Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (8 page)

During investigations, we almost always use an audio recorder to try to capture electronic voice phenomena, or EVP. The idea is that spirits can imprint their voices directly on our recorders in response to questions being asked. Though you can’t hear the
response at the time, you hear it on the playback. This is some of the most compelling evidence we have of spirit contact.

The EVP we caught in that room at Miner’s Lodge is still one of the most amazing pieces of evidence I’ve ever heard. You can clearly hear, “Is it the devil?” We’d let that tape roll for an hour; we hadn’t expected anything, but that one quiet voice on the tape freaked us out.

As I was investigating Virginia City, I noticed a transformation taking place within me. I’m a filmmaker, a documentarian who wants to document everything I’m discovering in a raw and original way. But now, I realized, I’m part of the story—I’m in it. And not just in it—I was getting way into the investigation itself.

Sure, we’re three friends looking for ghosts. But being there is making us something more. This experience changes you. If you don’t accept the reality of ghosts, then why would you be out there looking in the first place? If you accept the possibility and
start to capture little bits of evidence, you change. You become aware that there’s more than the physical world around you. There’s energy everywhere. People aren’t just flesh and blood. Buildings aren’t just bricks and wood and paint. In these early shoots, I felt that change starting.

At times I found myself nervous, or thrilled, and all kinds of other emotions. I was getting used to expressing those feelings as we were filming. We didn’t have a script or formula; we were just going into these haunted places to see what happened and what we could capture.

What people don’t realize is that not all the locations we’ve investigated made it into the documentary. When we were staying in Tonopah, we met a woman who told us about a place called the Castle House being haunted. We were told that the previous owner of the building used to hold séances on the top floor in order to communicate with the spirits there. This woman told us how local construction workers were afraid to work there after seeing a ghostly figure inside. I filmed Zak on the phone in the hotel room calling Joni Eastley, the owner of the Castle House, to see if we could get in. Joni said she was okay with it. It felt like a lucky break.

There’s a shot in our documentary where we’re looking out from our hotel balcony to the Castle House in the distance. In that sense, the building made the documentary. But when we investigated, not much happened.

Joni was nice—we’d interviewed her for over an hour before we investigated the basement and other parts of the building. Then we went upstairs to what they called the séance room. What made this different from the other places we had investigated was that we took more of an emotional approach. We
were willing to try to feel something instead of capturing it on our equipment. When we walked into the séance room, I smelled the strong scent of perfume. Aaron smelled it too. It was our first personal experience because we couldn’t figure out where the old-fashioned perfume smell was coming from.

The only problem was that, visually, that’s not interesting. The viewer would have to take our word for it that we were really smelling something, which is why nothing from the Castle House made it into the documentary. We figured we were too new to ask viewers to trust us. If our gear didn’t pick it up, if we didn’t capture something on audio or video, then we weren’t going to show it.

We weren’t completely finished with the Castle House, though. In season five, when we investigated the Mizpah Hotel, we returned to the Castle House to see if the place was still active. We knocked, and Joni answered the door. She still remembered us after all these years.

The idea was to finish something we’d started years earlier. That evening we conducted a short investigation of Castle House. We set up in Joni’s office, where she experienced the most paranormal activity. We aimed our thermal camera into the office from the kitchen; then we conducted an EVP session with Joni to try to make contact. After letting our recorders roll for a few minutes, we ended the session and climbed up to the attic—a place filled with creepy old dolls. Zak was unnerved by the dolls. He hates old dolls. I think we all do to some degree.

In the attic I suddenly felt dizzy. Then I felt goose bumps and tingles run down my arm. Behind me, I heard a loud breath right by the dolls. As quickly as the activity started, it ended. The room was quiet again and that tense energy was gone.

When we reviewed our audio, we heard what sounded like a faint conversation. One voice says, “Help”; then the other answers, “I know who you are.” Joni was shocked to hear the voices too.

I loved being back in Tonopah and having the opportunity to jump back into the Castle House. Unlike the first time we went there, on this visit we captured evidence we could use.

Our
Ghost Adventures
roles weren’t planned—they just fell into place. Zak naturally fell into the front-man role—he would deliver the history and story—while Aaron was always the funny one with great reactions. I was there to be the voice of reason—the one in the middle who isn’t scared of much, but needs to be convinced.

Another scene we didn’t include in the documentary involved Aaron and his antics. He’d walked into a candy store in Virginia City to buy a big caramel apple. I was outside filming down the wooden sidewalk and a biker couple was walking by.
Just as Aaron walks out of the store taking a bite of this huge caramel apple, the biker dude slaps his girl’s ass. Aaron didn’t even see the ass slap—he was concentrating on his apple. But the whole scene looked so goofy, we just cracked up. I’d put the scene in the first cut of the documentary, but in the end we dropped it. My point is, Aaron has always been Aaron—a big teddy bear of a guy with this childlike wonder and innocence about him. Whether he’s trying it or not, funny stuff just happens around him.

I made a blooper reel of some of the funny things that happened to us during filming. When you’re on the road, overtired, hungry, or punch-drunk, weird things happen. Today if you watch some of our video blogs for
Ghost Adventures
, you can see some of what I’m talking about.

