Chasing Spirits: The Building of the Ghost Adventures Crew

by Groff, Nick

  THOUGHTS ON PROVOKING

  Have you ever walked into a room where people have just been having a heated argument? Even though everyone in the room may be acting perfectly normal, there’s a resonance to the room that’s different. You can feel that the environment has been charged with energy. There’s been an energy transfer—two people have built up rage inside of themselves and expelled it at each other. That energy will take some time to dissipate. When you’re provoking spirits, you’re charging the environment with your own energy. You’re using words and actions that might mean something to the spirits present. That combination will stir paranormal events.

  After we finished filming, Zak, Aaron, and I were sitting on a bench on C Street, just chilling and shooting some shots in which I’m walking down the middle of the street at night. These were basically B-roll shots—those camera shots you use under voice-overs or as transitions from one scene to another.

  As we were sitting on the bench, all the drunks came pouring out of the bars, stumbling, tripping on the wood-plank sidewalk, and limping over to their cars. One drunk felt his way up to his motorcycle. I was thinking, Oh, God, here we go. I rolled the camera on him as he started off down the street, his motorcycle wobbling all over the place. Then—bam!—he drove right into the side of a parked car. An ambulance and the cops came to pick him up and take him off. After that, the street was quiet. Really quiet.

  When a town is that quiet, you start to understand why it’s a cliché that ghosts come out at night. Maybe the ghosts are around all day long too, but only when it’s that quiet can you hear and see them without confusing the phenomenon for something else.

  I then went back up to room 11 to try to get some sleep. Zak would take a shift sleeping in the bathtub, and I would get the bed. Aaron would sleep in the car, because we didn’t have enough money for two hotel rooms.

  Room 11 in the Silver Queen turned up some incredible evidence for us, which we showed in the documentary. Zak and I heard the sound of water filling the bathtub. It was the strangest thing. Were we hearing some phantom sound of the past, or did we get temporarily transported to the moment just before this prostitute took her own life?

  The water sounds weren’t the only thing we experienced. Just after four a.m. I was awoken by the sound of something at the foot of the bed. I turned my night vision camera in that direction and captured a strange mist forming right by the door just as we heard this faint knocking sound. Looking at this mist through my LCD screen, I was freaked—It’s right there, right now! I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.

  The second night of our investigation was going to focus on the Miner’s Lodge. The three of us set up the room with an audio recorder. Our plan was to come back and spend the night here after we’d investigated the cemetery.

  Emotions and thoughts are electrical impulses in the brain, energy that radiates out from us. I believe it can get recorded right into the land. That’s what I was going to look for that first night in the Miner’s Lodge. Touching the spirit world, or even just the past, would be a huge adventure. I was ready for it.

  ABOUT THE MINER’S LODGE

  The Miner’s Lodge is part of the Gold Hill Hotel that stands on the outskirts of Virginia City. Built in 1859, it’s Nevada’s oldest hotel. If this building could talk, it would have quite a tale to tell. It’s seen just about everything, including its fair share of tragedies.

  The hotel’s Miner’s Lodge building is the former mining office of the infamous Yellow Jacket mine. It was a place where miners would collect their pay and wash up after work, and also where the accounting books were kept.

  The Yellow Jacket silver mine was discovered in the spring of 1859. The mine consisted of 957 feet of the region’s Comstock Lode and produced over fourteen million dollars worth of silver.

  On the morning of April 7, 1869, disaster struck when a fire broke out eight hundred feet below the surface inside the Yellow Jacket mine. When rescuers tried to enter, they were pushed back by the flames and smoke. The more the fire burned, the more poisonous smoke seeped into the nearby Crow Point and Kentucky mines. All rescuers could do at this point was to seal off sections of the mine to keep the fire from spreading. It took years of smoldering before some sections finally cooled down.

  At least thirty-five miners were dead after what was the worst mining accident in Nevada history up to that point. Some bodies were never retrieved and are still down there today.

  The only thing firefighters could do was to collapse sections of the mine to keep the fire from spreading. According to local reports, the cries of the widows who gathered near the mine’s office could be heard for miles around. Some people will tell you they can still hear those cries today—a residual haunting, an echo of tragedy from the past.

  One theory for the cause of the fire was that a worker left a burning candle too close to the timbers inside the mine. Another theory was that Nevada state senator William Sharon was behind an arson that was intended to close the mine for good and offer the senator a political advantage.

  Whatever the cause, the result was nearly three dozen dead and a scar left on the land.

  Today, just a few yards behind the Miner’s Lodge, you can still see where the mine was collapsed. The lodge itself is believed to be haunted by former miners who might still be calling out for help.

  When you think about this history, it helps you to tune in to the past. I start to imagine the horror of being trapped by fire. Imagine that moment when you realize you’re not going to get out alive. Knowing your death is moments away must be the purest form of fear.

  During investigations, we almost always use an audio recorder to try to capture electronic voice phenomena, or EVP. The idea is that spirits can imprint their voices directly on our recorders in response to questions being asked. Though you can’t hear the response at the time, you hear it on the playback. This is some of the most compelling evidence we have of spirit contact.

