Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (7 page)
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Authors: Nick Groff,Jeff Belanger
One night in late 2004, I was watching a paranormal show on television. I really don’t remember what it was, but I do remember saying to Veronique, “How awesome would it be to go out there and see if there are ghosts and try to capture them on camera?”
She told me to do it. She knew I’d always been interested in the subject. I didn’t think about it another second. I picked up the phone and called Zak. “Dude,” I said, “what would you think about going out, grabbing some of this gear we have, and seeing if this ghost stuff is real?”
“That would be awesome. I’d love to do that,” he replied. “You know, I had an experience in Detroit when I was a kid…” He then told me about seeing the ghost of a woman in his apartment in Michigan when he was growing up.
We started talking about paranormal stuff. It was just two guys throwing around ideas, but it turned into something we got serious about. We couldn’t stop talking about a paranormal documentary. Zak and I would be the coinvestigators, but I knew we’d need some help. I knew different camera guys who were good shooters—they could film well—and we knew we wanted someone to have personality, because documenting what we were doing was going to be part of the process. But there weren’t many people who could leave their day jobs and just take on this project for little or no pay. Nor did we have the money to pay someone the going rate. Finally I told Zak, “I know this great guy, Aaron. He’s been one of my best friends for years. He’d be awesome to help do some camera work.”
So I set up a time for the three of us to get together. Aaron
was into it because he knew I was on board. We had our crew, I knew how to edit, and we had some camera equipment, although we were going to need more. We had the ability and the people, but we were short on one thing: cash.
I went to my parents and asked for a loan so I could buy a night vision camera, some recorders, a wireless microphone, and a new camera—a Panasonic DVX100A that had just come out. My dad said he’d lend me the money, but he expected us to pay him back. Ever the lawyer, he even drew up a contract. I thought it was funny at the time, but I realize now he was doing us another favor in addition to lending the money. He was also making the situation more businesslike. In a way, he helped us take our project more seriously, because the only way to pay him back was to make this documentary, sell it, and make some money.
Now I had the equipment, I believed in this idea, and I was willing to do whatever it took to get the project going. I was willing to quit my day job, put wedding videos aside, and just focus on this one thing. Zak was the same way. He believed in our documentary and was committed to making it a reality. With all this in place, we were ready to get started. The big question was where to start investigating.
In those early days of the documentary, Zak was coming over to my apartment regularly for meetings to plan out the project. It felt real, like we were working on a real production even though it was just the two of us and Aaron. Zak started calling potential locations to see about filming there, and I would film him on the phone for the documentary. I have hours of tape of Zak on the phone in my apartment.
It sounds crazy now, and we didn’t use any of it in the documentary, but at the time my thinking was: film everything,
document the entire process, because you never know what you’ll need. A note to all of you aspiring filmmakers out there: a guy on the phone just isn’t interesting footage.
Aaron was on the same page as me: just keep rolling the film. Keep in mind, we had no script, no notes, and not even much of a plan. We were three guys looking to investigate ghosts.
Zak and I talked at length about how the documentary should look: raw, gritty, real. Not flashy, not overly produced. This had to look like a real investigation. And real investigators don’t have someone following them with a camera—real investigators film everything themselves.
We were also trying to figure out, Where do we go? Where are great haunts in Nevada? Where can we drive to? What are the unique ghost stories? My mind immediately went back to the road trip Veronique and I had taken back in college. I thought about Tonopah, Virginia City, and some of the other great old mining towns we had passed through. There was really nothing in Las Vegas for us to investigate, so we knew we had to go north.
INVESTIGATING
VIRGINIA CITY
O
nce we were working on the documentary, I felt excited every day. You get a feeling in your gut—a tingle that literally pushes you forward. I listen to that feeling because it means I’m heading down the right track. That rush is like a drug and I continue to seek it out as I work on new episodes of
Ghost Adventures
or other projects.
After making a bunch of phone calls to various locations, we hit the road. We filmed everything in the car too—almost all of it unusable. I filmed us singing along to stupid songs on the radio. I filmed us eating lunch. Now I can look back and can see,
This is a documentary about looking for ghosts.
What we ate for lunch isn’t part of the story.
We drove all over Nevada. We hit the old mining town of Rhyolite, but didn’t last there very long. We got out of the car to film something and were told by the police that we had to leave because we didn’t have a film permit. I know what you’re thinking: “Where is Rhyolite?”
