Chasing Spirits: The Building of the Ghost Adventures Crew

by Groff, Nick

  Personally, I think that 98 percent of orbs can be thrown out and attributed to water vapor, dusts, lens flare, and all that crap we now know. But when you’ve spent years looking at orbs, you start to realize that not all of them can be so easily explained. When orbs appear in conjunction with other paranormal activity, that remaining 2 percent can only be described as balls of energy. I think true orbs are just that: energy. The paranormal is an open book, and there are new things to be discovered every day.

  At that time, orbs were new to us, so we thought taking pictures throughout the Goldfield would be beneficial. As more and more things started showing up on film, there came a point when we were getting scared. Yet there’s nothing wrong with being scared on an investigation. It heightens your senses and perhaps makes you more in tune with your surroundings. It certainly did for me that night.

  It’s not like there was a catalyst for the fear at this point. I felt my pulse quicken, felt a tingling sensation on the back of my neck, and sensed something ominous. There was no reason to have these feelings yet, but there they were. In the coming years I’d learn to pay close attention to those feelings when they happen.

  As I was walking around shooting on my Panasonic DVX100A, Zak was ahead of me taking pictures. I followed him as we went down the hallway, past room 109, and up the stairs.

  Room 109 was the room the locals had told us about again and again. The story goes that a prostitute named Elizabeth was chained to a pipe in the room and was killed there because she had become pregnant with the child of a former Goldfield owner. The owner had supposedly chained Elizabeth in this room until the baby was born, then took the newborn and threw it down an old mineshaft in the basement. He left Elizabeth to starve to death. When Zak first walked into the room, he immediately got chills.

  As Zak was taking pictures, I was filming him, yet the whole time I could feel something following me. All I kept thinking was, If there is something following me, when is it going to finally attack me? These are the types of thoughts that go through your head.

  Finally, I slowly turned the camera around to see if there really was anything behind me. Then I had to turn the camera a little more so the dim light from the LCD screen would shine down the pitch-black hallway to show me whether something really was standing there. You’re essentially putting all your faith, all your safety and sanity, in the light of a tiny LCD screen. For me, it’s still one of the creepiest moments in the documentary.

  The activity intensified as the night went on. When we investigated the upper floors later on in the night, we captured a figure that was peeking around the corner and then just disappeared. We first saw it with our own eyes, although Zak had a better view of it from where he was. I didn’t completely buy it until I reviewed the footage. When I saw it captured on film, that’s when it got me, when I knew it wasn’t just my eyes playing tricks.

  QUESTIONS FANS ASK

  Can you sense that a place is haunted before you begin an investigation?

  I’m not a psychically sensitive person, but that doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally feel some force around me. When the hair stands up on the back of my neck, or if I feel a cold spot, I pay close attention. In most locations, I don’t get much of a sense of the place until paranormal phenomena start happening. But once in a while, in a place like Linda Vista, I walk in and am on alert from the first minute. Our bodies are the best piece of ghost investigation equipment you can ever have.

  Even when I see something, my mind immediately begins trying to logically explain it. It’s just how I keep myself balanced, always trying to put an explanation on something. But when something that is hard and factual evidence is being validated on a piece of equipment, you just can’t wrap your head around it. So you have to come to terms with it, and that pumps you up to keep searching for the answers. That was a big moment for me.

  The night was getting more intense as we pressed on. We soon made our way down to the basement after hearing the sound of something metallic dropping onto the floor. I was tired and scared, and Zak and I kept getting separated from each other. The basement was so dark. I was thinking about the strange things we’d already seen and heard, and I wondered where I would run in an emergency. A hundred thoughts were going through my head at once, but one thought stood above all others: Just keep filming.

  Another strange bang on a pipe somewhere behind us, and we’re now totally on edge. After Zak and I collect ourselves, we make our way down the passageway following the glow of our night vision cameras. We pan around the corner into a room and come to another dusty room. Our cameras settle on some debris for only a second when we see a brick levitate and launch across the room—all of it captured on tape.

  At that moment, I panic. We both do. If some invisible force can throw a brick, then it can hurt us. That thought races through my head in the same instant my body is already turning to run.

  The flying-brick moment is the biggest event in the entire documentary, and it’s the evidence for which we have become best known. And despite what others have tried to say for years now, it’s 100 percent legitimate.

  A lot of people like to point to an edit cut in the footage, but everything is in real time. What you see there is a cut from one camera to the other, and I’ll take you through the entire sequence of events that led up to what I feel is historic evidence of the paranormal.

  Just prior to entering that portion of the basement, Zak was like, “Hey, we’re going to confront this thing.” Later, when we were about to enter that room, he said, “Nick, you going in first?”

  I could understand Zak’s apprehension, because prior to that, the activity had already been amping up in the basement. As I was walking through the complete darkness, I was looking at where I was walking using the LCD screen. From the moment we stepped off the staircase, we could tell the environment had shifted.

