Chasing Spirits: The Building of the Ghost Adventures Crew

by Groff, Nick

  We headed back into Manhattan to the Travel Channel offices to begin breaking down just how the series would work, and we signed all the necessary paperwork. All these suits were asking us questions like whether we were members of the Screen Actors Guild. A lot of “reality” shows out there today feature out-of-work actors sporting SAG cards, but that wasn’t us. We were just three dudes who’d made our own documentary, financed it ourselves, and devoted ourselves fully to it. And the executives were very happy about that.

  But at the same time, they were taking a huge chance. We were three unknowns, both in the paranormal world and in the world of television and filmmaking. This was in the years following 9/11, when there was a lot of economic uncertainty. The job market, the housing market—nothing was stable. Yet this network believed enough in what we could do to give us this amazing opportunity.

  They saw us as three individuals who could work well together with no bullshit, and what you saw was what you got. I think Matt Butler was a big push behind it, and we later became good friends. One night we were hanging out together in a bar in New York. He told me that what had really sold him on the series was that flying brick. So whatever that malevolent force was trying to do when it launched the brick at us, it probably didn’t have the intended effect.

  Now we would be coming at those dark forces armed with a renewed sense of purpose. We had better paranormal equipment, better filmmaking equipment, and a better budget. It would still be just three guys locked into these locations hunting down the unknown. But now we didn’t have to worry about all the other distractions we’d had to concern ourselves with when we’d filmed the documentary.

  It was 2008. I was twenty-eight years old and getting ready to produce a television series for a major cable network. Yet I wasn’t really concerned, not even when they pushed contracts and numerous other binding legal documents in my face. As far as I was concerned, that was all just business. I wanted to get that part over with so I could move on to what I love. I knew in my heart that I was ready for this leap.

  The series was going to be different from our documentary. We wanted to keep the raw feel, but a television show needs structure. We couldn’t just make up the narrative as we went along.

  Sounds easy, right?

  The show would also no longer be just me, Zak, and Aaron on these investigations putting together the show. There would be other crew members and production people involved—a prospect we found both exciting and daunting at the same time. We knew we still wanted the investigations to feature just the three of us, but we’d have to learn to put our trust in a whole bunch of strangers and hope they would stay true to our vision.

  The production group who works on our show is small, and everyone has to do a lot of different things. Because Zak, Aaron, and I would be wearing multiple hats for the production, we really needed a first-rate researcher to help us with all the background. We needed someone who could do the research and the write-ups for a location, then make the phone calls to secure interviews with people there. This was going to be an important job, because it would all have to happen well before our team arrived to film. So we couldn’t trust it to just anyone.

  We looked at a couple of people for the job. We reached out to my cousin Justin since he’d been such a big help so far, but he couldn’t do it because he had a job already.

  Zak got in touch with radio personality Dave Schrader, who we really trusted. When the documentary had come out, we’d done ghost hunting events in Virginia City and Goldfield with Dave. These were some of our first Ghost Adventures Crew events. I liked Dave from the start, but I was unsure of what he actually wanted. He would tell me things like, “Be careful of the people you work with in this industry,” and to watch out for this or that. Why did he care so much about helping us out? What was his endgame?

  In Goldfield, Dave and I had been chilling one night, having drinks together. We started laughing and having a good time, and that was when I realized Dave really was a cool guy. I could let my guard down around him and put my trust in him. We became good friends from then on.

  So when Zak asked Dave who would make a really great researcher for the series, he had one guy in mind: Jeff Belanger. At the time, Jeff had spent almost a decade running Ghostvillage.com, one of the world’s most popular ghost Web sites. He had written nearly a dozen books on the paranormal and combined a healthy respect for the history of a location with a keen sense of who the people are who have had the paranormal experiences there. He was the perfect fit.

  We ended up working with some really outstanding people the first season, like Hugh Hansen, our production supervisor, Anthony DiDonato, our line producer, and Joseph Taglieri, one of our producers. Kathy DaSilva would come out into the field with us to help create the reenactments, along with Christian Hoagland, who is an awesome cinematographer. We really got to know each other and became a tight little mini-family when we were on the road.

  On the first day of filming a location, we shoot our interviews during the day, plus B-roll shots. The B-roll is for those great-looking shots that don’t necessarily show action, but are a stylized look at the building or the space inside. On the second day on location we get to spend some time in the town hanging out with locals. It’s during this time that the production crew really gets to know each other.

  The first location we filmed was the West Virginia State Penitentiary in Moundsville, West Virginia—or just “Moundsville,” as most people in the region call it. Moundsville wasn’t the first episode to air—that was Bobby Mackey’s Music World—but this old prison was the first we filmed.

  Working on the series was a lot different from filming the documentary, when we really didn’t have a time limit. With the Ghost Adventures series, we had four days to film a whole episode—interviews, reenactments, lockdown, and reaction. We had new equipment; the entire industry was making the move to high definition, and we had to follow suit. We could no longer use the cameras we’d used to shoot the documentary because they didn’t meet network standards. Instead, we were given state-of-the-art Sony cameras that took mini-DV tapes and had XLR inputs so Aaron and I could monitor the sound ourselves. I would monitor the audio from Zak’s mic, and Aaron would monitor the audio of whoever Zak was interviewing.

