by Zak Bagans
You have to be extremely dedicated to your story as a documentary filmmaker. You have to be constantly aware of new developments. You have to learn how to pursue those developments and find an ending that helps explain or expands on the original story. It’s those different canals that lead off of the main river that add interest and credibility instead of telling the same story that everyone’s already heard. You run into obstacles and barriers, and you have to get through them to get what you want. When you do, you gain respect as a filmmaker. Not everyone has the tenacity to make a great film.
The barriers that have been thrown in front of me since I bought the Demon House have been incredible. I feel like an Amazon explorer trapping a new, unknown spider that everyone wants to see, but I can’t let them see it until I know what it can do. Inside Edition pressured me over and over again to get inside the house because they wanted to be the first to take cameras in. But I’d just witnessed something extraordinary, and since I owned the house, I knew I’d be putting their camera crew in jeopardy if I let them in.
As I write this book, I’m midway through filming my documentary about the house. There are so many more things that have happened that I want to talk about, and so many more details that I’d like to share, but it’s complex…and dangerous.
LOOK FOR THE DEMON HOUSE MOVIE
TO COME OUT IN 2015.
4
MY OASIS IN THE DESERT
Getting away is a necessity.
In the days leading up to a lockdown, we do a lot of preparation and talk to a lot of people. When we filmed in Pioche, Nevada, I spoke with a few old-timers who lived there and found each of their stories to be similar to mine. One used to live in Las Vegas and had escaped to this old mining town because life was simpler there, and another was slowly being overtaken by disease and wanted to spend the rest of his days away from the noise of society. At times like these, I find myself face-to-face with who I may become when the time is right.
There are only a couple hundred people living in Pioche today. It’s one of those communities where everyone gathers around a grill and the old fire truck drives in with Santa riding high atop it for the kids at Christmas. It’s those simple pleasures of life that I pine for, preserved in Norman Rockwell style in these little towns that time has turned a blind eye to.
I’m not saying that Pioche is a perfect, idyllic place, but it is far less noisy and pretentious than mainstream America, and I always seem to be drawn to these types of towns. People who live in towns like these don’t obsess over Bieber and the Kardashians, and the local press is more concerned with relevant civic issues than with worshipping pop stars and socialites.
This day and age makes me sick sometimes. It’s disgusting and selfish in so many ways that it drives me to separate from it. That’s one reason I love traveling: It gives me the chance to escape into these nooks and crannies of space and time. But my experience is always a little different from everyone else’s. Being a sensitive and an empath, I’m not just visiting an old town looking at rundown buildings; I can actually feel the spirits and their energy. If you put a blindfold on me, put me in a van, and drop me off in a town like Pioche, I can instantly feel that I’m in a different time. It’s a therapeutic escape that I miss after the shoot is over and I’m back in loud, neon Vegas. Traveling to these places off the beaten path is my privilege and my sanctuary. I’m definitely a guy who prefers the road less traveled.
This temporary release from the noise of society is one reason I keep making Ghost Adventures. It’s a serene island in an ocean of chaos. Everyone wishes they could go back in time and feel what it was like to live in a different world—at least temporarily. We all enjoy the comforts of modern life, like medicine, transportation, electricity, and running water, and I have to admit that I’m no different.
Some of my favorite spots to film are old Wild West mining towns in the desert. I’ve been all over Nevada and the Southwest and have swallowed more than my fair share of dust. But the more desolate a place is, the more I enjoy it. Bannack Ghost Town in Montana is beautiful. Historic old towns like Gettysburg are insanely cool to me as well. I love a location with a good story, and the Colonial East Coast has a ton of stories to tell. On set, I’m no longer in 2014; I’m in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. I wear my cowboy hat and boots or whatever the location calls for, and for three days I’m truly free. I’m not famous or successful, just a guy doing his job, and at times I wish I could stay there. In these ghost towns, I’ll sit in an old rocking chair and observe the people who live there. Many look like they’ve been through hell but are peacefully riding out the rest of their days in solitude. Some days I want that for myself, too.
On the flip side, I also need an element of adventure, in case I get a little bored. The murders, suicides, abductions, scandals, and mysteries that built these towns are spellbinding to me. I’ve always found the dead more interesting than the living because they have more secrets to discover. I can talk to a living person today and learn their secrets pretty quickly, but the dead are tough nuts to crack. They lived in a different time with different lifestyles and even different speech. We sometimes think of them as rudimentary or simple people, but really they weren’t. They had the same problems we do, but different ways of dealing with them. That’s intriguing to me.
When I travel to these towns, there are always mysteries to unravel. I can go back in time and pick up a cold case murder and try to ask the victim what happened. Communicating with spirits from the past is a true adventure. I get to meet the people of that era and area and see how different they were. Some say that the people create the environment, but after all my travels, I think it’s the other way around—the environment shapes the people. Those who live in a dirty place tend to be meaner, less trustworthy, and more violent. People who are brought up in a nicer place are likely to have better manners and care more about helping others. This is a generalization, of course, but I’ve observed a lot of people and find it to be true a lot of the time.
