Chasing Spirits: The Building of the Ghost Adventures Crew

by Groff, Nick

  QUESTIONS FANS ASK

  Do you believe there is life after death?

  Absolutely. Energy doesn’t die.

  My childhood was not one paranormal event after the other, but I can look back now and see that there were events that couldn’t be explained. There were connections between adventures, accidents, and life experiences that molded me into who I am today. The same could be said for all of us—we are all a product of every moment of our lives up to this point. But this is how I was drawn into the paranormal and how I launched a career on television. It wasn’t a single event, but a bunch of small moments that steered me to this. Two seconds here, two seconds there, and you end up exactly where you are now.

  Throughout these pages I’m going to answer some of the most common questions you’ve asked me on Facebook, Twitter, and in person, and I’ll bare it all. We’ll go behind the scenes and into my own life because I want you to see the world through my eyes. I want you to know more about the history of the locations I’ve investigated, and I want you to understand why I’m chasing spirits.

  CHAPTER 1

  NEAR DEATH

  There’s no question that fear sharpens your senses. When you’re in a situation where your heart is racing and adrenaline is pumping, you’re wide awake, you see and hear things you might not hear otherwise, and you’re extra sharp. Tapping into that fear can be helpful in a paranormal investigation. Knowing fear means to know yourself. Standing in creepy, abandoned buildings frightened of what might be lurking there is one thing. Facing the real possibility of your own death is another.

  My brush with death occurred when I was only eight years old. Did I mention I was a hyperactive kid? Indestructible? Looking back, I wonder if this event left me more open to the supernatural. Could coming close to my own death have brought me closer to understanding the spirit world? I’m not talking about some psychic awakening—though I know all of us have certain abilities and intuition. I mean just knowing that the spirit world is there. Recognizing the paranormal when I see it because I faced it as a kid.

  Since my sister, Dianna, and I were swimmers, we spent a lot of time at the YMCA in Nashua. We had practice several times a week. My practice ended before my sister’s, so my mom would take me outside and let me run around while we waited for Dianna to wrap up.

  On one of these practice days, my mom sat down on a bench to read a book while I ran off to the small park behind the building. I wandered farther and farther away until I found an old tree that was begging me to climb up it. This tree stood out from the others: it was old, its branches like wrinkled arms and legs sticking out from a knotty trunk. It called to me, and soon it would punish me for my curiosity.

  Part of the tree was rotten, but there were plenty of branches for me to pull myself up with. I climbed up one branch, then another. Soon I was about twelve feet off the ground, but I wasn’t thinking about the height—I was thinking about the one branch that was sticking out on its own. I leaned out and grabbed the branch with my left hand, putting all of my weight on the old limb. It seemed to be holding me, so I reached out with my right hand to grab it as well. I swung my legs out from the branch I was standing on and…

  …I didn’t look down—not that it would have mattered had I seen the old, rusted chain-link fence directly below the branch. I wasn’t thinking about falling—I was thinking about pulling myself up on the branch…

  …CRACK… the branch snapped and I was falling.

  I don’t remember the fall. I don’t even remember hitting the cyclone fence or the ground below. I do remember opening my eyes and seeing the tree and sky above me. I tried to stand up and look for my mom, but then everything went black and I collapsed in a heap back on the ground. Again I opened my eyes and pushed myself up. My mom was running toward me… something felt wet and cold on my left side. I looked at her and said, “Mom, I love you,” and again it all went black and I collapsed to the ground.

  What happened next was like flashes of a movie. I opened my eyes and my mother was huddled over me working on something near my body—I couldn’t tell what it was. Later she told me that my left arm was ripped completely open two-thirds of the way around—the cyclone fence had sliced me up like a rusty razor. She could see my bone, my muscle was torn, and I was bleeding everywhere. I wouldn’t know that until later, though at that point I did know something was very wrong.

  …I opened my eyes and I was inside the YMCA building with a group of people standing around me. I have to die—that was how I felt. Like this was my time to go and that there were angels standing over me looking down. “It’s going to be all right,” someone said. I looked at my arm. There were T-shirts wrapped around it and everything was red, soaked with my blood.

  I was in and out of consciousness, but I didn’t feel any pain. I realized much later that my body was in shock—my brain had turned off all pain receptors in an effort to spare me further trauma. I opened my eyes again and was in an ambulance… black… I opened my eyes and was in a hospital operating room. Dianna was in there sobbing… black… I opened my eyes and could hear doctors working on my arm, but I still felt nothing but gentle tugs on the skin of my arm… black…

  …this time I woke up in a recovery room. My mom was there. When my foggy head cleared, I heard the whole story. When I’d fallen, the top of the chain-link fence had ripped my arm open to the point where my biceps was hanging from my bone like bloody meat. Had I fallen just a quarter inch differently, the fence would have sliced through a major artery and I would not have survived. Had my mother not seen me fall and had I lain there a few extra minutes, I would have bled to death. Had my mom not been a former nurse, had she not kept a cool head and wrapped a T-shirt around my wound to stop the bleeding, I would have died. Just a few seconds had made all the difference.

