by Groff, Nick
Every time we remember someone who has passed on, we are using an electrical impulse in our brain to call up that person’s image. That memory and image gives you a connection to that person. This is why so many people have visitation experiences involving their deceased loved ones.
The ghost experience isn’t just seeing an apparition. People can sense ghosts, like the way you can tell when someone walks into the room behind you. People can smell ghosts—I can’t tell you how many times witnesses have reported smelling perfume or a cigar when no source can be found. Smell is closely related to memory, so that scent may call up something specific in the case of a deceased loved one. People hear ghosts—sometimes we hear disembodied voices in a location. And then, of course, there’s actually seeing something. The ghost experience involves our senses. There’s no way around it.
So if spirits are energy, and if we need our senses to experience them, then we have a lot of equipment available that can be adapted to help us validate what we’re experiencing in a haunted location.
QUESTIONS FANS ASK
How can you tell the difference between a paranormal orb in a photo and something natural like dust or moisture?
Orbs are a controversial topic in the paranormal. Most of the orbs you see in photographs are just halos around dust or moisture. Sometimes what you’re seeing is lens flare—light reflecting and refracting off the numerous lenses inside a camera. But there are those balls of light that glow—they produce light. Those are interesting and very rare. If the orb is producing its own light and even illuminating the area around it, it’s not just dust or drops of moisture.
It’s been a learning curve—we’re always experimenting with this stuff—but we’ve seen that our gear is clearly a factor in connecting us to what we experience out there.
Let me start with the basics. Ouija boards. There’s no item in the paranormal discussion that’s more controversial. The Ouija board is actually a brand name—a trademark that belongs to Hasbro. It’s kind of like how people call a tissue a Kleenex or a photocopier a Xerox machine. The generic term is a “talking board” or “spirit board,” for any device with letters and numbers on it and some kind of pointer, or planchette, used to spell out messages. The Ouija board came around in 1891 and has been the most commercially successful talking board ever.
Ouija was first manufactured by the Kennard Novelty Company in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1891, five men invested thirty thousand dollars to mass-produce a new kind of board game. Their bet paid off. In 1967, this “game” outsold Monopoly. There is nothing inherently evil about cardboard and plastic. But like anything else, it’s all in how you use it.
I understand the talking board. If I were turned into a spirit right now, I could use one of these devices. I mean, I know how to spell, and I can move the pointer around, so I could get a message across. The reason this board is so controversial is because it has a stigma attached to it. That stigma dates back only to the 1970s, when the book and then movie The Exorcist came out. There’s a brief scene in the movie where a young girl named Regan MacNeil (played by Linda Blair) uses a Ouija board in her house by herself as she communicates with an entity she calls “Captain Howdy.”
Ever since the 1970s many paranormal investigators have pointed to this movie as an example of why you shouldn’t use Ouija boards. These critics will say you shouldn’t use them because you don’t know what could be coming through on the other side. Here’s the thing: we never know what’s on the other side—whether we use a Ouija board, an EMF meter, an Ovilus, or any other method. We’re invoking the spirit to come to us and communicate. Each method has its risks. If you feel the practice is dangerous, that’s fine—I understand. But in that case, it’s probably best for you to stay away from paranormal investigation entirely. I also understand those people who say they get better results using one method over another—that’s fair. What I don’t understand is calling one method a doorway to evil and others safe based entirely on hearsay and rumor. The Ouija board’s reputation, for one, has a powerful effect on people. Some people are afraid to use it, and that fear doesn’t serve you in the paranormal. Having confidence in yourself and control of your thoughts and emotions does.
In the original documentary, we used a Ouija board in the Miner’s Lodge of the Gold Hill Hotel in Virginia City. You see it briefly in the documentary, but that’s about it. In reality, filming people using a Ouija board isn’t very compelling. Even if the messages are profound, they still come out one letter at a time.
Back to spirit contact: I also understand how we could use an EMF meter—an electronic device used to measure electromagnetic activity in the area—such as a KII or Mel meter to communicate. Electromagnetic activity is happening all around us all the time. If you took one of these meters and held it near your television while it was turned on, the meter would spike because your TV radiates energy due to the electricity and wiring inside. If a spirit gets close to an EMF meter and it lights up, you could easily use this to establish communication with the spirit. For example, ask it to touch the device once for yes and twice for no. I get all that.
The thing with EMF meters, though, is that many natural causes can set them off. We live on a big magnet called Earth, after all, so when these devices go off, we need to validate that it’s due to more than random chance. If I ask a question and get a reaction from an EMF meter or one of our pods, I ask an immediate follow-up like: “Make it flash twice now.” If the device responds to my specific commands, then I know I’m communicating with something intelligent as opposed to a random event.
QUESTIONS FANS ASK
Do you think ghosts are really with us all the time, rather than fleeting presences? The more we learn about physics, the more it sounds like this may be the case.