  The EVP we caught in that room at Miner’s Lodge is still one of the most amazing pieces of evidence I’ve ever heard. You can clearly hear, “Is it the devil?” We’d let that tape roll for an hour; we hadn’t expected anything, but that one quiet voice on the tape freaked us out.

  As I was investigating Virginia City, I noticed a transformation taking place within me. I’m a filmmaker, a documentarian who wants to document everything I’m discovering in a raw and original way. But now, I realized, I’m part of the story—I’m in it. And not just in it—I was getting way into the investigation itself.

  QUESTIONS FANS ASK

  How can you be sure what you’re seeing is paranormal and not your eyes playing tricks on you?

  This is why it’s good to have other people investigate with you or have your video camera rolling. If you see something weird, you can ask the people around you to describe what they’re seeing. If it’s really in the environment, then others will see it too and you can film it with your camera. You need a second opinion sometimes.

  Sure, we’re three friends looking for ghosts. But being there is making us something more. This experience changes you. If you don’t accept the reality of ghosts, then why would you be out there looking in the first place? If you accept the possibility and start to capture little bits of evidence, you change. You become aware that there’s more than the physical world around you. There’s energy everywhere. People aren’t just flesh and blood. Buildings aren’t just bricks and wood and paint. In these early shoots, I felt that change starting.

  At times I found myself nervous, or thrilled, and all kinds of other emotions. I was getting used to expressing those feelings as we were filming. We didn’t have a script or formula; we were just going into these haunted places to see what happened and what we could capture.

  What people don’t realize is that not all the locations we’ve investigated made it into the documentary. When we were staying in Tonopah, we met a woman who told us about a place called the Castle House being haunted. We were told that the pre
vious owner of the building used to hold séances on the top floor in order to communicate with the spirits there. This woman told us how local construction workers were afraid to work there after seeing a ghostly figure inside. I filmed Zak on the phone in the hotel room calling Joni Eastley, the owner of the Castle House, to see if we could get in. Joni said she was okay with it. It felt like a lucky break.

  There’s a shot in our documentary where we’re looking out from our hotel balcony to the Castle House in the distance. In that sense, the building made the documentary. But when we investigated, not much happened.

  Joni was nice—we’d interviewed her for over an hour before we investigated the basement and other parts of the building. Then we went upstairs to what they called the séance room. What made this different from the other places we had investigated was that we took more of an emotional approach. We were willing to try to feel something instead of capturing it on our equipment. When we walked into the séance room, I smelled the strong scent of perfume. Aaron smelled it too. It was our first personal experience because we couldn’t figure out where the old-fashioned perfume smell was coming from.

  QUESTIONS FANS ASK

  Why do you think some spirits can be heard only on an audio recorder while others can be heard with our own ears?

  We think it has to do with energy. For a spirit to appear in front of you in a solid-looking form takes a great deal of energy. For a spirit to appear as a misty form takes less, a disembodied voice takes a little less, and projecting energy waves onto an audio recorder takes even less. It could be that we’re dealing with energy forces that aren’t strong enough at that moment to do anything more than leave us an EVP recording.

  The only problem was that, visually, that’s not interesting. The viewer would have to take our word for it that we were really smelling something, which is why nothing from the Castle House made it into the documentary. We figured we were too new to ask viewers to trust us. If our gear didn’t pick it up, if we didn’t capture something on audio or video, then we weren’t going to show it.

  We weren’t completely finished with the Castle House, though. In season five, when we investigated the Mizpah Hotel, we returned to the Castle House to see if the place was still active. We knocked, and Joni answered the door. She still remembered us after all these years.

  The idea was to finish something we’d started years earlier. That evening we conducted a short investigation of Castle House. We set up in Joni’s office, where she experienced the most paranormal activity. We aimed our thermal camera into the office from the kitchen; then we conducted an EVP session with Joni to try to make contact. After letting our recorders roll for a few minutes, we ended the session and climbed up to the attic—a place filled with creepy old dolls. Zak was unnerved by the dolls. He hates old dolls. I think we all do to some degree.

  In the attic I suddenly felt dizzy. Then I felt goose bumps and tingles run down my arm. Behind me, I heard a loud breath right by the dolls. As quickly as the activity started, it ended. The room was quiet again and that tense energy was gone.

  When we reviewed our audio, we heard what sounded like a faint conversation. One voice says, “Help”; then the other answers, “I know who you are.” Joni was shocked to hear the voices too.

  I loved being back in Tonopah and having the opportunity to jump back into the Castle House. Unlike the first time we went there, on this visit we captured evidence we could use.

  Our Ghost Adventures roles weren’t planned—they just fell into place. Zak naturally fell into the front-man role—he would deliver the history and story—while Aaron was always the funny one with great reactions. I was there to be the voice of reason—the one in the middle who isn’t scared of much, but needs to be convinced.

