Chasing Spirits: The Building of the Ghost Adventures Crew

by Groff, Nick

  After graduation, Veronique and I started working and then moved into an apartment in Las Vegas across the street from a basketball court. I was doing video production work on anything I could get my hands on. I filmed and edited a ton of weddings. I was working on commercials too, and I even built my own computer for editing video projects.

  I wasn’t making a lot of money yet, but I was getting by. Veronique was working as an event coordinator for the Ritz-Carlton in Las Vegas. Between our two incomes we were living a good life for a young couple right out of college.

  QUESTIONS FANS ASK

  What does it feel like to have your own show? Did you ever dream this would happen?

  When I was young I dreamed that I’d make movies one day. I did that when I was twenty-three—I made my first feature film, Malevolence. I had no doubts that making films was what I wanted to do. When I made the Ghost Adventures documentary, I had no idea it would evolve into a television show, but once we started shopping it around, a show seemed like the natural next step. Working on the television series is an amazing experience. It has made me smarter and forced me to creatively solve problems when it comes to production and capturing the stories of the locations we visit. In my heart, I’m still a filmmaker. I’m still exploring script and film opportunities—that’s something that will always be a part of my life no matter what else I’m doing.

  Since Veronique was working at the Ritz, she was able to recommend me for a lot of wedding videos. I was working for a company that paid me two hundred dollars to film the wedding and another two hundred dollars to edit it—not a lot of money for the job even back then, but it was steady. Because Veronique worked at this fancy hotel, we were able to hold our wedding there for almost half price.

  Producing wedding videos may sound like the least exciting job in the film business, but it’s a way learn a lot. Plus, so many weddings come through Vegas. I took each job as a new challenge to do something creative, to bring something new to the video. I was learning and I wouldn’t take back that experience for anything.

  When it came time for my own wedding, I asked Aaron to film it, and then I would do the editing myself. When Aaron got married, I did the same for him. I knew he’d do a great job with my wedding because I’d brought him on jobs before, when I was filming larger weddings that needed more than one camera. Next, Veronique and I needed to find the right music.

  Not a lot of people know this, but I was a DJ in middle school to earn extra money. I DJ’d and had my band, Dysfunctional Family—I was a legend in my own mind!

  I’d worked and saved so I could buy speakers, music, and everything else I’d needed as a kid. Music has always been a huge part of my life. At our wedding, I knew I wanted someone great in charge of it.

  We had originally picked a DJ recommended by the Ritz, but I decided to look instead for someone cool with better music. I went online and one Web site popped up right away: Vegas Voltage. Veronique and I met with a Vegas Voltage DJ over drinks. It turned out the guy had gone to film school too and was really into movies. We liked him and hired him for our wedding. His name was Zak Bagans.

  Zak and I kept in touch after Veronique and I got married. We worked to get each other jobs at weddings, with him as DJ and me as videographer. The wedding videos were going well for me. I started a company called Artisan Wedding Videos, but it wasn’t enough to make a living. Needing another job, I started working at CompUSA selling computers, which I saw as an opportunity too. I witnessed some real characters there. Everyone from the customers to my coworkers were giving me inspiration and story ideas. But the money wasn’t great. I wanted to fund and pursue my own film projects, and that was going to take more money.

  I was writing my own scripts for movies in my spare time. I had even produced my own feature film, Malevolence, during my senior year at UNLV. The film was about the Robaldo family—that old high school story revisited—but this time it had a budget and more know-how. It’s funny how stories from your past come up again and again. I spent everything I had just to blow up a car in the desert. I told everyone involved, “Do this project and I’ll get it screened.” I didn’t know how, but I knew I would do it. I was determined to see my work on the big screen.

  When the project was done, I’d pushed and pulled to get it screened at the CineVegas Film Festival in 2004.

  Malevolence had some weird moments in it. The film, which was partially experimental, followed a character who owed the Robaldo family a hundred thousand dollars. You saw the nightmare he went through knowing he had twenty-four hours to pay it back but no way to get the money. He knew (and the audience knew) he was going to die. Putting the movie together taught me a lot about visual storytelling—what to leave in and what to take out. There are great stories all around us. If you’re going to be a creative person, you need to find a story that speaks to your gut and capture it. From that point, it’s a game of finesse. You want to be visually interesting, you need to move the story along at all costs, and you need to make sure your audience gets what it wants.

  Details are important, but too many slow you down. Action is important, but too much takes away from the story. Characters are critical—you need to have feelings for them (whether you love them or hate them), or the story falls flat. Teachers tell you this stuff in film school, but you can’t really learn it until you actually make a movie.

  Making Malevolence also taught me about budgeting—money, time, resources. I had friends helping me for free, people who needed to get paid, and only so many hours of daylight.

  Filmmaking is a creative rush. I agonize over the edits. Do I have the right shots? From the right angles? Editing film is one of those things that seems like it’s never finished. But the more you do it, the better you get. Editing makes you a better camera operator, and vice versa. Being a camera operator makes you better when you’re on-screen talent because you know what your camera operator needs to get.