That’s definitely possible. One theory is that there are many different dimensions all around us, maybe even alternate universes. Quantum physics suggests that every choice that each individual makes creates an alternate universe where a different choice was made. I know it sounds mind-blowing, but here’s a simple example: You walk down an alleyway. You get to the end and can turn left or right. If you decide to go left, then there’s a whole other universe that exists than had you decided to turn right. Billions of people making millions of choices each day and you have an infinite number of dimensions.
One theory is that these dimensions stack up next to each other like sheets of paper. Sometimes something like a cosmic quake erupts and two points on the sheet of paper touch—each dimension sees the other for a brief period of time. Seeing a person from a different time period in the environment would definitely look like a ghost!
My favorite method for spirit communication is still the audio recorder. Like the Ouija board or EMF meter, this method is also clear to me: I’m asking the spirits to get close to the microphone and speak as loud as they can. EVP, or electronic voice phenomena, isn’t recorded as audio. It’s imprinted directly onto the magnetic tape or circuit. The idea of EVP goes back at least a century, to when ethnologist Waldemar Bogoras took his recording equipment to Siberia to record a spirit conjuring ritual of the Chukchi tribe. In the recording you can hear a voice tweak out and overpower the audio equipment, though the voice of the shaman performing the ritual remains constant. EVP really took off in the late 1950s when a Swedish painter and musician named Friedrich Jürgenson took his audio recorder out into the woods to record the sounds of nature. On the playback, he heard voices. From there the equipment has evolved from reel-to-reel recorders to tape recorders, then to digital recorders and so on, but the idea has always been the same: you ask a question and get a response on the recorder even though you haven’t heard the voice with your ears. It’s amazing when it happens. To those who are skeptical, I invite you to try it for yourself.
EVP is the most powerful evidence we can offer. Though I’ve captured hundreds of EVP readings by now, each one still blows me away.
When it comes to more complicated devices like the Ov
ilus, PX, or Spirit Box/Shack Hack (devices that quickly cycle through radio waves allowing spirits to manipulate the sounds into words and sentences), I don’t have all the answers on how these things work. I’ve included a section at the end of this book on paranormal investigation equipment (see page 239), where I talk to the people who invented these things so you can hear about the technology behind these things straight from the horse’s mouth. But even the inventors stop short of telling you why it works. All I can say is it’s worth experimenting, because sometimes you’ll get amazing results.
For example, we were investigating a historic home called Rocky Point Manor in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, in season five. This old home saw some serious shit during the Civil War. After the Battle of Perryville on October 8, 1862, Confederate forces retreated. Both Union and Confederate soldiers took over any building they encountered to convert into a field hospital. Anything you had in your house, from food to linens to furniture, was seized. The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was October, so many families had stocked up on supplies for the winter, and now they had nothing.
Likewise, Rocky Point Manor had become a field hospital. Many soldiers lost their limbs and some lost their lives. We found all kinds of artifacts in the dirt-floor basement, from bones to belt buckles.
During this investigation, I was out in the Perryville battlefields with my PX device—a kind of EMF meter with a built-in audio dictionary. The PX takes readings of the electromagnetic field and runs it through software to determine a number. That number corresponds with a word in the dictionary. We believe spirits can use this device to communicate with us. For two hours we were out there and this thing didn’t speak up once—that in itself is rare, as usually the PX won’t go more than a few minutes before it says something. So we headed over to Rocky Point Manor and set up an experiment where we had cameras on a room with lines back to monitors at a base. We took turns going in. Aaron went in and the PX said nothing. I was next. Just as I was about to leave, I put my hand on the doorknob and the PX said, “Close”—as in, close the door. Okay, fine, could be a hell of a coincidence. So now we all got quiet and I asked, “Why?” and then the PX says, “Nick.” So now I’m thinking this isn’t just a chance. I can’t tell you how the spirits manipulated the circuits, but something happened to spit those two words out at that exact moment. But that wasn’t the end of it. After I walked out into the hallway, it said, “Enemy.” Considering this was a field hospital, that word had significance. At the same time it said the word “enemy,” I felt an electric charge run through my body.
The equipment is great because it can validate your experience. The best judge, however, is you, the living person. When you feel that tingle, the hair stand up on the back of your neck, you might be in the presence of something.
So we have all this gear, but how do we make sure we’re making the best use of it when we bring it to a haunted location? First, you have to know the history of a place before you go in. You need to know what took place there, who lived there, and how they died. When you know those things, you’ll ask the right questions and get better results. It makes me crazy when investigators want to go into a location without doing their research first—that’s just lazy. The history is the stage these ghosts stand on. Without the history, we’re guessing, and that’s not the way to do a paranormal investigation.
By interviewing people from the location ahead of time, we already have a sense about what the most active parts of the building might be. That doesn’t mean we’ll ignore the other rooms, but it does mean we think twice about where to set up our static cameras.
During the investigation, we want to be thorough. During setup, I’ll often walk around with an EMF meter to see where the electromagnetic forces spike around the building. This doesn’t mean ghosts necessarily—it could also mean there are electric wires running through the wall. If I know where those high-EMF areas are, I can rule out false positives when they occur.
