by Groff, Nick
“You want to do movies and all that?” this guy asked me.
“Definitely,” I responded.
“Then you need to change your major to film,” he said.
That was it. I changed my major to film. The conversation we’d had was just a few seconds, but everything was so clear when he said it.
I started seeing all these other students wanting to be directors, writers, actors, editors, cinematographers. I started taking film classes, shooting on 8mm and 16mm film for projects for cinematography class, and I began learning everything about the field. I was grasping how to break out and be open-minded when it comes to visual storytelling. I think either you have it or you don’t. If you can’t think outside the box, you don’t belong in film.
I threw myself into the subject. I learned screenplays, I learned acts, I started to grasp everything—all of the logistics involved. If you’re going to capture great stories and events like haunted places and the paranormal, you need to have both the creative sense and a logistics sensibility. You may have a great idea on a camera angle or perspective, but if it requires cranes and helicopters to get that shot, it’s going to be expensive and will possibly break your budget. In film, you always need a plan B. School drilled that into us, but I’d later learn just how important this concept is.
During this time I was teaching myself video editing—that’s one thing I didn’t learn in school. Editing takes a ton of time and focus. There’s so much that goes into the process: where you cut, how you match up the video to the audio, what to leave in, what to take out, keeping the narrative moving at a good pace, building suspense, and so much more. Editing is filmmaking.
My sophomore year at UNLV was a time when I started making exciting connections. I was never much of a student, but give me a subject I love and I throw myself into it. I had my parents ship me their Hi8 camera so I could start filming more, and I was eating up everything I could on the subject.
QUESTIONS FANS ASK
Is Ghost Adventures edited? Isn’t it a reality show?
One question we often get asked about Ghost Adventures is about the editing. I understand the question and the concern. People who have gone out on ghost investigations know it’s often not as exciting as watching a television show. Here’s the reason. In our lockdown we place multiple static X-cameras that roll pretty much for eight hours. Zak, Aaron, and I also have handheld video cameras, thermal and UV cameras, plus other equipment that rolls pretty much nonstop during the lockdown. So that’s dozens of hours of footage that will get turned into half the show, which is about twenty-two minutes of actual screen time on television.
During the lockdowns, hours can go by where nothing happens. We’re obviously not going to bore our viewers with the misses. And sometimes our cameras or audio recorders capture something that we don’t experience until we’re reviewing evidence long after the lockdown is over. If we’ve caught something interesting, it goes into the show. If there are tense moments where one of us is experiencing something, that goes into the show. What you’re seeing are the highlights from hours of investigating a location from a ton of different perspectives—mine, Zak’s, and Aaron’s, plus the multiple static X-cams. This needs good editing, or all of that time in between investigations would drag out more.
One night at school, a film pro, who had just produced a small movie, gave a lecture about his experiences in the business. There was a fee to attend his talk, which I gladly paid. The roomful of people listened to him talk about the industry, how to get projects going, and where to take them. When the talk was over, I waited to chat with him about what I was doing. I told him about the film I was trying to make and how I was going to get my own thing off the ground. I was talking this guy’s ear off, until eventually it was just two of us left in the room with the filmmaker, seeking advice. The professor looked at the other guy standing there and said to him, “You want to make movies? Work with Nick.” I introduced myself to the other straggler, and we shook hands.
“I’m Aaron Goodwin,” he said.
Aaron and I kept talking about filmmaking. I came to find out he wasn’t even a student at UNLV; he just loved film and wanted to be in the business. There are people who go to film school and there are people who are straight-up filmmakers period. Aaron is a filmmaker.
We continued talking, and he told me about this project he was working on—some funny skits called the “Aaron and Brad Show” where he and a friend walk down the Vegas Strip and do things to hurt themselves to get a laugh—like Jackass before Jackass. And I told him about this short horror film I was working on for college. I asked him if he’d be willing to help me shoot it, and he said, “Hell, yeah, I will.”
So Aaron helped me on the project and we became fast friends. Our first project together was a bloody horror short. Veronique’s in it too—she gets a crowbar to her back and blood comes spilling out. I would never hurt her in real life, but she was always game for being a victim in my school film projects.
It was a cool short, but I didn’t understand editing back then—that takes years to develop. Nonlinear editing was just getting started and I was trying to teach myself how to use it. Most people didn’t have the right computers to do this stuff then.
When you make your early projects, you think you’re heading for the big time. At the time, it’s the best piece of work you’ve ever produced. Now I can laugh at that stuff, but I had to learn, I had to grow as a visual storyteller and filmmaker, and the only way to do that is to keep plugging away.
Soon Aaron and I were getting together a lot to cut short videos. All the while we were learning how to edit.
Aaron Goodwin wasn’t the only discovery I made my sophomore year. This was also the year I found Virginia City.
With spring break coming up, Veronique and I decided to take a road trip… and what better place to visit than paranormal hot spots?
We drove north to some of the old haunted mining towns. We drove up into Tonopah, a town whose biggest claim to fame has always been that it’s the halfway point between Reno and Las Vegas.