  At the time, this film was my biggest accomplishment in video production—I had practically forgotten about those high school projects for local access TV. I felt like I’d made it—I’d got the thing screened at CineVegas. I couldn’t stop smiling as I watched my work on the big screen. Now I look at this film as just another step in my career. I wanted more. I knew I could do things better.

  I called Zak to talk about how to get some of my video production ideas off the ground. Zak was really business savvy and had ideas. I was sick of scraping by. I thought Zak and I could work on bigger projects, so when he wasn’t DJ’ing we started filming some wedding videos together. And we were becoming cool friends.

  QUESTIONS FANS ASK

  How does a spirit “speak” into an audio recorder? If an entity has no physical body or voice box, how does the sound get there?

  While we can only guess, we think it has to do with a psychic impression. Here’s a quick experiment for you. Close your eyes and imagine the voice of your mother or father. I’m sure you had no trouble hearing their voice—the tone, timbre, and inflections they use—right there in your head even though your parents may be nowhere near you right now. Maybe we know what our voices sound like and can project them energetically onto a device that can record electromagnetic information (like an audio recorder).

  Working together on video production, Zak and I were able to take on more work and bring in more money. When Zak came on board, we knew we wanted to do more than just wedding videos, so we started Four Reel Production Company. We were going to produce films, commercials, and other projects.

  At the Ocean’s 11 film premiere in Vegas, we were on the red carpet filming everything. We had been hired by a video production house to film all the actors so the footage could be used for film promos and news spots around the country. We were one of many hired-gun production companies there, but it felt like the big leagues to us. We also did some big corporate videos, as well as the presentation video when Siegfried and Roy were honored by the American Heart Association. Overall we’d started to do so
me cool stuff and were making decent money, but we knew we ultimately wanted to do our own projects.

  One night in late 2004, I was watching a paranormal show on television. I really don’t remember what it was, but I do remember saying to Veronique, “How awesome would it be to go out there and see if there are ghosts and try to capture them on camera?”

  She told me to do it. She knew I’d always been interested in the subject. I didn’t think about it another second. I picked up the phone and called Zak. “Dude,” I said, “what would you think about going out, grabbing some of this gear we have, and seeing if this ghost stuff is real?”

  “That would be awesome. I’d love to do that,” he replied. “You know, I had an experience in Detroit when I was a kid…” He then told me about seeing the ghost of a woman in his apartment in Michigan when he was growing up.

  We started talking about paranormal stuff. It was just two guys throwing around ideas, but it turned into something we got serious about. We couldn’t stop talking about a paranormal documentary. Zak and I would be the coinvestigators, but I knew we’d need some help. I knew different camera guys who were good shooters—they could film well—and we knew we wanted someone to have personality, because documenting what we were doing was going to be part of the process. But there weren’t many people who could leave their day jobs and just take on this project for little or no pay. Nor did we have the money to pay someone the going rate. Finally I told Zak, “I know this great guy, Aaron. He’s been one of my best friends for years. He’d be awesome to help do some camera work.”

  So I set up a time for the three of us to get together. Aaron was into it because he knew I was on board. We had our crew, I knew how to edit, and we had some camera equipment, although we were going to need more. We had the ability and the people, but we were short on one thing: cash.

  I went to my parents and asked for a loan so I could buy a night vision camera, some recorders, a wireless microphone, and a new camera—a Panasonic DVX100A that had just come out. My dad said he’d lend me the money, but he expected us to pay him back. Ever the lawyer, he even drew up a contract. I thought it was funny at the time, but I realize now he was doing us another favor in addition to lending the money. He was also making the situation more businesslike. In a way, he helped us take our project more seriously, because the only way to pay him back was to make this documentary, sell it, and make some money.

  Now I had the equipment, I believed in this idea, and I was willing to do whatever it took to get the project going. I was willing to quit my day job, put wedding videos aside, and just focus on this one thing. Zak was the same way. He believed in our documentary and was committed to making it a reality. With all this in place, we were ready to get started. The big question was where to start investigating.

  In those early days of the documentary, Zak was coming over to my apartment regularly for meetings to plan out the project. It felt real, like we were working on a real production even though it was just the two of us and Aaron. Zak started calling potential locations to see about filming there, and I would film him on the phone for the documentary. I have hours of tape of Zak on the phone in my apartment.

  It sounds crazy now, and we didn’t use any of it in the documentary, but at the time my thinking was: film everything, document the entire process, because you never know what you’ll need. A note to all of you aspiring filmmakers out there: a guy on the phone just isn’t interesting footage.

  Aaron was on the same page as me: just keep rolling the film. Keep in mind, we had no script, no notes, and not even much of a plan. We were three guys looking to investigate ghosts.

  Zak and I talked at length about how the documentary should look: raw, gritty, real. Not flashy, not overly produced. This had to look like a real investigation. And real investigators don’t have someone following them with a camera—real investigators film everything themselves.

  We were also trying to figure out, Where do we go? Where are great haunts in Nevada? Where can we drive to? What are the unique ghost stories? My mind immediately went back to the road trip Veronique and I had taken back in college. I thought about Tonopah, Virginia City, and some of the other great old mining towns we had passed through. There was really nothing in Las Vegas for us to investigate, so we knew we had to go north.