Though each place needs a different investigation plan, in general we want to walk through the entire location to see what we feel and what our equipment picks up. This is part of the investigation you rarely see on the show, because it’s the least exciting part of the lockdown. When you do see parts of this process, it’s because something has happened during the setup. Sometimes things start happening almost as soon as we enter a building. The Riddle House in West Palm Beach, Florida, was one of those locations. We had just shut the door when we heard a banging noise. Some places seem like they’re waiting for us.
Earlier I said that there are advantages to investigating in a group because you have other people around to validate your findings. That’s true. But if you’ve seen Ghost Adventures, you know there are plenty of times when we split up and go solo. There are a couple reasons for that. First, it could be that the spirit entities are intimidated by the group and may be more likely to make contact with just one of us. The other reason is fear.
When you’re afraid, your senses are heightened and you’re more open to whatever else might be in the environment. If you’re alone and scared, you’re sharper. Sometimes it’s the only way to have a personal paranormal experience.
It’s amazing how much braver you get with even one other person there. I recall hosting an event at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio. We had filmed an episode of Ghost Adventures at this place in our second season—it turned out to be one of our most popular episodes. The place is insanely active all over.
During events like this, we lead groups that can be as large as twenty-five to thirty people. I remember talking to one girl who said she wasn’t scared at all—this place didn’t frighten her. Really? We were in a giant building. It was dark. The paint was peeling, there were strange breezes and sounds all around us, and six stories of rusted cages used for the prisoners. But she was in a group.
“Okay,” I told her. I moved her to the center of the cell block and told her to start walking to the far wall. There was very little light, but just enough to see where you were walking. She was fine for a few steps, but soon it got darker and she couldn’t hear or see us anymore. I heard her footsteps fading in the distance as she was walking alone past dark prison cells. Those old doors were wide-open. Out of the corner of your eye it looked like someone was always ready to jump out. A few seconds later I heard her yelp and the distinct sound of her running footsteps coming our way.
“Oh, shit! I saw something,” she said as she tried to catch her breath.
The fear had made her more sensitive and open. It’s a natural physiological response that dates back to our early human ancestors who had to pay close attention to their environment or else would be eaten by animals or attacked by enemies fighting for the limited resources of the land.
Once we’ve completed the initial survey or sweep of the location, we head to the hot spots—those areas where witnesses have reported strange things happening. We might set up our static X-cams or do some experiments to see what happens. This is why knowing the history is critical. You will get better results by making specific remarks and asking pointed questions, as opposed to saying, “Hello? Anybody there?”
In many cases we use provocation to stir things up, which is one of the most controversial aspects of what we do. We call out the entities that might be there. We charge the environment with our own energy. We invite physical contact.
It’s like preparing for a fight. We’re showing we’re not afraid. “Go ahead—do something to me!” We’re ready to stand up to these things. No fear. Fear invites these entities inside of you and gives them room to get comfortable. By a show of force, we’re protecting ourselves. But no, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes these things push back.
Nor do we use provocation every time. If we’re dealing with spirits who did no harm in life, then we might take a different approach. But I’m always pushing for spirit contact, whether it’s by a show of force or by a trigger object.
Trigger objects are really old-school ghost hu
nting. You put out an item that might have some meaning to the spirit there and see if they react. On Ghost Adventures we’ve used toys, shots of booze, and many other effects to try to get a response. We’re all drawn to objects in some way—people love their jewelry or their liquor, or a child might be comforted by a familiar toy. So it’s natural that they’d want to reach out and interact with one of these objects from the other side.
On a few investigations we’ve brought in psychics. In season two, we used Chris Fleming for our live episode at Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia. We also brought in psychics for the Riddle House in Florida and the Lizzie Borden House in Massachusetts. I believe we’re all intuitive to some degree, but some have the gift more than others. For example, any one of us could play the piano—I could show you the three keys you need to press at the same time to make a C-chord. But that doesn’t make me Mozart. When it comes to psychics, it’s the same thing—some folks truly have an intuitive gift. But I still listen to my gut. If I trust them, then I’m okay with using them in an investigation. To me, psychics are another tool in our arsenal to help verify what we’re experiencing.
We never know for sure what’s waiting for us when we reach out. I tell this to everyone, because it’s so important. I don’t care if you’re using a Ouija board, a trigger object, or some fancy piece of technology. We know the history before we go into a location, to give us some kind of edge to know what we’re dealing with, and we have all this equipment and these techniques for making contact. But still, that’s only a start.
You just never know—could it be these things are now following us around? We know from experience that some entities know our names—we get them on our audio recorders and other devices. Could the entities at these locations have been told we were coming?
It’s all possible. That’s why it’s important to be focused and have a strong mind before you go in. It’s also critical to leave it behind when you leave. When you open a dialogue with whatever is on the other side, you might not like everything you hear…