Many people are stuck in a bad environment or situation that they can’t get away from. I was stuck in Detroit for years and kept telling myself that if I just made a little more money, I could leave. It was a miserable time because I never found my place there. There was no purpose to any of the jobs I held. I would go home and then go through the same meaningless stuff again the next day. I had no impact on people. There was no adventure. I wasn’t dissecting life to uncover its mysteries. That’s how I wanted to live, but I wasn’t sure how to accomplish it.
As a kid, I used to fear that my life would be wasted. I would agonize over how I was going to live this finite life. We have only so much time, after all, and I didn’t want my only experiences with different cultures to be on TV or in the pages of National Geographic. I wanted to visit the Kansas plains, the Virginia battlefields, and the California coast. I wanted to see the world instead of being stuck in just one part of it. I wanted to feel the energies of new places and different people, and I wanted to experience the glories of history. But as I get older, I can see the benefits of settling down in a small town where you know everyone and become part of the lore. I absorb energy like a sponge everywhere I go. It allows me to see the world and my purpose in it. I wish everyone could do that. I wish everyone could see more than where they are today, and see how vast and wonderful the wide world is while also appreciating the beauty of the little corners.
The guy in Pioche who escaped Vegas said that he was running from something. I don’t remember what it was (or maybe I just don’t want to give his secret away), but he was seeking peace in this small town.
MAYBE I’M THE SAME.
5
DEEPER CONNECTION
Sometimes I zone out like Walter Mitty, and that’s not always a good thing.
You know that old saying, “Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it”? Some days that’s me. I walk through the paranormal door to discover all I can about the spirit world, and I develop
a deep connection to the other side that sometimes overtakes me completely, whether I want it to or not. After a paranormal investigation, I seem to have a residual connection with the spirits that I don’t know about until days, weeks, or even months later…when they want to make contact, not the other way around. It’s almost like being kidnapped, or at least forced to go somewhere and listen to something regardless of how you feel about it. I worked hard to open a door, but now I can’t shut it.
Recently I was driving home from my mom’s house through Las Vegas, and at a stoplight I was suddenly transported back to La Purisma Mission in Lompoc, California, one of the first investigations we did for Ghost Adventures. It had been the site of some pretty barbaric events, and the spirit energy was so strong there that it stayed with me, but I never knew that it would someday take hold of my mind. While my car was stopped at this light, I was back in the eighteenth century, sitting around a campfire with the women and children of the Chumash Indians. Everyone was laughing and happy. I was there, really there. It was as if I had gone back in time at a Vegas stoplight, of all places. It was so vivid that I couldn’t shrug it off as a simple flashback.
These reflections from past investigations float in and out of my life like the flute music we captured on the tribal grounds. I feel as though a part of me stayed with the spirits there, and at certain moments those spirits can call upon me and demand that I listen. They can still communicate through me. They seek relief from their pain by igniting visions within me. I get so deep into these visions that it’s hard to break free. At that stoplight, I was back in the 1700s. It was a sunny day. The women were making pottery. The children were playing and having a good time. I could feel every bit of it, and I had to force my hand to reach forward and turn on some music just to get myself straight enough to drive home.
La Purisma isn’t the only example. I get it from all the places I go. The spirits select me, and I never know which ones are going to come and when. In certain locations I can almost transport myself back in time to those moments we’re investigating. At Gettysburg, for example, I could smell the sulfur and death in the air and see the sun shining on the scorched battlefield in July 1863. I could hear the screams of the men having their legs sawed off. Long after I left the battlefield, I felt the pain of bullets hitting a soldier in the chest and fell to the floor in agony as he would have fallen as he took his last breath.
One time I was at home relaxing in a chair and boom—I was in a recliner at Waverly Hills Sanitarium with the other patients who were dying of tuberculosis. We were on the breezeway, where the terminally ill spent their days. There was a woman with curly hair. I believe it was the one whose picture was on the wall there—the one I left flowers for. I shared comforting stories with this woman before she died.
I don’t know what it is, but it seems like a part of me gets left behind at these locations, and the spirits can find me through that. It sounds crazy, but these episodes are happening more and more often now, and they’re more powerful every time, which makes me wonder if they’ll ever get so strong that I won’t be able to get myself back. Will I pass out on the floor and be trapped in another time while doctors try to figure out what’s wrong with me, and eventually call it something they understand, like a stroke?
Many times it’s stronger than just a vision, and my emotions are part of the experience. I really feel that it’s an ethereal connection that I made during the investigation by opening myself up to the spirits. It’s almost like I’m transplanting or channeling them through me and me through them, but it’s stored deep inside me and comes out only at certain moments.
