by Groff, Nick
The reason I’m comfortable with breaking this rule is that the two other guys know where I’m going and can come help me if I need them. Plus, I have my camera and audio recorder. If something is in the environment, my gear will be my second witness. But my biggest reason for wanting to go it alone was that Aaron and Zak were both hesitant. So I said, “Screw it. I’ll go.”
While in the dark basement of this old and deadly prison, I wanted to go into the “Sugar Shack” by myself. This place is one of the most infamous rooms in the complex. The prisoner recreation room was better known among the inmates as the “Sugar Shack” because it was here that illegal activities like gambling, fights, and murder took place, but also rape; hence, it was a place for the cons to “get some sugar.”
Questions Fans Ask
Do you guys ever get scared before going into haunted places?
Most of the time I’m psyched to go in. We’ve done the research, we’ve heard from the eyewitnesses—and sometimes the victims—of the entities inside, and now I want to experience the location for myself. But once in a while, there’s something so ominous about a place that I do get creeped out. Linda Vista Hospital was one location where I felt myself gulp before going in.
We’d learned that guards didn’t want to be down here with the inmates because of the horrors that went on. It may sound odd, but those of us who have never been to prison have a difficult time understanding that the value of life inside is different from the value outside. When you have no freedom, no money, and no family, your life can be devalued down to a pack of cigarettes. Guards know that, though, because they live a dual life—they live the life on the inside with the inmates, but they also get to go home at night and appreciate their families, homes, and other luxuries foreign to those serving time.
I was ready to put my own stamp on our investigations, and going into the Sugar Shack alone was the way to do it. No other show had done anything like it. Early on in the series, that became my calling card—it was always “Let’s stick Nick in the morgue” or “We’ll send Nick in here alone.”
After hearing all the stories about the Sugar Shack, I wanted to experience the place for myself. It was crazy to hear the graphic material that came from the prison guard we’d interviewed who used to work there, but the stories “Redbone” told us were even creepier. He told us about a riot in which a prisoner was found with his penis cut off and shoved in his mouth because the other inmates thought he was a snitch.
As I sat there alone in the Sugar Shack, those gruesome details kept going through my mind. I wondered if the spirits there would prove to be as demented and angry as the people who once inhabited the prison. These thoughts would enter my brain and mess with my head until I started to really get scared down there in the dark on my own. I kept hearing noises, like something was moving around. I couldn’t see anything, and I’ve never been the kind of guy who walks around with a flashlight. All I had was my LCD screen, so I could see a few feet in front of me in the dark, but that was it. It was at this moment that the paranormal, our investigations, and the Ghost Adventures series started to get real for me. My heart rate was speeding up and I was sweating a bit. I was afraid something was going to attack me and I wouldn’t know where it was coming from until it was too late.
The scariest moment for me at Moundsville never even made it into the episode. For another solo venture during the lockdown, I went up to the prison hospital on the second floor all alone. As I roamed throughout the rooms and hallways, I could actually hear disembodied voices that sounded like they belonged to the inmate patients of another time. However, those sounds weren’t recorded on my digital audio recorder or camera. Let me tell you, that place was haunted. The problem was, most of what proved it to me were just feelings, and we had better-documented material that ended up making the show. I’m not an actor, and I’m not good at pretending. If I have a genuine reaction to something, that will make it in the show. If it’s just a creepy feeling, that’s not enough.
When we left Moundsville and got home to go through our footage, the real challenge began. We had hours of tape from several different cameras. We wanted to show the best parts of the lockdown, and not just footage of us walking around talking about what we were feeling. We had to capture our investigation and cut it down to about half the show—thirty minutes of screen time, but only twenty-two minutes of footage without the commercials—showing only the best of what we encountered. On those first few episodes especially, what to cut and what to keep was always a difficult decision.
It was during those first edits that we learned that sometimes there are tense moments we want to keep in the show, and other times there are moments when we’ve caught evidence even though we didn’t realize it at the time. Once we’d reviewed our audio recorders and mini-DV tapes, we found the anomalies and then had to fit them into the lockdown segment.
That first lockdown was really draining. I think I slept the entire day after I got home to Vegas. I was amped up to investigate, and I was working hard to get everything right now that the stakes were so much higher. Now I could rest—but only for a day, since we still had to edit.
Think of it like this: You’re a basketball player trying to help your team win the championship game. You give everything you have—your heart, your soul, your ability—and you leave it all out on the court. After that, you’re drained.
The buildup of emotion of getting to the championship game, and then the buildup of being broken down whether you’ve lost or won—those are the same feelings that we go through during a lockdown. There’s the buildup of being there, hearing things, and then going in and battling it. Some locations are worse than others, and can just drain your energy just by your presence. The lockdowns really screw with your emotions, your energy, and your body, and it takes at least a weekend to gain it all back—sometimes even as long as a week. After the episode where we returned to the Goldfield Hotel, I was out of commission for two weeks. I felt nauseated, like some entity had attached itself to me. It took a long time to shake it off.
