by Zak Bagans
During a possession, I have one singular goal: to not be possessed anymore. Maybe what I secretly enjoy, then, is the fight. The struggle against dark forces reinforces my belief that good can prevail in the end. Maybe I like knowing that I truly can make contact with the other side—that even though it’s a dark entity trying to take over, at least it chose me, and I’m still bridging the divide between this world and the next.
I can sit in a chair all day and revisit places I’ve already been and be entertained by the spirits that are still there and call to me. Unlike the guy in the Dos Equis commercials, I’m not the most interesting man in the world, but I feel that I live in a more interesting place than most. It’s not made up only of material things and present-day society. Money, women, houses, cars…those aren’t the things I live for. The more places I investigate, the more spirits I come in contact with, and the more possessions I endure, the more I can just sit and reflect on those experiences and ask myself billions of questions about life and death and how it all works.
Going through a possession doesn’t mean that you’re screwed for life. The boy on whom The Exorcist was based went on to lead a successful life long after the demon was cast out of him. Dr. William Bradshaw, one of the most successful and knowledgeable demonologists in the world, believes that demons choose their victims at an early age. They prefer people with great potential who will have an impact on the world, but why? Why do they choose to possess people who are gifted or are destined to do something great? And does this mean that our fate is determined before we’re even born? Have great people been marked from birth? Is there really no free will, and are those who say that God has a plan for everyone correct? Can you see how a seemingly insignificant thing like a possession can lead me to ask the biggest questions in the universe?
Sometimes I feel that a possession can do a person good. While it’s hell to go through (literally), the people who experience a possession go on to live great lives with no recollection of the event. Maybe it makes them stronger in the end, like any traumatic event can make a person more resilient. No one knows what demons are. No one has been able to study or dissect one. I’m not taking the side of demons—I do think they’re evil—but I’m not comfortable making blanket statements about something so difficult to study. Demons make you feel evil, make you want to do violent things, and make you say horrible things. They are nasty and can cause you harm.
But when a demon possesses you, does it really do damage to your body, or does it actually help it? Can a dose of supernatural energy that makes you levitate, speak in Latin, or have superhuman strength make you a better person in the long run? Think about it—a godlike power is entering your body and giving you its power. When it leaves, what does it leave behind? You won’t know what effects it had until years later. Does a spirit entering your body energize your organs or cells? Does it prevent disease? Do demons get diseased? Do they die?
SO MANY QUESTIONS AND SO FEW ANSWERS.
25
TRANS-ALLEGHENY LUNATIC ASYLUM
What you don’t know can hurt you.
When we came up with the concept to do a live paranormal investigation at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum on Halloween night, there were a ton of obstacles for us to overcome. How could we examine evidence quickly and thoroughly on the spot? How could we broadcast a live event without the equipment and people getting in the way (because a live event would certainly involve a larger crew)? Could we really sustain a seven-hour event? Was there any place for Aaron to eat in Weston, West Virginia? How many times would Aaron fart on live TV? How would I edit that out? A lot of the variables that are under my control in a regular lockdown would be uncontrollable in a live event, so it was going to take some creative thinking to pull it off.
I saw this as a challenge and took it on as a mission, but my biggest worry was getting a migraine. At the time I was suffering from massive migraines that would last for one to two days and would be triggered by any number of crazy things. A migraine would really slow me down, so I was worried that one would kick in at the exact wrong moment. Four days before the event, we arrived in Weston to get ready for the show, and I remember worrying every day: When will the migraine kick in? At the time they were so bad that I knew I wouldn’t be myself if I got one. I wouldn’t be able to think clearly and talk right. This was a seven-hour live event with millions of people watching, and I had to not just lead it, but make it meaningful and memorable. Doing that would be impossible with a migraine, so the pressure to avoid one was absolutely massive.
We did research and walk-throughs and set up a ton of equipment—I think we had forty remote camera operators and six production trucks. It was like NASA, and I was Snake Pliskin in Escape from New York. The pressure was on, and I knew that if I got a migraine, I would be in a fog and wouldn’t be able to speak or work. I wouldn’t be myself. I live in Vegas and see people do live shows on the Strip every night, and I think they must be in perfect health to perform so often.
During the investigation I wore an earpiece the whole time, with our award-winning producer Bruce Kennedy on the other end. Bruce is amazing to work with, and he kept me on a strict time line by telling me when to wrap up a particular segment, when to go to commercial, when to go to the front door of the asylum to bring in new guests, when to go to Dave at the nerve center to talk about new evidence, when any problems arose, etc. All this while leading a live paranormal investigation and maintaining our credibility. I’d never done live TV before, so to jump into it for the first time with a seven-hour show, with several more hours of interviews afterward, was a huge accomplishment for me, Nick, Aaron, the production staff, and everyone else involved.
Except for one.
I wanted to bring in guest investigators for an hour each to add to the experience. We brought in Mark and Debby Constantino, who are awesome investigators and EVP specialists. We also brought in one of the leading psychic mediums, Chris Fleming, and some fans, including Kelly Crigger, who helped me write this book and my previous one, Dark World. Kelly got locked in a seclusion cell at the asylum and heard the creepiest disembodied scream ever.