Our style of investigating was coming together in those early documentary shoots, and we were just falling into it naturally.

One difference between what we were doing and what everyone else was doing was that we were the camera crew and producers. If you’re a camera operator working on a show, your job is to film whatever the on-screen talent is doing. Your function is to focus on them and capture their actions and reactions. If the on-screen talent sees a ghost, points, and says, “Holy shit, right there!” the camera has to try to capture the reaction of the on-screen talent, and then try to film a ghost. Because we’re also operating the cameras, we can point the camera at whatever we see. We stand a better chance of capturing something that way.

Our formula was starting to gel as we headed into the Washoe Club in Virginia City, a place I had never been able to get out of my head ever since the spring of 2001.

When we walked into the club, we had no idea what we were in for.

In Virginia City’s heyday, millionaires were being made almost daily. The newly rich needed a place to hobnob with other wealthy men. Local establishments like the Washoe Club and the Millionaire’s Club were built so the rich could drink, gamble, carouse with prostitutes, and plot ways to expand their respective empires.

The Millionaire’s Club had a respectable main entrance up a winding staircase and two secret rear exits, where prostitutes could enter, and drunk and disorderly patrons could make a discreet getaway.

Inside the once decadent club were suites, gambling tables, and a billiard room. We also learned that in the winter, bodies were sometimes stored in a crypt in the building while the grave diggers waited for the ground to thaw. From raucous good times to debauchery, the Washoe Club is Virginia City’s most paranormally active location.

The Washoe Club is said to be haunted by at least three ghosts: an attractive blond apparition known as the “Lady in Blue,” the ghost of a scared little girl, and an old-time prospector who was known to steal unattended drinks from the bar. The drink-stealing ghost is so active that even modern-day bartenders leave out a full shot of bourbon before closing for the night… by morning, it is often empty.

The main bar still looks great after all these years, but when you walk up the old staircase to the upper floors, you really step back. There are no more gambling tables, furniture, bars, or even light fixtures to remind you of what used to happen here a century ago, but the rooms are still there—memories of times past still float in the air.

The Washoe Club was the first place where I felt threatened by an unseen force. It was a skin-crawling feeling I just couldn’t shake off—like something bad was waiting around the next corner.

There was a lot of area to cover in the upper floors of this building. I had set up a night vision camera in the former ballroom so it could record the entire room. I went out into the middle of the room to set up my audio recorder to try to capture some EVPs. I stepped out of the room, and something stepped in behind me soon after.

This was one of those cases where I didn’t know what we had captured at the time. Back in Las Vegas I was going through tons of the footage. Trust me, it’s tough to watch hours of footage with nothing happening. I was leaning on my arm watching the ballroom of the Washoe go by when suddenly I blink. Something just walked through the middle of the room! I rewind and watch again—maybe I was dreaming this. Holy shit! It’s right there.
I see this semitransparent apparition walk right through the middle of the room! My jaw hung open as I watched the raw footage a second and third time. I grabbed the phone and called Zak. He raced over to see it. Zak was also floored by what he was seeing on the monitor. “Dude,” he said. “Holy shit, dude!”

I knew we had something big here. This piece of evidence was the most compelling I had seen up to that point. I knew others had to see it too.

You never forget these locations, especially when you have such a personal experience or capture dramatic evidence. Such as my amazing first trip to the Washoe Club. Yet other trips there would prove more dangerous.

Washoe wasn’t our last stop in Virginia City. We also paid a visit to the town cemetery. Coming from the East Coast, I just don’t expect cemeteries to look like this. I’m used to lush green grass, shady trees, and simple headstones. In Virginia City the dogwoods and other trees look more menacing, more gnarled. The sand, the rocks, the rusted wrought-iron fences around the graves all painted a sorrowful picture.

Cemeteries often get a reputation for being haunted because they are places of the dead. When living people are there, we can’t help but think about our own mortality. All those bodies just under your feet call out to you.

When we were walking through the cemetery, we saw strange balls of light floating around. The mood was tense. When little things start to happen as soon as you walk into a location, your senses are sharpened. Just when we’d sat down to take a breather and look around the cemetery, we heard the gravel move behind us and Zak felt something grab his shoulder.

I jumped. We all jumped. It was just reflex. We ran the hell out
of the cemetery. Today I’ve been in this situation enough times to keep my cool a bit more, but back then this was still new to me.

Virginia City is full of spirits. Everywhere we went we ran into people who knew about them and who had experienced them. The town was our first ghost investigation success. It also scared us a bit into reality. This stuff is real, it’s out there, and if we can’t see it or control it, what does that mean for us? We had to keep looking.

Back in my apartment, I had a great time working on the documentary, but it was taking a toll financially. Veronique was working over eighty hours a week at the Ritz-Carlton to make ends meet, but we were still falling behind.

Our Internet was turned off so many times because we were behind on bills. I’d get on the phone and plead with the company, “We’ll pay the bill!” It’s kind of hard to edit and download pictures and video clips when the Internet is dead because we’re behind on payment. Our cable was turned off a few times too, but the worst was yet to come.

Veronique had to get up really early to go to work. She would leave around six a.m., while I was still asleep. One morning I suddenly woke up to Veronique’s scared and angry voice: “Wake up! My car was stolen!”