  I had to make sure I knew what I was doing. I didn’t even get the new cameras until the day before we were supposed to leave for Moundsville. I had them shipped to my house and tried to read the manual as quickly as possible so I could be ready for filming just a few days later.

  We were responsible for getting the cameras to the locations too. We had to carry them with us on flights and keep them with us wherever we went. It wasn’t enough that we already had to worry about our own stuff. Now we had to worry about transporting and protecting these very expensive cameras! Just ensuring the equipment got from one place to another might have been more nerve-racking then heading into a reportedly haunted building. If you think the TV business is glamorous, it often isn’t!

  I was constantly concerned about whether or not we actually would capture any paranormal activity at these places. Many people felt that what we had caught in our documentary was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of evidence, and now we were going to go and seek it out eight more times? I had all the confidence in the world that we could make a well-produced, visually appealing documentation of the quest for the paranormal. I had little confidence that the paranormal would comply.

  A lot of debate went into the locations we chose. We had many meetings and discussions about different places. We had our own ideas; our production team had their favorite haunts—there was a lot of back-and-forth. Our criteria for a location: It had to be huge. It had to have dark history. It had to look scary. And, of course, it had to be haunted. Not just with friendly ghosts either. We wanted to know (living) people were scared inside this place, that they felt threatened. Where else could you go for all that evil than an old prison? Moundsville’s history was downright badass.

  ABO
UT MOUNDSVILLE PENITENTIARY

  Nine hundred ninety-eight men died inside this prison’s walls. Dozens were hung, several electrocuted, many more murdered by other prisoners. Then there were those who couldn’t take the sentence of prison living and committed suicide to escape.

  These stone walls have seen hard men broken, dreams shattered, and evil punished.

  The death and carnage at this West Virginia penitentiary have left a mark that can never be washed away. By many accounts, some of the tortured souls who served time under this roof are said to still lurk in the shadows of the prison walls.

  The story of Moundsville’s penitentiary began in 1863, when West Virginia seceded from Virginia to side with the Union in the Civil War. The newly formed state needed a prison, and the close proximity to the then capital of Wheeling made the tiny village of Moundsville the perfect location.

  Between 1866 and 1876, prisoners sentenced to hard labor toiled stone by stone to construct the ten-acre prison. The work was oftentimes grueling, especially in the hot West Virginia summers.

  When the penitentiary opened in 1876, it brought an influx of jobs to Moundsville. The village grew and job opportunities at the prison helped the locals, but the downside was sharing their peaceful landscape with the worst criminals in the state—including the ever present threat of jailbreaks.

  Life inside the walls of the West Virginia State Penitentiary was hard. Moundsville had the dubious honor of being on the U.S. Department of Justice’s list of top ten most violent correctional facilities during its 119-year history.

  Bad people in a bad place is a recipe for a dark haunting. We were ready to tackle Moundsville.

  As I mentioned earlier, I had experiences I couldn’t explain when I was a kid. They were enough to let me know there’s more out there than what we see every day. I’ll never be able to explain the apparition we captured in the Washoe Club or the brick flying in Goldfield, but I still wasn’t completely convinced that all this stuff was for real. Maybe it’s a power of our mind? Maybe it’s something else entirely? No matter—I wanted to come face-to-face with something that could end the debate for me. I wasn’t afraid of anything paranormal when I left Las Vegas on April 14, 2008, heading for this tiny West Virginia town. I was psyched to get started on the series, but I was overthinking everything. I wanted the shoot to go perfectly.

  Veronique gave me a big kiss, said “good luck,” and I was off to the airport. The entire plane ride I thought about our new equipment, and the angles I wanted to take on the building. I thought about our investigation—how we needed to capture not only our evidence, but also how we were feeling. Because that’s the most important part of a television show: capturing the emotions of the moment. When you’re out in the middle of the night alone in a haunted place, you go through a roller coaster of emotions. There are tense moments, and there are also funny times when you’re spooked by something stupid like the wind or a mouse running by. The whole point was to capture all of that.

  When we landed, I picked up our rental car. Zak, Aaron, and I started making our way down through West Virginia toward Moundsville.

  I wanted to keep everything as real and raw as possible, so we pulled over in a restaurant parking lot across from the jail to get our gear set up. I wanted Aaron to film our reactions the first time we drove up to the building. I was driving the car and trying to figure out which street to take to get there. As we rolled closer, we felt the sheer presence of the prison.

  The place was huge. Like some old green-stoned castle. Dark, even on the bright sunny day we arrived.

  We were still in documentary mode when we arrived, because that’s what we knew. When you film a documentary, you film everything from every angle. You film and film and film, and you edit later.

  When we arrived in West Virginia, I was feeling the pressure. When we filmed our documentary, there had been no timetable. We filmed when we could, we edited when we could, and we had all the time in the world to get it just right.