Around the fourth or fifth hour, we brought in Robert Bess, whom I’d never met. I’d investigated with the Constantinos and Chris Fleming, and they always do amazing work (and got amazing results that night at the asylum). But the first time I met Robert Bess was the moment I met him live on camera. For some reason we had never crossed paths during the preparation for the show, so I was meeting him in front of millions of people. It was risky (especially because the stress of the unknown could trigger a migraine), but I figured it was worth the risk because he brought a new piece of technology to the show, and from what I had heard, it got results. Looking back on that night, it wasn’t the best idea.
I think it was Dave Schrader who told me about Bess and his Parabot device: a chamber large enough to hold a human, flanked by large electric Tesla coils. It is supposed to be able to attract and contain the electromagnetic energy created by spirits. Dave sent me a video of the device in action, and it looked really interesting. It looked and sounded like something from Ghostbusters, but it came from a credible source, so I said yes, let’s bring him on the live show. I love experimenting with new technologies and techniques, and this thing was pretty captivating. Could it really capture and hold a spirit?
A few days before the live show, the production crew had a couple of incidents with the Parabot that they told me about. While it was sitting in a hallway of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, the glass on the inside of the device cracked. Bess explained this as angry ghosts that didn’t like the device and were trying to sabotage it. I actually got to step inside the Parabot and see the cracks. Another day the fluorescent lights above the Parabot came crashing down on it unexplainably. So I was really amped to get this thing on the show and work with Bess.
I met Bess on set (decked out in his cowboy hat and long leather coat) in the middle of the night in front of the world. He fired
up the device, and I was immediately concerned about the sheer amperage coming off of it. It was like he was trying to resuscitate Frankenstein’s monster with massive jolts of electricity. The Parabot made a sound every few seconds—boom boom boom—and I could feel the shock waves in the air every time it fired. Clearly it had power. It was like the human version of a bug zapper, and I was waiting for one of us to get electrocuted. I seriously thought one of us was going to get killed by the thing, especially when Bess said to me, “Don’t get within three feet of it.” Getting incinerated on live TV would not be good.
But while this thing was pumping out electricity, I could feel the environment change. The air was supercharged, and since spirits are thought to be made of electromagnetic energy, I thought maybe this was a great invention and we were going to see some results. Bess said that when the door opened, the ghosts would go toward the energy, and he would capture them in the pod by closing the door. I thought, Okay. Let me see this.
So we let Bess do his thing, and I will say that legitimately strange things started happening. Nick said that he felt something grabbing his leg, so I took a still shot of his legs and captured a huge white anomaly. It was like a spirit was being dragged toward the Parabot and was grabbing Nick’s leg to avoid being sucked in. Then I took another picture down the hallway we were in and captured a green manifestation moving toward the Parabot. Aaron started freaking out because he was standing close to the coils and felt like the device was messing with him internally, so I pushed him back and told him to keep his distance, because none of us knew what the side effects of this thing were. It was an experiment, and we all know how horribly wrong an experiment can go and how quickly it can turn.
I was feeling pretty good about the Parabot and Bess when it all went bad. Something hit the floor, and it was loud—loud enough to make Nick, Aaron, and me jump. I had no idea that the EMF detector that was in Bess’ hand had left his hand, hit the floor, and slid down the hallway. All I knew was that something had hit the ground, and we all reacted.
It wasn’t until after we had finished with Bess and the Parabot and moved on to the final hour of the show to investigate an abandoned hospital that we got the bad news from the guys back at the nerve center: It appeared that Robert Bess had thrown the device. “Hey, Zak, listen, man,” Bruce said in my earpiece. “We reviewed the X-cam footage, the night vision footage, and the static footage from the robotic camera, and it really looks like the EMF detector was thrown.”
No way, I thought. We were almost across the finish line, and this news stopped me in my tracks. Then Dave Schrader’s voice came across my earpiece: “Yeah, this looks really convincing that he threw it.” They asked if I wanted Dave to say something to the audience from the nerve center, and I agreed. I told them to have Dave word it in a way that made it seem suspect, and to suggest that it was not paranormal. Dave delivered the perfect NFL analogy when he said, “Was this intentional grounding?”
They then asked if I wanted to confront Bess about the incident. “Hell yes,” I said. Unfortunately, that meant cutting the last investigation short, because we were on live TV and had a time limit, but it was worth it to resolve the issue. We planned a final goodbye on camera with all of our guests, like Pat Sajak does on Wheel of Fortune, but they gave me an extra three minutes to confront Bess afterward. It was going to be uncomfortable, but my reputation—and that of everyone else who had worked on the show—was on the line. It had to be done publicly and immediately. I knew it was important to send a message to everyone that we have high standards for our investigations. I never condone behavior like that, and since I was in charge of the investigation, it was my responsibility to say something about it on the spot.