About a century ago, Tonopah was one of many Western boomtowns where miners flocked to look for gold and silver. At its Belmont mine, seventeen men tragically lost their lives in a fire in 1911. People said the mine, the Tonopah cemetery, and other places nearby were haunted. When you start talking to locals and you can get them to open up about ghosts, you learn a lot about a community.
Keep in mind, this was back in 2001. There weren’t all the ghost hunting shows on television that we have now. Plus I wasn’t on TV, so no one knew who I was back then. When I walked up to someone to ask if they knew of any haunted places, I often got funny looks. It was way different than today, when people seek me out to tell me about their local haunts.
Eventually we got some locals to open up and learned about a place called the Mizpah Hotel. We heard about a “Lady in Red” who had been seen walking the hallways and by the windows of the fifth floor. The story goes that she was a former mistress of one of the building’s owners, who kept her in a suite on the fifth floor. But trouble came calling when the woman’s boyfriend found out about her situation and strangled her to death in the hallway outside of her room. Apparently, she mainly haunts the fifth floor, but also makes her presence known in some of the other guest rooms.
We couldn’t get inside the building because it had been shut down and closed up. So Veronique and I parked our car across the street from the Mizpah around midnight. I took out my camera and began videotaping the windows. It looked really cool, because the moon was right over the building. As I panned across the windows on the fifth floor, I saw something weird. “What the hell?” I exclaimed—you hear me say it on the videotape.
I zoomed into this thing in one of the top windows. I was like, “What is this?” I looked at it and then outside the car. I was looking for reflections, maybe a car light, maybe a neon light on a building across the road—but nothing. So I looked back and saw it start moving f
rom one room very slowly into another room, passing the inside frames and into the next room before the glowing stopped and it disappeared. Veronique watched the same thing. On the tape you can hear us talking about this weird light. We couldn’t explain it. It was wild, and I’d captured it on camera.
There we were in the parking lot staring at this anomaly, and I knew I had to get in there to look around. It would take another ten years to finally get the chance. Ghost Adventures filmed at the Mizpah in season five. You never stop thinking about some haunts.
After Tonopah, Veronique and I went by Area 51 near Rachel, Nevada. We drove all the way up to the fence where they’ll shoot you if you go any farther. There are a bunch of zigzagging roads with small black boxes that I’m sure contain cameras and other devices. They must have known we were coming for miles before we got there. After zigging and zagging for miles, we eventually found the fence. We even saw the military jeep parked up on the hill watching us. There’s a vibe there. You see the sign, the jeep, and you have no doubt that if you try something stupid, you may very well get shot. As much of a daredevil as I am, I’m not completely stupid. As I got out of the car, I wondered what would happen if I put my big toe over the line, then thought better of it. I got back into the car; we turned around, and kept driving north.
We made our way to a small town called Virginia City. As soon as we pulled into town, heading down C Street, the main drag, I could tell I was in love with the place. The mountain views are amazing, the air is clean and thin, and it feels like you’ve just stepped back in time a hundred years into the miner days.
Veronique and I first paid a visit to the Silver Queen Hotel. We’d heard it was haunted by a prostitute, so we asked about it in the bar. The owner looked at us a little funny. Again, this was before the ghost craze. Today when you ask for the most haunted room in a hotel, you might have to get on a waiting list because everyone wants to stay there. But back then it wasn’t something the hotel promoted.
We’d barely walked into and out of the bar, and yet there was a feeling to this place I couldn’t explain. We also checked out the Washoe Club. The old-time saloon and former Millionaire’s Club resonated with the past. I knew I wanted to check out this place in a big way, but that would have to wait for another trip. After Washoe, we went over to the Mackay Mansion in town. At the mansion, I filmed the tour guide and asked him questions about the haunting. He told us about the ghosts of children who’d died from disease in the area, and the apparitions of some former owners, including the original owner, George Hearst. Then we went around to the various rooms. The Mackay Mansion was named after John Mackay—it was one of those Cinderella mining stories. He’d come from Dublin, Ireland, with a background in shipbuilding. He’d grabbed a pick and a shovel and soon found his fortune building mine shafts and finding gold.
Today you can go through his old haunted mansion. When Veronique and I were there, we’d heard about a haunted room where witnesses see imprints on the bed. So I sat there to film the bed. For several minutes I was just rolling on this empty bed waiting for some ghost to make an impression on the covers or something. On the tape you can hear Veronique getting aggravated, saying, “Come on, let’s go!” But I was waiting to capture a ghost on film. Another minute. And another. A sigh from Veronique. Nothing happened. That’s ghost investigating for you. Sometimes nothing happens.
From the Mackay Mansion, we went and checked into a small motel in town called the Sugarloaf. It was a one-story place, a serious dump. The kind of place that earns the name No-Tell Motel. But we were in college and it was what we could afford.
We went to check in and it was like some creepy scene in a cheesy movie. The guy behind the counter had one hand and looked shady. Room 1—girls can’t sleep in there because a prostitute was murdered in there years ago, he told us. Bludgeoned to death. True story. When girls stay in that room, he said, they can’t sleep, they say the room is freezing, and the covers get ripped off the bed.