  In West Virginia we had to get everything shot in four days. Not only that, but we had to do so with completely new equipment. We now had real-deal hardware—wireless mics, great cameras—but this also meant we weren’t yet experts on how the gear worked. When we rolled up into the small town of Moundsville, I was sweating. I remembered how much work the documentary had been, and now we were about to do it all again—eight times in a row! There were people depending on us, and tight deadlines, but also the opportunity to make a dream come true: our own television series.

  Back in our first season, we were still filming on digital tapes. I laugh when I think about how many we used in Moundsville. If I was walking to the next room during the daytime interviews, I filmed it. If Zak was eating lunch, I filmed it. The cameras never stopped rolling.

  We spent the first day of the shoot walking up to the houses across the street from Moundsville and knocking on doors asking if people there had had any paranormal experiences. These locals were so down-to-earth. Many of them used to work in the prison. They were happy living where they did, even though they were less than a football field away from this scary building. One family was huge—all these people living in one small house. They invited Zak, Aaron, and me to play baseball with them. Here we were playing baseball with this family right in the shadow of one of the most haunted places in the United States. It was surreal. We filmed part of the game, but we didn’t air it on the show because it didn’t have much to do with the story. But we had fun.

  We also had some inevitable arguments while filming that first episode. Aaron and I were the main camera operators that first season for the daytime interviews. It was up to us to capture every moment. Though we knew each other, we still had to get used to working together as a team in a fast-paced shoot. People were scheduled for interviews, so there wasn’t much time to practice.

  We were just about to film the first interview when Aaron and I exchanged some words. I white-balanced my camera off a nearby wall. When you white-balance, you’re making an adjustment to your camera so white looks white and colors look natural. If you ever look at a picture or video and everything looks bluish or kind of orange, there’s a good chance the camera wasn’t white-balanced. If you’re using multiple cameras, this is really important because as you cut from one camera to the other, it has to look like the same camera shot—otherwise it’s jarring to the viewer. And to try to fix a mistake like this in postproduction is a serious pain in the ass.

  Aaron white-balanced his camera and put it next to mine so we were pointing in the same direction. I could see his shot looked orange while mine looked more crisp.

  “Your white balance is off,” I said.

  “Dude, I just did it… Yours is off,” Aaron said.

  We bickered back and forth, and Zak asked what was going on. I was pissed. Aaron was pissed. And we were losing time. As we each rechecked our settings, together we realized that we were both kind of wrong. We can laugh about it now, but at the time we were pretty angry. We glared at each other throughout the next interview.

  Messing with each other during the shoots is a tradition on Ghost Adventures. When you’re using multiple cameras, you need some kind of visual and audio cue so you can sync everything up during editing. If you’ve ever seen any depiction of a Hollywood movie being made, you’ve surely seen someone walk in front of the cameras with a marker board with a handwritten scene and sequence. They clap down the top of it with a snap; then the director yells, “Action!”

  The idea is the same, but we don’t need a fancy marker board. Aaron and I both roll our cameras on Zak and ask him to clap his hands. It accomplishes the same thing—our editor then lines up each tape on the visual of the clap and the sound.

  “Okay, Zak… give me the clap,” I said.

  “I’m not sure if you’ll get it, Nick… I may not be contagious,” Zak said.

  Zak clapped.

  “I didn’t get it,” I lied. “Give me another clap.”

  Sometimes we
see how many times we can make Zak clap before he stops.

  On that first shoot, we had our challenges too. Right from the start, things didn’t go exactly as planned. When we knocked on the door of an elderly gentleman who lived across the street from the prison, he fainted while talking to us. Literally, he fell right over. I thought he had died!

  Someone dying on camera wouldn’t have been the first time for me either. Years ago, on a wedding shoot, I went to get a close-up of the father of the bride or groom (I can’t remember which), who was having a great time dancing, smiling and everything. I got in for the close-up shot and then boom! The guy collapsed right there on the floor from a heart attack. You can imagine how tough it was to edit that wedding footage together.

  Thank God the guy in Moundsville woke back up a few moments later; he just had low blood sugar or something.

  Since we have only four days to capture everything on these shoots, we plan what we can, but we also want to leave room for things to unfold organically. There was one lucky moment when we were getting ready to go inside the jail to film, and Tom “Redbone” Richardson, a former inmate of the prison for almost twenty years, just happened to be driving by and stopped to see what we were doing. He ended up giving us an amazing tour with an insider’s perspective that we never would have thought to seek out on our own.

  Even as we were filming for the first time, I was trying to think of ways in which we could make our mark, differentiate ourselves from other paranormal investigators. I was thinking about possible experiments, different things we could do to push the limits of both filmmaking and investigating. How could we do it better than everyone else?

  I wanted to break the rules of paranormal investigation. You never get anywhere doing the same thing over and over. One of those paranormal rules is: don’t go in alone.

  Sure, there are a couple of good reasons for that rule. First, safety: if you get hurt, you might need another person to get help or get you out of there. But also, if you witness something paranormal while you’re alone, it’s tough to know if your mind is playing tricks on you or if there’s actually a presence in the environment. A second witness could verify this for you.