst. Then we went around to the various rooms. The Mackay Mansion was named after John Mackay—it was one of those Cinderella mining stories. He’d come from Dublin, Ireland, with a background in shipbuilding. He’d grabbed a pick and a shovel and soon found his fortune building mine shafts and finding gold.

Today you can go through his old haunted mansion. When Veronique and I were there, we’d heard about a haunted room where witnesses see imprints on the bed. So I sat there to film the bed. For several minutes I was just rolling on this empty bed waiting for some ghost to make an impression on the covers or something. On the tape you can hear Veronique getting aggravated, saying, “Come on, let’s go!” But I was waiting to capture a ghost on film. Another minute. And another. A sigh from Veronique. Nothing happened. That’s ghost investigating for you. Sometimes nothing happens.

From the Mackay Mansion, we went and checked into a small motel in town called the Sugarloaf. It was a one-story place, a serious dump. The kind of place that earns the name No-Tell Motel. But we were in college and it was what we could afford.

We went to check in and it was like some creepy scene in a cheesy movie. The guy behind the counter had one hand and looked shady. Room 1—girls can’t sleep in there because a prostitute was murdered in there years ago, he told us. Bludgeoned to death. True story. When girls stay in that room, he said, they can’t sleep, they say the room is freezing, and the covers get ripped off the bed.