You could say that I’m a human satellite. The spirits reach out to me because they know I have a good heart and a good soul. They know I was sent there for more than a TV show. It’s my destiny and my fate. In the beginning, I was more focused on taunting evil spirits and enticing them into a fight, but now I feel like I do more. I help people, but I also help spirits.
When you have a family member who’s in pain, what do you do? You talk to them and show through your empathy that you’re also in pain. You comfort them with words and touch and let them sense that you’re hurting, too, which relieves them. That’s what I do for these spirits. I don’t just help them; I also guide them through the astral plane. We humans are constantly striving for happiness, so is it so hard to imagine that spirits who were once human would want the same thing? We all want to be free of pain, disease, violence, and suffering. Life is a fight against these adversities. Even when we’re happy, we fear falling toward a state of illness, trauma, insecurity, or whatever.
Most of the places I’ve investigated have been the sites of atrocities and disasters that resulted in pain, suffering, and death. These places are vortexes of supercharged emotion, and I believe that the physical surroundings—the trees, the rocks, the walls—can hold onto the energy of those disasters. But more incredibly, so do I, and I frequently experience delayed pain from making contact with spirits. I’m sure we all try to avoid death, but I believe it’s this moment of mortality when a person dies that imprints a spirit on its surroundings and keeps some spirits earthbound because they’re still fighting to get their lives back. Wouldn’t any of us do the same?
When I’m not filming, I don’t go out a lot anymore. I’m not around people as much as I used to be. I don’t leave my house like I did a few years ago. Instead, I travel back to the places I’ve been to visit the spirits there; even though I’m physically at my house, my mind is always away. I visit these spirits just like you would visit your friends. Usually I see smiles and happiness, which I’d like to think is because I came to see them. I know how strange this sounds, but I don’t care. I know it’s real.
I deal with the world of the unknown and the unexplained. I can’t explain why these things happen to me, but they do. All I can do is welcome it and try to learn from it. But I also worry that something darker may be aware that I’m involved in it. Am I making things worse by opening myself up?
I had a friend who had something dark come through while he was opening himself up to a loving spirit. He’s smart, educated, and likable, but he was not aware that something evil could find him. He was so focused on opening up to a good spirit with love and compassion that he never saw the dark one that blindsided him. Your soul is like the Stargate. If you open it up too long to the spirit world, bad things can come through, and they’ll attach themselves to you. His sessions with the loving spirit were too long and too open, and he was unprepared for what could happen. His armor wasn’t strong enough to combat anything dark. His emotions were focused on the good things, and that left him vulnerable to the bad thing that came through and still affects him to this day.
Dark things have tried to come for me, but I’m always ready for them. I train myself and my soul to be strong while I visit other times and spirits. I gain knowledge from others in the field: parapsychologists, psychic mediums, and demonologists. I prepare and cleanse myself with prayer, meditation, and communing with Mother Nature. If you try to contact spirits without doing those things first, something bad will take notice and try to destroy you. The more you work in and around the paranormal, the more you open yourself up to the dark side of it, which is dangerous. You’re vulnerable to paranormal diseases that you can’t get rid of. This isn’t the thrill ride that many people think it is. There are health risks and life-or-death situations that most people don’t understand.
I don’t fear the visions I have because most of them are sad or happy and pretty nonthreatening. However, some are evil, and those are the ones that concern me. One such episode shook me to the core.
I usually get visions in the daytime, but of course we all dream. One night I dreamed that I had powers. I was a ghost with the ability to move things. I was at a bar and made a glass slide into my hand like a parlor trick. The next thing I knew, a giant satanic creature with hooves and backward antlers was standing in front of me. Then he had control of me. I was frozen as he opened
his mouth and mine opened at the same time, against my will. Smoke came out of his mouth that I was inhaling, and then suddenly I woke up. I was shaken, but I got over it.
Fast-forward a few months. I hadn’t told anyone about that dream, and out of the blue I got a text from Chris Fleming, a psychic medium and friend. He’d heard that I bought the Demon House and wanted me to be careful because there was a satanic creature with hooves and backward horns in the house that was aware of me. I was chilled like never before. How could he have known? “I just know,” he told me. He’s done things like this in the past and is always spot on, so I heeded his advice when I finally set foot in that place.
In addition to my connection to the dead, I’m gifted with the ability to connect with the living on a deeper level. I am an empath, meaning that I can feel the emotions of others near me. From a young age I’ve had a hypersensitivity to others’ emotions. I know it sounds silly, but I can be at home watching a talk show featuring a man telling a story about his son who was killed in a car accident, and the next thing you know I have tears running down my face. I don’t feel just a little emotion; I feel strong emotion and a real connection to the person telling the story, much more than the average person sitting on their couch eating potato chips would. This is just who I am. Long ago I realized that my emotions are finely tuned instruments that can tap into and synchronize with others. I can feel what other people feel at the same intensity and at the same time, especially sadness and happiness.