  CHAPTER 5

  INVESTIGATING

  VIRGINIA CITY

  Once we were working on the documentary, I felt excited every day. You get a feeling in your gut—a tingle that literally pushes you forward. I listen to that feeling because it means I’m heading down the right track. That rush is like a drug and I continue to seek it out as I work on new episodes of Ghost Adventures or other projects.

  After making a bunch of phone calls to various locations, we hit the road. We filmed everything in the car too—almost all of it unusable. I filmed us singing along to stupid songs on the radio. I filmed us eating lunch. Now I can look back and can see, This is a documentary about looking for ghosts. What we ate for lunch isn’t part of the story.

  We drove all over Nevada. We hit the old mining town of Rhyolite, but didn’t last there very long. We got out of the car to film something and were told by the police that we had to leave because we didn’t have a film permit. I know what you’re thinking: “Where is Rhyolite?” Exactly.

  We headed farther north several hours up to Virginia City. When we got into town, we talked our way into locations. We weren’t famous at this point, just amateur filmmakers trying to appeal to people to let us go in and shoot.

  WHERE DID WE GET THE NAME?

  Zak and I were brainstorming name ideas for the documentary. We had tons of different ideas for the name, but we knew we wanted “Ghost” in the title somewhere. One night Veronique and I were talking and thought this quest was like an adventure. I was telling Zak about it and we both said, “Ghost Adventures.” As soon as we said it out loud we knew that was the title.

  I love knowing the history before I go into a location. The history gives some context to the haunting. When you look around Virginia City, it looks like the Old West—saloons, former brothels, an opera house, and it’s set up there high in the mountains. It’s a dry desert town with that dusty look like it’s been around long enough to see some shit go down.

  ABOUT VIRGINIA CITY

  In 1859, two miners named Pat McLaughlin and Peter O’Riley discovered gold at the head of Six-Mile Canyon. Soon after the discovery, another miner named Henry Comstock wandered into the dig site and claimed the men were prospecting on his property. McLaughlin and O’Riley believed Comstock, and were soon swindled out of a major find. The giant vein of precious metal was named the Comstock Lode.

  Soon, other miners wound their way up the canyon into the shadow of Mt. Davidson, where more gold was discovered. A tent city sprang up and hundreds of miners flocked to the region.

  One of those early miners, James “Old Virginny” Finney from Virginia christened the town during a drunken celebration. The story goes that he smashed a bottle of whiskey on the dirt and rocks and called the tent city “Old Virginny Town” in his own honor.

  With pounds of gold and silver leaving the earth each day in the 1860s, thousands of prospectors were drawn to the region from around the country. Soon, the silver began yielding millionaires as much as the gold, and the first industrial town of the Old West was born.

  The tents soon grew into a proper city with tens of thousands of residents. There were schools, local newspapers, an opera house, hotels, and restaurants. The town’s population peaked at around thirty thousand people. When you stand there today, it’s difficult to imagine so many people in such a small town.

  Mark Twain even spent some time in Virginia City, as a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise in 1863. Was this town tough? Don’t take my word for it—Mark Twain himself wrote that there were so many tragedies in town from cave-ins to dead Indians that the paper never lacked material for its front page.

  By 1898, the Comstock Lode had e
nded, and the exodus of people began. Those tens of thousands turned into a few hundred. If not for modern-day tourism, Virginia City would truly be a ghost town.

  When you know the past before you begin investigating it, it not only helps you appreciate where you are and why a spot might be haunted, but it also helps you connect with the locals.

  A few places wanted money for us to film inside, so we paid what we could. The Silver Queen Hotel just charged us for a room, as did the Miner’s Lodge at the Gold Hill Hotel.

  It was that night in the Silver Queen where the provoking style of our show was born. Zak was trying to reach the spirit of the prostitute who’d killed herself in room 11. He sat in the bathtub pretending to slit his wrists while mocking her. He told the prostitute’s ghost to come and get him. I thought it was insane, but that was mostly me just egging him on. Before the camera started rolling, I told Zak, “What would you do? You’re sitting in the tub, you’d slit your wrists—mocking the spirit.” I know it sounds a little mean.

  Here’s the thing. This prostitute committed suicide. I have some tough feelings on suicide. I know these people are sick—no one in their right mind takes his or her own life—but I feel like it’s a selfish way to go out. Especially when people have a family, kids, spouses, friends. Your life is all you get—that gift shouldn’t be wasted no matter how bad things get.

  The real provoking style came later; what went down at the Silver Queen was just an early glimpse. Provoking was really Zak’s thing. It was obvious in those early shoots for the documentary that Zak was going to be our main guy—the host, the lead investigator. With his provoking, his bravado, he was the guy.

  Provocation is controversial in the paranormal community because some feel it’s disrespectful to the spirits, while others feel it’s dangerous and can lead to spirit possession. But we were getting results with it, and we wanted our documentary to push the envelope. We couldn’t look like the other ghost shows.