  After a while, it just felt as if we were walking underwater, just a very heavy feeling. As we walked down the creepy hallway peering into rooms, the banging sounds suddenly got louder. That’s when we both started to get nervous. In the film, you hear Zak suggest I sit down for a second, and I respond, “I’m not sitting down. I don’t know where I am. I’m not, you know—Why would I sit down?” It’s funny what comes out of people’s mouths when they’re nervous.

  Eventually, we gathered up enough courage and adrenaline to push forward and search out whatever was making those sounds. That’s when Zak suggested I go into the room first, but I wasn’t having any of that. So the shot you see is actually the view from Zak’s camera; then it switches to mine, so you can see the brick from the best angle. And it wasn’t just the brick—other items were being thrown; scraps of metal were flying. This was true poltergeist activity. When you’re confronted with that—something you’ve never experienced before—everyone is going to react differently. I don’t care how tough you are—it’s a scary moment. Being new to the paranormal, we reacted the way we did: we ran. Zak went blazing out of the room, and as I took off after him, I was surrounded by this completely weird feeling.

  I lost him in the dark and began drifting off in a hazy fog, like I was only partly conscious, wandering through rooms on my own. I lost myself in the moment, enveloped by this strange energy that seemed to be guiding me. I had no idea what was going on, and total confusion had set in. I wasn’t even aware until watching the footage that Zak had run upstairs and then come back down to find me. That’s when I had the creepiest moment of anything we’d caught on film—I realized I should have heard him calling for me, but I hadn’t. I’d never responded.

  Perhaps something had control of me, keeping me from hearing Zak call out to me. I think I didn’t hear him because I was so scared, I just didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I was going to get attacked, if something else was down there with us. I imagine it’s kind of like being behind enemy lines—maybe that’s the best way to describe it. If you’re behind enemy lines in combat, you’re not going to start yelling out to yo
ur fellow soldier and give up your location.

  I was totally drained of energy, and I was scared that if I called out to Zak, I would give myself away. I might get thrown or clawed or something terrible like that. And when we reviewed the footage, we caught a disembodied voice saying my name—so it knew just where I was. You hear it say “Nick” and then there is a burst of energy that fluctuates across the frequencies. It was the first time I heard an entity say my name, but it would not be the last.

  We captured a similar disembodied voice on Zak’s camera just before he shut it off, which I believe he did accidentally—he must have been shaking so much he accidentally hit STOP on his recorder.

  We knew then that it was time to get the hell out of there. But with the doors locked, the only way out was off the second-floor fire escape. A lot of people have accused us of making up that part of the story, saying there’s no way we could have survived a two-story jump unscathed. But you’ve got to consider a couple things—first, we were in good shape, pretty athletic, and it wasn’t as big a fall as you might think. The other thing was that our fight-or-flight instinct had kicked in. People are able to do some pretty amazing things when faced with danger. If a mother can lift a car off a baby pinned underneath it, then it was no big deal for me and Zak to jump off a second-floor balcony.

  Of course, it’s different now. Over time you learn how to get out of certain situations. And now we’re locked into locations all the time, so we’re used to it. These days I let the shit hit the fan, but right then I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.

  When we got in the car and took off, it was around five a.m. The day was beginning to dawn, and at that point we’d been up for twenty-eight hours straight, between driving up there and filming, and now we were on the road back home. We were about three hours out of Las Vegas when I began blacking out as I was driving. Zak was already in a deep sleep, and I began drifting on the highway.

  I pulled over and told Zak I couldn’t drive anymore, that we should just sleep in the car for a while. He said he could drive, no problem, but then he started drifting off while driving as well. Finally I made him pull over again and I drove the rest of the way. That’s why today we have a production crew member drive us after a long night of investigating.

  Once we got home, I slept for an entire day before I started going through the footage. What I saw blew my mind. Zak and I reviewed everything over and over again; it seemed we must have watched it a million times. We began showing it to family and friends, and they had the same reaction. We knew we’d hit it big. We’d found something that we had to show the entire world.

  But we also knew that what we had was going to be scrutinized from every angle. I thought it was important to get other people’s opinions and put them on camera. That’s when Zak found Victor H. S. Kwong, a physics professor at UNLV, to analyze the footage of the moving brick. When he couldn’t explain it away with his vast knowledge of physics, that just made the footage that much more impactful. We also had Slim Ritchie, who has an impressive background in the video profession, take a look. He analyzed the video through a variety of filters and programs and stated on camera that he saw no evidence of tampering or trickery.

  That was what we needed. We needed others’ input to give it gravitas. We were the ones who’d experienced it, so our analysis might be somewhat skewed. We felt it was important to bring in a third party to analyze moments like those, and over the years on the series we’ve done it more and more. Even though we’ve become much sharper at analyzing things ourselves, it’s always good to get other people’s opinions.

  But even authenticating what happened to us didn’t have as much impact as when we went back to Goldfield and showed our footage to Virginia. She said what we’d documented with our equipment was pretty much the same type of phenomena that she herself had experienced there for years.