At the end of the show, I was interviewed by the host, Dean Haglund (the dude from The X-Files), and then I went up to Bess and asked him face-to-face what had happened. I told him that I hadn’t seen the video, but everyone was telling me that it looked like he had thrown the EMF detector. He denied it, but days later, when I reviewed the evidence, it seemed pretty clear that he had thrown the device.
This pissed me off back then and still pisses me off to this day. Robert Bess tarnished what was otherwise a great investigation. Forget that it was a live TV show and the production crew and Travel Channel executives were there; we brought Bess into our crew to do paranormal research, and he violated our trust, which disrespected us and everything we had worked for. It was disappointing, because so many people worked so hard to make it a great event, and everything else had gone off without a hitch.
I take personal responsibility for bringing Bess on the show and therefore anything he did as our guest, so as soon as I saw the video and knew that he’d thrown it, I was upset with myself. Even though 95 percent of the show went perfectly, I still felt like I’d let everyone down, but I also believe that I did the right thing in calling him out. If I hadn’t, then it would have made Ghost Adventures a party to the crime. In the end we turned a negative into a positive.
THAT’S WHEN THE MIGRAINE FINALLY HIT.
26
LOCATION DISAPPOINTMENTS
Not every “haunted” place turns out to be a paranormal hotspot.
I hate letdowns, but some of the locations we investigate just don’t turn up any good evidence. Keep in mind that just because we don’t turn up any evidence during our investigation doesn’t mean that the place isn’t haunted or that there’s no activity there; it just means that we weren’t able to capture any on that particular night. Still, I consider it a personal failure, because it’s my job to entice the spirits to make contact with us. It’s my role to research what happened at a location and find out what makes the spirits trapped there want to be heard or seen, and then use that knowledge to bring them out. Otherwise I’m just a chump walking around in the dark asking silly questions.
The most disappointing location we’ve filmed for Ghost Adventures was probably the Gribble House Warehouse in Savannah, Georgia. The Excalibur nightclub in Chicago and the jail at Cripple Creek in Colorado were also disappointments, but the Gribble House Warehouse was the pits. There’s a fine line between a truly haunted location and a location that’s being sensationalized by a tour company, and I got a lesson in the two on that trip.
Now, I’m not saying for certain that this is the case at the Gribble House, but there was something fishy going on down south. A local tour company was touting the location as the “Gribble House Paranormal Experience,” which should have raised red flags in my mind. I’m not against companies teaching the public how to ghost hunt and leading them into certain areas to give them a true paranormal experience—I’m all for it, in fact, so I can’t speak negatively about the practice. But I do think it’s being sensationalized there.
The real Gribble House is gone. It was a private residence that was built in the early twentieth century, and three women were murdered there in 1909. The house was torn down in 1940, and now there’s just a warehouse where the Gribble House used to sit. It’s new and clean and didn’t feel anything like the places I’m used to investigating. Where the Gribble House once stood, supplies are now stored, and to me it felt like I was walking around a Sam’s Club. There are walls within the warehouse that separate a storage area, and the tour operator says that area is about the same square footage as the old Gribble House and claims that the company has detected a lot of paranormal activity there. Sorry, but I don’t buy it.
I think land has something to do with paranormal activity, but structures play a larger role in hauntings—walls, floors, ceilings, bricks, and mortar store more paranormal energy than the land itself does. Sacred Indian lands, burial grounds, mines, and tunnels can hold onto spiritual energy, but an open field where a house once stood is hard to believe as paranormal. Think about the Stone Tape Theory, which says that certain natural materials can store supercharged emotional events and play them back like a cassette tape under the right conditions (more on that in chapter 14, “Carrying Spirits”).
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sp; The Gribble House is gone, so none of the materials that were present during the murders are there anymore. Where the house once stood is just a spot in a warehouse. When we were there doing interviews, I felt like the people who lived and worked there were hamming it up for the cameras and their own tour group. It’s an interesting story, and I give them mad props for telling the tale of what happened there, but as far as hauntings go, I was not convinced then and am not convinced now.
During the Gribble House tour, people are given information that I believe feeds into their psyche and leads them to think that paranormal events are happening when they’re not. They’re told things like, “People in this room feel their neck being squeezed,” and, “Over here where the house was, we hear women screaming, and over here where the slave quarters were, African Americans feel uncomfortable.” When the tourists (who are not professional paranormal investigators) are told these things during a haunted tour they are taking to get a spook or a thrill, they’re going to experience those things whether they really happen or not. They’re being programmed to hear or feel them, and they think they do. It’s Mentalism 101.
When I was filming an episode of Paranormal Challenge, we did an experiment with the publisher of Skeptic magazine (who is not a believer…shocking). He took a couple of groups on the show around the Linda Vista Hospital and gave them different pieces of false information in the same rooms. He told the first group that in a particular room there was a spirit of an old man that liked to poke people in the head, and told another group that in the same room a young girl had died and would put her hand in your hand. Sure enough, someone in the first group felt a poke in the head, even though that “evidence” was patently false. It’s one way to show how the mind can be tricked or even programmed.