I told him we’d take that room. “Oh, hell no!” Veronique said. “No way—I’m not going in that room!”
I laughed. Fine. So we took a different room. In the middle of the night, we awoke to hear banging on the wall. We were completely freaked out. “Is that a ghost? Is it a ghost?!” Veronique asked. She was really scared.
We heard more knocks on the wall, then what sounded like a mattress squeaking, then some other sounds that made it obvious that we were listening either to two ghosts having sex or to two living people getting freaky.
Those walls were thin! I had two pillows over my ears trying to drown out the sound. Veronique and I laughed about it, but we didn’t sleep much. The next morning I went out of the room and saw this old guy coming out of the room next to us. He was outside washing his clothes in a bucket of water. How freakin’ weird is that? I jumped back into the room and said to Veronique, “You’ll never guess who that was! It’s some creepy old guy.”
We left that morning and started driving back to Vegas. As Virginia City started to fill my rearview mirror, I thought about how full the place was with history and ghost stories. I knew I would go back there again someday.
College was a great time for me. I was making connections all over the place—with people and with locations. The more I threw myself into film, the more I found my passion. Even the faculty started to notice.
As a senior at UNLV I became really good friends with the head of the film department, Professor Francisco Menendez. At the time he wanted me to help him on a new movie he was producing. His last movie had been bought by Showtime, so I was psyched to be working on his new film, Primo.
I was the high-definition camera technician for Menendez’s movie. No one really knew how to use a high-definition camera, as it was fairly new at the time. But I was a step ahead of the game. The camera came with an attached remote control, and I was the only one who knew how to operate the thing because of the equipment training I’d had in Los Angeles. I taught everyone else. This was a real film with actors, trailers, and a budget. I knew I was going somewhere in this business right there. I even got to appear in the movie.
Menendez took a look at me on one of the days when I guess I looked a little mafioso, and he said to me, “Hey, you want to play the Russian Mafia guy really quick? Our guy didn’t show up.” I was like, “Hell, yeah, I do!” I ran to makeup, called Veronique and asked her to bring some of my suits over, and slicked back my hair. I had makeup give me a scar near my eye so it looked like I had been cut before. I basically created my own character right there. Spoiler alert: I die… quickly, in the movie. I get shot. If you ever get the chance to get shot in a movie—do it!
I had two roles on this production: camera technician and cast member. I loved being able to do it all. I knew it was just an early step. I wanted to be the guy with the ideas, the guy creating, directing, and seeing it come together.
I was taking on every project I could around this time. I worked as a production assistant, or PA, on another horror film. That’s where I learned that being a PA sucks—it’s like being a slave. But you should always respect the PAs, because someday they’ll be somebody.
CHAPTER 4
THE GHOST ADVENTURES
CREW COMES TOGETHER
During the winter of my senior year, I had an idea for a film project. I knew I’d need some help with this one.
I called my friend Aaron Goodwin and told him I needed to make a proposal video. “What kind of proposal?” Aaron asked.
“A wedding proposal,” I told him.
The idea was a movie where I’d be traveling across the world trying to find Veronique. I would find her picture on the ground and go looking for her since I’m lost without her.
It came out really cool. We did a time-lapse effect so images fly by. We used the Vegas Strip for a lot of this because it has the New York skyline, the Eiffel Tower, the Venetian—we could walk a few blocks and make it look like we were all over the world. In a matter of minutes we could go from the Ve
nice canals to the desert outside of town.
Toward the end I showed footage in front of a fountain in Paris because I knew Veronique had always wanted to go there. The video ends with a shot of the fountain and just holds there… because the video was only part of the proposal.
I’d completely edited together the mini-DV tape and I planned to give it to her on Christmas Day 2003. I had to cue the music perfectly so that when the music was playing in front of the fountain it was loud and built up, but then it would come down so you could hear me talk over it as I stepped in front of the television in person.
I wrapped up the mini-DV cassette in a toilet paper roll, so it looked weird. When Veronique opened it Christmas Day, she thought it was sweet that I’d made her a movie—she knew I didn’t have a lot of money. So I made her go and watch it alone in a room. I’d had the camera already set up and everything. She thought it was really weird that she had to watch it alone, but she agreed to do it, and I went upstairs.
I timed everything perfectly so that I would come down the stairs and get on one knee in front of the television at the fountain scene at the end. By the time I got to my knee, the music had slowly lowered to background music. “Veronique, will you marry me?” I asked.
I had worked construction jobs and a ton of video jobs to save up enough money to buy a ring. My aunt worked for a jewelry store back in Nashua, so she’d helped me design it. I’d spent everything I had and had to borrow the other half of the money to pay for it. I was sweating and nervous, but I had no doubts I wanted to marry her.
Veronique said yes. I was so happy. I couldn’t imagine not being married to Veronique.
We finished our senior year at UNLV engaged. The plan was to get married September 25, 2004.