  As we were leaving Goldfield for the last time, the thought came to me for a final climactic scene of Zak walking through the Goldfield cemetery. It proved to be just another weird moment in a series of weird moments that would always happen when we film Ghost Adventures. We found a grave with ELIZABETH engraved on the headstone, and at that moment we saw a sort of rainbow forming over the town that seemed to go directly toward her grave. I knew it was an amazing moment, so I set up the camera as fast as I could. Then I swung the camera around just in time to capture a cool flash of lightning. We were getting these amazing cinematic shots, and we felt they would close the documentary off perfectly.

  The Goldfield experience definitely had a lingering effect on me, and it became the basis of what the Ghost Adventures series would become. But it also became our paranormal proving ground, the place where the evidence we captured would forever be either put on a pedestal or dragged through the garbage. It thickened our skins as investigators for our experience that night in the hotel, and it thickened our skins as researchers for the slings and arrows our evidence has endured.

  Back when we first started showing our documentary to people, I would get frustrated when they didn’t believe it was authentic. It’s sort of like if you’ve painted a picture, but then everyone tells you it’s too good to have been painted by you. That’s what’s so frustrating to all paranormal investigators—if someone hasn’t experienced it themselves, you’re never going to fully convince them of what you’ve captured on film.

  Looking back, maybe I was that way before we started making the documentary. Maybe I myself would have said, “Wow, that’s cool, but I don’t necessarily buy your story.” But now, having had my own experiences, I really listen to the thousands of people who want to share their own ghost experiences with me. Everywhere we go, someone has a story to tell. Now I listen and, instead of judging, I embrace. It’s their experience and it happened to them, and it has meaning to them. It’s exactly what happened to me at the Goldfield Hotel.

  The only difference is, I had it all on film.

  CHAPTER 7

  EDITING AND THEN

  SELLING THE

  DOCUMENTARY

  Once filming was completed, the real work began. It was time to take our adventures and turn them into a coherent, linear story and begin the process of editing all the footage together.

  I had built my own computer, and I had my own editing software and an editing deck with a small TV monitor. How I’d rigged it all together was very complex, and I was the only one who knew how to use it all properly. Video production has come a long way in just a few years, but back then what I had rigged worked for what I needed it to do.

  I asked my buddy Mike Mouracade, who’d written the music for Malevolence, to create music to amp up some of the more suspenseful moments in the documentary. Zak and I felt it was important for the viewer to feel what we’d gone through emotionally, and music would help express that.

  I also had to balance all the audio and edit together all the takes. Add in the time it would take to capture the video footage to the computer’s hard drive, and it’s easy to see why it took a good, long time for it all to come together.

  Zak came over every day and we would work on it together, including writing the whole narrative. We would brainstorm, script the voice-overs, and then Zak would go into the bathroom to record them. While it wasn’t exactly Skywalker Sound, it got the job done.

  I got a rush showing Zak some of the cool montages I’d put together. One example was during the Goldfield segment, when we were conducting the séance. I really wanted to paint a visual image of what we were experiencing emotionally, so I overlaid visual shots over the séance footage to convey what we were going through. It was very complex and took a lot of time, but the result was well worth the effort. I felt I was able to bring the viewer into that séance with us.

  Looking back, I realize it was one of the craziest projects I’ve ever worked on in my life. It certainly took a ton of effort and resources. Some mornings I’d wake up and get right to work without even taking a quick shower. Veronique would come hom
e and find me still unshowered, still editing, looking like a zombie in front of the computer monitor. When I look at the Ghost Adventures series now, I find it amazing how far we’ve come.

  But it was about to get even crazier.

  I’m not saying the original documentary was cursed, but there was an unusual energy surrounding the entire project. Even during the editing process, strange things began to happen. Some of it may have been my own fault—at that time, I didn’t see the value in backing up my video editing projects because it took too much time. That was lazy of me, and I would pay the price later. Always trying to cut corners and get things done quicker, I thought that since I knew the technology so well, the technology would never fail me.

  Boy, was I wrong.

  While editing the documentary, I had four 300GB external hard drives all linked together and tied into my computer with one FireWire cable. I was too cheap to go out and get more FireWire cables. To this day I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I think I unplugged the FireWire cable from the first hard drive and tried to plug it into another. That interrupted the flow of data to the computer, and essentially crashed the hard drives. Every time I tried to open the timeline for the project, the screen would read, FILE LOST—ALL CORRUPTED.

  Anyone who has ever had a computer crash and kill a huge project knows how this feels. I went into a rage, kicking myself for not being more careful. There’s no worse anger than when you’re mad at yourself.

  I would have to start from the beginning and work it out like a puzzle, figuring out what piece was missing so I could get the project to open up. But panic began to set in when after the tenth time trying to reopen it—after restarting the computer, restarting the hard drives, and whatever else I could think of—still nothing happened.