Resting was a luxury when we started filming. Doing the investigation and filming everything was only half the battle. We would comb through the audio and video looking for anything that might be considered evidence. We were worried about being able to deliver, to have something profound come out of every episode, until we realized that that’s not what paranormal investigation is about. If we didn’t capture anything while we were filming, maybe we’d find it during our analysis. If we didn’t find anything then, maybe it was emotional experiences that we could share. At the end of the day, it’s not up to us to determine whether or not a place is haunted. Our job is to share our experiences during the course of an investigation. We set a strict policy of “no bullshit”: no weird camera tricks, no “What was that?” moment where we pretend to hear something off camera. What you see is what you get.
QUESTIONS FANS ASK
Were you just being melodramatic for the camera at Moon River Brewery?
I’m not a good actor. I tried years ago in my own film, Malevolence. I had two lines and I wouldn’t hire myself as an actor again. You’d be surprised how fast you forget about the camera once you work on a television show. Maybe in those first couple of episodes in the first season I thought about how I looked or sounded on the camera, but those thoughts are distracting. Now when we start investigating, the camera is just an extension of me. I’m doing what I do whether the camera is on or not. I don’t hold back, and I don’t turn it up either.
Something else that sets us apart from other paranormal shows: we’re not only the series creators and the guys on cameras, we’re the camera crew and the editors as well. We can’t blame our editors for making us look bad (or good, for that matter). It’s all on us to deliver.
In other words, once the show began, my life became—well, I had no life. Not that I’m complaining, but everything became about the show. Our routine became: investigate, film, analyze, edit, and then move on to t
he next one. I had to capture all the footage onto the computer, go through it, and organize it. My whole life, I had been a PC guy, but when we started doing the show we had to move everything to Mac so it could be edited in Final Cut instead of Adobe Premiere Pro, which is what I was used to. So I had to learn a whole new computer operating system in addition to different editing software.
Though all three of us had to adjust to the hectic new schedule, Aaron was the luckiest. Once the investigation was finished, he could go home and rest. Zak and I had to edit.
The editing process involved cutting the footage and laying it all out, an ordeal since we had all those cameras and digital recorders to deal with. I had to mix all the audio from the three cameras. I had no assistant to help me with any of it that first season—I had to do it all. And then Zak would come in and make suggestions, so we had to restructure it in a way we both could agree on. Sometimes, we had to agree to disagree.
I spent late nights in the office, past midnight sometimes, just by myself. Zak is okay with sleeping until the afternoon, but I’m an early riser. So those late nights were killing me. Veronique would bring me food at night, or we’d meet somewhere so I could grab a quick bite and get back to work. And then finally, when I had the lockdown portion edited down to half the episode, I shipped it off to New York. The New York production group would then add the other half of the show—the great camera shots that opened each episode, the interviews, and the daytime tour of the locations. We were basically shipping hard drives back and forth.
This just wasn’t what I had imagined. With our documentary, of course, we’d had to do everything ourselves. I was naive and thought that once we got a television series we’d have tons of money and a huge staff doing all of this for us, but that isn’t how it works. You need to get into this field because you love it. And not just the investigating—that part is easy to love. You need to love every part of the process, right down to the evidence review, the editing, the tiny details that go into making a kick-ass show.
CHAPTER 9
THE TV ADVENTURE BEGINS
It didn’t take long for tensions to begin to mount while shooting the first season of Ghost Adventures. For one thing, we had only those four days to shoot an entire episode—interviews, walk-throughs, research, and the lockdown. We got one shot at doing everything and getting it right. That’s a lot of pressure, especially when it’s your first time producing a television series.
Another problem was that whenever the three of us were together, strange things would happen that we hadn’t planned for in our production schedule. An elderly man passing out when he answers the door. A former inmate pulling up as we head into the prison. My name being called at the Washoe Club. These things turned out to be some of the most memorable moments of the show, but they also threw off our shooting schedule.
We never know what we’re going to find, and things rarely go the way we’ve envisioned. That’s what makes filming Ghost Adventures so interesting. Every time I go to a location, it’s always different from the last one: the people, the environment, the situation, the filming—and that’s not even including the paranormal encounters.
But things going awry can often lead to increased drama behind the scenes too.
Zak, Aaron, and I are three different personalities, but ultimately we all click well together. We love what we do, we’re passionate about it, and nothing could ever change that. But being on the road, and being around each other—we’re all creative types who have strong feelings on how the show should look—we’re bound to have some tense moments. You know the old saying “Familiarity breeds contempt”? Well, it’s true. Family members, friends, college roommates, even rock bands suffer from it—when you’re around someone so much, you start picking up on all their little annoyances, and it becomes amplified. Something small gets blown up into something big, and those tensions eventually boil over.