Exactly
.
We headed farther north several hours up to Virginia City. When we got into town, we talked our way into locations. We weren’t famous at this point, just amateur filmmakers trying to appeal to people to let us go in and shoot.
Zak and I were brainstorming name ideas for the documentary. We had tons of different ideas for the name, but we knew we wanted “Ghost” in the title somewhere. One night Veronique and I were talking and thought this quest was like an adventure. I was telling Zak about it and we both said, “Ghost Adventures.” As soon as we said it out loud we knew that was the title.
I love knowing the history before I go into a location. The history gives some context to the haunting. When you look around Virginia City, it looks like the Old West—saloons, former brothels, an opera house, and it’s set up there high in the mountains. It’s a dry desert town with that dusty look like it’s been around long enough to see some shit go down.
In 1859, two miners named Pat McLaughlin and Peter O’Riley discovered gold at the head of Six-Mile Canyon. Soon after the discovery, another miner named Henry Comstock wandered into the dig site and claimed the men were prospecting on his property. McLaughlin and O’Riley believed Comstock, and were soon swindled out of a major find. The giant vein of precious metal was named the Comstock Lode.
Soon, other miners wound their way up the canyon into the shadow of Mt. Davidson, where more gold was discovered. A tent city sprang up and hundreds of miners flocked to the region.
One of those early miners, James “Old Virginny” Finney from Virginia christened the town during a drunken celebration. The story goes that he smashed a bottle of whiskey on the dirt and rocks and called the tent city “Old Virginny Town” in his own honor.
With pounds of gold and silver leaving the earth each day in the 1860s, thousands of prospectors were drawn to the region from around the country. Soon, the silver began yielding millionaires as much as the gold, and the first industrial town of the Old West was born.
The tents soon grew into a proper city with tens of thousands of residents. There were schools, local newspapers, an opera house, hotels, and restaurants. The town’s population peaked at around thirty thousand people. When you stand there today, it’s difficult to imagine so many people in such a small town.
Mark Twain even spent some time in Virginia City, as a reporter for the
Territorial Enterprise
in 1863. Was this town tough? Don’t take my word for it—Mark Twain himself wrote that there were so many tragedies in town from cave-ins to dead Indians that the paper never lacked material for its front page.
By 1898, the Comstock Lode had ended, and the exodus of people began. Those tens of thousands turned into a few hundred. If not for modern-day tourism, Virginia City would truly be a ghost town.
When you know the past before you begin investigating it, it not only helps you appreciate where you are and why a spot might be haunted, but it also helps you connect with the locals.
A few places wanted money for us to film inside, so we paid what we could. The Silver Queen Hotel just charged us for a room, as did the Miner’s Lodge at the Gold Hill Hotel.
It was that night in the Silver Queen where the provoking style of our show was born. Zak was trying to reach the spirit of the prostitute who’d killed herself in room 11. He sat in the bathtub pretending to slit his wrists while mocking her. He told the prostitute’s ghost to come and get him. I thought it was insane, but that was mostly me just egging him on. Before the camera started rolling, I told Zak, “What would you do? You’re sitting in the tub, you’d slit your wrists—mocking the spirit.” I know it sounds a little mean.
Here’s the thing. This prostitute committed suicide. I have some tough feelings on suicide. I know these people are sick—no one in their right mind takes his or her own life—but I feel like it’s a selfish way to go out. Especially when people have a family, kids, spouses, friends. Your life is all you get—that gift shouldn’t be wasted no matter how bad things get.
The real provoking style came later; what went down at the Silver Queen was just an early glimpse. Provoking was really Zak’s thing. It was obvious in those early shoots for the documentary that Zak was going to be our main guy—the host, the lead investigator. With his provoking, his bravado, he was the guy.
Provocation is controversial in the paranormal community because some feel it’s disrespectful to the spirits, while others feel it’s dangerous and can lead to spirit possession. But we were getting results with it, and we wanted our documentary to push the envelope. We couldn’t look like the other ghost shows.
Have you ever walked into a room where people have just been having a heated argument? Even though everyone in the room may be acting perfectly normal, there’s a resonance to the room that’s different. You can feel that the environment has been charged with energy. There’s been an energy transfer—two people have built up rage inside of themselves and expelled it at each other. That energy will take some time to dissipate. When you’re provoking spirits, you’re charging the environment with your own energy. You’re using words and actions that might mean something to the spirits present. That combination
will
stir paranormal events.