  Another scene we didn’t include in the documentary involved Aaron and his antics. He’d walked into a candy store in Virginia City to buy a big caramel apple. I was outside filming down the wooden sidewalk and a biker couple was walking by. Just as Aaron walks out of the store taking a bite of this huge caramel apple, the biker dude slaps his girl’s ass. Aaron didn’t even see the ass slap—he was concentrating on his apple. But the whole scene looked so goofy, we just cracked up. I’d put the scene in the first cut of the documentary, but in the end we dropped it. My point is, Aaron has always been Aaron—a big teddy bear of a guy with this childlike wonder and innocence about him. Whether he’s trying it or not, funny stuff just happens around him.

  I made a blooper reel of some of the funny things that happened to us during filming. When you’re on the road, overtired, hungry, or punch-drunk, weird things happen. Today if you watch some of our video blogs for Ghost Adventures, you can see some of what I’m talking about.

  Our style of investigating was coming together in those early documentary shoots, and we were just falling into it naturally.

  One difference between what we were doing and what everyone else was doing was that we were the camera crew and producers. If you’re a camera operator working on a show, your job is to film whatever the on-screen talent is doing. Your function is to focus on them and capture their actions and reactions. If the on-screen talent sees a ghost, points, and says, “Holy shit, right there!” the camera has to try to capture the reaction of the on-screen talent, and then try to film a ghost. Because we’re also operating the cameras, we can point the camera at whatever we see. We stand a better chance of capturing something that way.

  Our formula was starting to gel as we headed into the Washoe Club in Virginia City, a place I had never been able to get out of my head ever since the spring of 2001.

  When we walked into the club, we had no idea what we were in for.

  In Virginia City’s heyday, millionaires were being made almost daily. The newly rich needed a place to hobnob with other wealthy men. Local establishments like the Washoe Club and the Millionaire’s Club were built so the rich could drink, gamble, carouse with prostitutes, and plot ways to expand their respective empires.

  The Millionaire’s Club had a respectable main entrance up a winding staircase and two secret rear exits, where prostitutes could enter, and drunk and disorderly patrons could make a discreet getaway.

  Inside the once decadent club were suites, gambling tables, and a billiard room. We also learned that in the winter, bodies were sometimes stored in a crypt in the building while the grave diggers waited for the ground to thaw. From raucous good times to debauchery, the Washoe Club is Virginia City’s most paranormally active location.

  The Washoe Club is said to be haunted by at least three ghosts: an attractive blond apparition known as the “Lady in Blue,” the ghost of a scared little girl, and an old-time prospector who was known to steal unattended drinks from the bar. The drink-stealing ghost is so active that even modern-day bartenders leave out a full shot of bourbon before closing for the night… by morning, it is often empty.

  The main bar still looks great after all these years, but when you walk up the old staircase to the upper floors, you really step back. There are no more gambling tables, furniture, bars, or even light fixtures to remind you of what used to happen here a century ago, but the rooms are still there—memories of times past still float in the air.

  QUESTIONS FANS ASK

  Any advice for a first-time ghost hunter?

  Be careful! It’s a good idea to go with someone more experienced, and be sure you’re prepared: emotionally and physically. Be clean and sober, and understand that you sometimes get more than you bargain for. If you’re spiritual like I am, say a prayer before you go in. And start small. A local haunted cemetery is a good place to start, or some building with a spirit that doesn’t have a dangerous reputation. Document everything you do, be skeptical, but open-minded too.

  The Washoe Club was the first place where I felt threatened by an unseen force. It was a skin-crawling feeling I just couldn’t shake off—like something bad was waiting around the next corner.

  There was a lot of area to cover in the upper floors
of this building. I had set up a night vision camera in the former ballroom so it could record the entire room. I went out into the middle of the room to set up my audio recorder to try to capture some EVPs. I stepped out of the room, and something stepped in behind me soon after.

  This was one of those cases where I didn’t know what we had captured at the time. Back in Las Vegas I was going through tons of the footage. Trust me, it’s tough to watch hours of footage with nothing happening. I was leaning on my arm watching the ballroom of the Washoe go by when suddenly I blink. Something just walked through the middle of the room! I rewind and watch again—maybe I was dreaming this. Holy shit! It’s right there. I see this semitransparent apparition walk right through the middle of the room! My jaw hung open as I watched the raw footage a second and third time. I grabbed the phone and called Zak. He raced over to see it. Zak was also floored by what he was seeing on the monitor. “Dude,” he said. “Holy shit, dude!”

  I knew we had something big here. This piece of evidence was the most compelling I had seen up to that point. I knew others had to see it too.

  You never forget these locations, especially when you have such a personal experience or capture dramatic evidence. Such as my amazing first trip to the Washoe Club. Yet other trips there would prove more dangerous.

  Washoe wasn’t our last stop in Virginia City. We also paid a visit to the town cemetery. Coming from the East Coast, I just don’t expect cemeteries to look like this. I’m used to lush green grass, shady trees, and simple headstones. In Virginia City the dogwoods and other trees look more menacing, more gnarled. The sand, the rocks, the rusted wrought-iron fences around the graves all painted a sorrowful picture.