I’ve noticed that the energy of the location can have an effect on how we interact with one another while filming. For example, at the Houghton Mansion in North Adams, Massachusetts, the third episode we filmed. You could feel a kind of sad presence there. That melancholy force may have had a role in the heated argument Zak and I got into right before our lockdown.
On August 1, 1914, Albert Charles Houghton was out for a ride with his daughter Mary and two family friends up north. In the small town of Pownal, Vermont, John Widders, their chauffeur, tried to steer their new Pierce-Arrow around a horse-drawn carriage. Widders pulled the car too far toward the side of the road, where the wheels hit some soft dirt and sent the car rolling down the embankment. Everyone except Mary Houghton was thrown from the car. Family friend Sybil Hutton, one of the other passengers, was killed when the car rolled on top of her. Mary was badly injured, and she died later at the hospital in North Adams. Widders was so upset that the next morning he walked to the Houghtons’ barn and shot himself. Though Houghton himself wasn’t injured in the crash, his heart was broken. He died about a week after his daughter. This tragedy left a sad mark on the mansion. We believe that John Widders and A. C. Houghton still haunt the home where they once lived and worked.
It’s possible that all of the sad energy that has built up can take an emotional toll on the place. I’m not saying that this location is completely to blame for what happened between Zak and me, but it could have played a part.
The argument started because I didn’t put a wireless microphone on Zak before the lockdown began. I assumed that he could do that himself, but he assumed I would do it for him. Neither of us was right and neither was wrong, but it just escalated into a shouting match between us. We should have just suited him up with the microphone and moved on, but instead the tension that had been building came to a head and we were yelling at each other.
As anyone knows from watching Ghost Adventures, Zak has a strong personality. He knows it, and he doesn’t shy away from it. But Aaron and I also know a different side to Zak than you’ll see on TV. One of the questions I am constantly asked is why I allow Zak to tell me to “shut up” all the time. There are many instances in early episodes where he tells Aaron or me to be quiet. But it’s not that he wouldn’t allow us to have our say; it’s just that Zak is in the moment of the investigation, and he’s so involved and engulfed that he doesn’t really mean it as harshly as it comes across. Normally he might say, “Hey, guys, just be quiet for a second, okay?” But when the shit is going down, when paranormal activity appears to be happening, Zak is on edge and his words just come across a little more sharply than he might intend.
My approach to investigating is to listen more than speak, but it’s inevitable that you’re going to have to tell the other two guys to shut up at some point. Aaron and I handle it differently than Zak—everyone has their own way about them—and as a result it sometimes looks like Zak is being rude to us on investigations.
That comes to a head sometimes, as it did at the Houghton Mansion. So Zak and I yelled at each other, but the issue, of course, wasn’t the wireless mic—it was everything. As we were in each other’s faces, every thought went through my mind: Are we going to come to blows? Is this the end of the show? Do I want to keep putting up with this shit?
No punches were thrown. After the standoff we both walked away for a minute to collect ourselves, while poor Aaron was left running back and forth trying to calm us down. We were under pressure we hadn’t been under before, but we both quickly saw we had a job to do, and we both wanted to check out this haunted mansion. I’m glad we yelled at each other—it broke the tension and made things better in the end. At the end of the day we looked at it as a brotherly bond.
Late in filming season one, Zak realized how it was coming across when he told Aaron and me to shut up, so we started taking a lot of it out in the edit. We thought it made Zak look bad even though we knew it wasn’t personal; it was easier to take it out than to constantly have to address it. And over time, Zak became more chill as an investigator. As we did it more and more, he becam
e less on edge and more mellowed out. It was just part of the learning curve for all of us.
People who want to parody Zak—and there are some good impressions out there, as even he’ll admit—will always say, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” They’ll also throw in repeated use of the words “dude” and “bro,” which, actually, all three of us are guilty of overusing. Some people have even made a drinking game out of it—every time one of us says “dude” or “bro” in an episode, they take a drink. Good luck with that! Play that game and you’ll probably be toast before we even get to the lockdown!
Dude, when we’re in the moment and forget there are cameras on us, that’s what we become. We say it a lot and it just flows from us, especially in moments when we’re not exactly thinking about what we’re saying and are instead focused on what we’re experiencing. When we filmed in Tucson, we had to trim out so many “dudes” in editing that it even annoyed us, bro.
The way we talk and react is, I’m sure, part of the reason I’ve received so many compliments over the years on the show. People perceive us as genuine. If you go through some big-time experience, your reaction probably won’t sound like a Shakespeare sonnet. It’s more like, “Wha… wha… what the fuck was that?!”
During the filming at the Houghton Mansion, some of the executives from Travel Channel showed up to check out the operation. Matt Butler was one of them, and even though we had become friendly, I was still a little intimidated by all these network people hanging around. It only added to the stress between Zak and me, since we wanted to impress those guys and show them we were pros.