After we finished filming, Zak, Aaron, and I were sitting on a bench on C Street, just chilling and shooting some shots in which I’m walking down the middle of the street at night. These were basically B-roll shots—those camera shots you use under voice-overs or as transitions from one scene to another.
As we were sitting on the bench, all the drunks came pouring out of the bars, stumbling, tripping on the wood-plank sidewalk, and limping over to their cars. One drunk felt his way up to his motorcycle. I was thinking,
Oh, God, here we go
. I rolled the camera on him as he started off down the street, his motorcycle wobbling all over the place. Then—bam!—he drove right into the side of a parked car. An ambulance and the cops came to pick him up and take him off. After that, the street was quiet. Really quiet.
When a town is that quiet, you start to understand why it’s a cliché that ghosts come out at night. Maybe the ghosts are around all day long too, but only when it’s
that
quiet can you hear and see them without confusing the phenomenon for something else.
I then went back up to room 11 to try to get some sleep. Zak would take a shift sleeping in the bathtub, and I would get the bed. Aaron would sleep in the car, because we didn’t have enough money for two hotel rooms.
Room 11 in the Silver Queen turned up some incredible evidence for us, which we showed in the documentary. Zak and I heard the sound of water filling the bathtub. It was the strangest thing. Were we hearing some phantom sound of the past, or did we get temporarily transported to the moment just before this prostitute took her own life?
The water sounds weren’t the only thing we experienced. Just after four a.m. I was awoken by the sound of something at the foot of the bed. I turned my night vision camera in that direction and captured a strange mist forming right by the door just as we heard this faint knocking sound. Looking at this mist through my LCD screen, I was freaked—It’s
right there, right now!
I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.
The second night of our investigation was going to focus on the Miner’s Lodge. The three of us set up the room with an audio recorder. Our plan was to come back and spend the night here after we’d investigated the cemetery.
Emotions and thoughts are electrical impulses in the brain, energy that radiates out from us. I believe it can get recorded right into the land. That’s what I was going to look for that first night in the Miner’s Lodge. Touching the spirit world, or even just the past, would be a huge adventure. I was ready for it.
The Miner’s Lodge is part of the Gold Hill Hotel that stands on the outskirts of Virginia City. Built in 1859, it’s Nevada’s oldest hotel. If this building could talk, it would have quite a tale to tell. It’s seen just about everything, including its fair share of tragedies.
The hotel’s Miner’s Lodge building is the former mining office of the infamous Yellow Jacket mine. It was a place where miners would collect their pay and wash up after work, and also where the accounting books were kept.
The Yellow Jacket silver mine was discovered in the spring of 1859. The mine consisted of 957 feet of the region’s Comstock Lode and produced over fourteen million dollars worth of silver.
On the morning of April 7, 1869, disaster struck when a fire broke out eight hundred feet below the surface inside the Yellow Jacket mine. When rescuers tried to enter, they were pushed back by the flames and smoke. The more the fire burned, the more poisonous smoke seeped into the nearby Crow Point and Kentucky mines. All rescuers could do at this point was to seal off sections of the mine to keep the fire from spreading. It took years of smoldering before some sections finally cooled down.
At least thirty-five miners were dead after what was the worst mining accident in Nevada history up to that point. Some bodies were never retrieved and are still down there today.
The only thing firefighters could do was to collapse sections of the mine to keep the fire from spreading. According to local reports, the cries of the widows who gathered near the mine’s office could be heard for miles around. Some people will tell you they can still hear those cries today—a residual haunting, an echo of tragedy from the past.
One theory for the cause of the fire was that a worker left a burning candle too close to the timbers inside the mine. Another theory was that Nevada state senator William Sharon was behind an arson that was intended to close the mine for good and offer the senator a political advantage.
Whatever the cause, the result was nearly three dozen dead and a scar left on the land.
Today, just a few yards behind the Miner’s Lodge, you can still see where the mine was collapsed. The lodge itself is believed to be haunted by former miners who might still be calling out for help.
When you think about this history, it helps you to tune in to the past. I start to imagine the horror of being trapped by fire. Imagine that moment when you realize you’re not going to get out alive. Knowing your death is moments away must be the purest form of fear.