  I had fifty stitches on the inside of my arm and fifty stitches on the outside to pull my arm back together. You can still see the deep scar that goes almost all the way around my left bicep.

  I was in a cast for a long time, and it hurt like hell after the cast was removed. My parents and coaches forced me to get back into the water and swim again as soon as the cast was off. Every stroke was painful for weeks. I know why they did that to me. I was raised to not give up, no matter how bad the setback. Had my arm been amputated, I’m sure I would have found a way to swim, to compete with only one arm.

  I was only eight years old. Indestructible. It took years for this to sink in: I could have died. I was that close. To have your mortality tested that young changes your perspective. I couldn’t have known it then, but looking back I can see it clearly: I had a near-death experience.

  Did this horrible accident at age eight make me more careful when throwing my body into an adventure? Hell, no!

  QUESTIONS FANS ASK

  How do you prepare for an investigation?

  I remind myself to go in with an open mind. I’ll take some deep breaths so I’m not overhyped before walking in. If you’re too amped up, you’ll jump at every little thing. Because I know my surroundings and the history before going in, I also feel better prepared for whatever might be inside. I can better guess at the entity’s motives.

  As I mentioned earlier, our house in Salem was surrounded by woods—I spent a lot of time out there having adventures as a kid. About a year after my accident, I was out in the woods one fall afternoon on a big outcropping of rocks. There was a huge tree over the rock where I had attached a rope that hung at the edge of the top of the rock. Here’s how it worked: I would grab the rope and swing out over the drop-off—at least twenty feet above the ground. It was great fun—as long as the rope and tree held together, which, this day, they didn’t.

  I had piled up a bunch of fallen leaves at the bottom of the ledge. You know what was under those leaves? Rocks. But the fact that I’d pushed some leaves over the rocks as a cushion proves I didn’t have a death wish, right? Right?!

  I was out there alone on this day, swinging on my rope swing—the coolest
daredevil in Salem. As I swung out I heard CRACK, SNAP… and then I was falling.

  I landed on my back and my head slammed hard against the rocks under the leaves. Everything went black.

  When I opened my eyes, I was dizzy, but I recognized the woods around me. I lifted myself up and stumbled around a bit. I reached my hand up to the back of my head and felt something wet. I looked at my hand and saw the blood… I’m thinking, If this cut doesn’t do it, Mom is going to kill me.

  I dragged myself back to our house and found my mom inside. Off to the doctor’s office we go, and three stitches on the back of my head later, I’m walking out to our car with my mother shaking her head.

  Some might use the word “reckless” to describe my childhood, but to this day I say “adventurous.”

  At age ten, after having suffered two bloody accidents—one that almost killed me—I had my first experience with a ghost. There is definitely a connection between my near-death experience and this sighting. Something in me was open now. Now I knew what to look for and I was beginning to understand what being in the presence of a spirit feels like.

  It was a school day and I had just been dropped off at home by our carpool. My mom wasn’t home yet—she would usually show up five or ten minutes after me because she was working at my dad’s law firm during the days while my sister and I were at school. So I used my key to get into the house.

  I went in through a door on the basement level. I remember walking up the stairs from the garage and I was getting a weird feeling. I was creeped out. I knew I wasn’t alone in the house. I should have been alone, but there was a presence there. It was like I was getting a premonition of something I was about to see. I was afraid and my senses were heightened by the fear.

  I walked up the stairs and opened the door to the living room. I walked through the living room and into the kitchen. In our house, when you walked into the kitchen there was a dining room off to the right and a sliding glass door that looked out onto the woods in the back. I was really scared at this point and didn’t know why. I had come home to an empty house many times before and thought nothing of it. But something was different today.

  I tiptoed through the kitchen, leaned into the doorway, and peeked around the corner of the dining room, where I saw a figure standing there right in front of the glass door. The figure was dark, almost black. A surge of energy ran through me as I turned and sprinted through the living room, back down the stairs to the basement, and out to the side yard. I didn’t stop running. Through our yard, into the woods, I jumped across a small stream and kept scrambling until I reached our neighbor’s yard. I turned around. Panting from the run, I put my hands on my knees to catch my breath and I looked at our house in the distance. Something was in there. Some kind of otherworldly intruder.

  At this point the experience started to sink in. I couldn’t remember any features on this dark figure. I didn’t see a face. It was just a tall black figure and it scared the crap out of me.

  A few minutes later I saw my mom’s car pull into the driveway, so I walked back to the house and went in after her. The figure, and the feeling of something being there, were now gone.

  I didn’t tell anyone what happened. I wasn’t sure if anyone would believe me. With each hour that passed, I questioned myself. Was I just scaring myself? Was it real or not? I didn’t know, but I kept checking over my shoulder for days after that experience.

  Over the years, this memory kind of drifted away, until I started working on Ghost Adventures. The more involved I became with ghost hunting, the more pieces of this memory started coming back to me. It was as though investigating the spirits as part of the show had triggered my memory.

  It’s not like my family shunned talk of weird stuff when I was a kid. My dad had his law practice and my mom worked there too, so I spent a lot of time at Grandma’s house. My grandma often spoke to me about UFOs and other paranormal topics. Grandma was especially interested in aliens and spaceships. She lived on top of one of the biggest hills in Nashua. You could see for miles around from up there. She and my grandpa had bought the house in the early 1960s during the time when a lot of people were talking about the Betty and Barney Hill UFO abduction case.

  QUESTIONS FANS ASK

  What does it feel like to have a ghost travel through you?

  It feels like a wild electrical shock or charge that vibrates through your entire body. I feel goose bumps from my face down to my hands and then through my legs. A jolt like that wakes you up and heightens your senses right away. Right after, I feel a little dizzy, like my equilibrium is off.

  Betty and Barney Hill were from Portsmouth, a coastal city about an hour’s drive from Nashua. On September 19, 1961, the Hills were returning home to Portsmouth after vacationing in Niagara Falls. While driving along Route 3 near the town of Lancaster, in the northern part of the state, the couple saw strange lights in the sky. Eventually the craft hovered so close that Barney stopped the car and they got out to look. Hill claimed that through binoculars he could see figures inside the craft that didn’t quite look human. He was panicked. The couple then recall hearing a series of beeping and buzzing noises and then the next thing they remember is being in their car driving and they’ve traveled about thirty-five miles south from where they had stopped to observe the UFO in the road.

  The Hill case became world famous. The couple had experienced missing time and a close encounter. People still talk about it in New Hampshire. I think deep down my grandma was a little jealous. I’m sure she would have wanted that same experience for herself, even if it was to validate what she suspected: that aliens have visited us before.

  Not a lot of people ever knew that my grandpa worked for RCA on some of their national defense projects. He had some serious clearance and wouldn’t even talk about what he did with his family. But I know he and my grandma had had some deep conversations about UFOs and extraterrestrial technology. I can only imagine the things he saw and knew.

  My grandma was a smart lady. She died of a stroke when I was in college. I miss her on so many levels, but I’ll never forget all those fascinating discussions we had about extraterrestrials, ghosts, and the like. She’d really thought about this stuff. She’s a big part of the reason I’m interested in this subject today. My aunt Missy lived with her, and she was also into the paranormal. When I was a kid, we would all talk about what it would mean if there was life out there, and Aunt Missy had her own thoughts on the paranormal too. But she was more interested in ghosts.

  At Grandma’s house Missy had this creepy old doll, which she kept in her bedroom. I’ll never forget it. It was an antique—brownish, made of leather, and with a little bell on its hat. When I would sleep over—on the very couch where my grandpa had died—Aunt Missy told me that the doll would walk and even run around in the middle of the night. The idea had me panicked to sleep there. There was also something about this house. Now that I’ve been in so many haunted places, I can look back and know what I was feeling at my grandma’s. There was something there in that house. It’s this feeling you get when you know there’s something else present—almost like there’s an electrical charge.

  One time I was staying overnight sleeping on the couch, and I swear I heard the jingling of the bell on this doll’s hat. It was moving around the room and throughout the house. I was frozen with fear—I pulled the blankets up to my chin, ready to duck under them to hide. Maybe it was my mind messing with me, or maybe it was real, but either way I was paralyzed. The next morning I asked Aunt Missy, “Was the doll in your room or was it somewhere else?” She let my imagination run. I know Missy was playing a trick on me, but she did believe in the supernatural. I’m sure part of her wondered if maybe the doll had sprung to life. To this day I’m still not sure what really happened.

  From dealing with spirits so often and having had many unexplained encounters since I was a child, I’ve been able to piece together these paranormal pieces of my early life and figure out how they got me to where I am to
day. Powerful physical and emotional events like near-death experiences do make you more sensitive, but paying attention to the signs along the way and then focusing on the haunts is a sure way to have more ghostly experiences.

  I think about these events from my life as if they were scenes from a movie. Each one builds on the last, and I’m different after each one. Little did I know back then that one day my job would involve living out my own horror movie, going from one haunted building to the next looking for answers and facing demons.

  CHAPTER 2

  MAKING TELEVISION

  The love of my life has always been Veronique. We met in the sixth grade. The funny thing is, if I hadn’t been such a problem child, I might never have met her. And if I hadn’t been such a problem, I might never have been introduced to the world of video production and television. Thank God I was trouble!

  St. Pat’s was a Catholic school for boys and girls. I had a great teacher or two, but for the most part I don’t think the school could handle me. I was basically kicked out. The principal was a nun who didn’t like me because I was a hellion. I was “a distraction in class”—that’s probably how she would have put it—but I just wanted to make everyone laugh. I was a smart-ass to the teachers, and always distracted. I had a hard time sitting still. I wanted to run around, climb the walls—do anything but sit there. I wasn’t a complete punk about it, but I’m sure if I had been a teacher I wouldn’t have wanted me in class.

  The teachers at St. Pat’s figured putting me on the soccer team would help me burn off excess energy. The soccer team was awful. They didn’t score their first goal until I joined the team. Imagine game after game not even putting up a single point. It’s demoralizing. I hate losing. Plus, running around after school playing soccer wasn’t enough to tame me the rest of the day. But I did love soccer—that would stay with me.