Chasing Spirits: The Building of the Ghost Adventures Crew

by Groff, Nick

  In 864, two hundred followers of Doge Pietro Tradonico settled on the island after Tradonico was assassinated by Italian nobles. For centuries the small group managed the island and avoided many taxes and laws that would have applied to them on the mainland. The population dwindled and eventually the island was abandoned in the fourteenth century.

  When the bubonic plague arrived in Venice in 1348, many islands, including Poveglia, became lazarettos—or quarantine colonies. Venice was particularly harsh in dealing with the infected. When citizens showed signs of the plague, they were carted off—against their will—to islands like Poveglia. This was almost certainly a death sentence.

  Near the center of the island the dead, or those too sick to protest, were burned in giant pyres. The corpses of tens of thousands of those who’d perished in Venice made their way to the Poveglia pyres.

  The bubonic plague killed one out of three Europeans. People lived in constant fear. Families turned on one another as the dying lay in torment. But 1348 wasn’t the last plague to hit Venice. In 1630 another disease spread through the city. Again the nearby islands like Poveglia were used for the sick and dying. There was so much death that a psychic scar was left on the region forever. Ghostly reports on the island go back centuries.

  Between 1798 and 1801, during Napoleon’s military campaign through Italy, he used Poveglia Island as a place to store gunpowder and weapons. He knew that between the ghostly legends and the island’s defendable position, his weapons cache would be safe.

  In the late 1800s, an asylum was constructed on Poveglia Island. Isolated from Venice and from the world, the mentally disturbed couldn’t bother anyone else. Likewise, there was very little oversight in regard to the facility’s caregivers. Locals will tell you the rumors about a doctor in the 1930s who conducted strange experiments on patients, butchering his victims. The doctor eventually went mad, and jumped from the tall bell tower. Though the bell in the tower was removed decades ago, locals still report hearing a chime echoing from the old tower.

  By the mid-twentieth century, the facility had been converted into a geriatric center for the elderly to live out their final days. The place closed for good in 1975, leaving only the shell of the building behind to remind us of what was once there.

  In recent years, construction crews attempted to restore the former hospital buildings. But, inexplicably, the crews stopped working, leading some to speculate that they were driven away by some dark force on the island.

  Poveglia is an island—it’s surrounded by water. Like many investigators, I believe there is a connection between water and the paranormal. These spirits, these entities seem to be trapped here, unable to cross the watery plane. Maybe the water amplifies the activity here—it’s a theory we’d be able to test during our lockdown.

  None of us speaks Italian, so there was a language barrier here. But we learned a few phrases before the investigation. One key phrase: Usa la mia energia, or “use my energy.” While trying to record spirit voices there, I was curious if we’d capture EVP sounds and if the words would be in English or Italian.

  QUESTIONS FANS ASK

  Why don’t you guys use your thermal camera more often than your other gear?

  We use the thermal camera quite a bit—almost in every location. The reason you don’t see it in every show is because sometimes we don’t capture anything. Sometimes we’ll let that thing roll for an hour, looking in every corner of a building, and get nothing. We’re not going to bore the viewers with that. But then again, sometimes we capture some amazing footage with the thermal.

  In the Gettysburg episode we captured that dark blue human-looking figure down near the train tracks. The blue color means the figure was colder than the environment around it. At the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel we saw that reddish-colored figure move out of one of the rooms. We believe that red color meant the spirit was sinister.

  At the Hales Bar Marina we captured a solid-looking figure up near one of the locks standing by Aaron. So the thermal can be an amazing piece of investigation equipment, but we don’t get results with it at every location.

  This lockdown was also different for us in that there were no doors to lock us in with. Well, we’d been dropped off by boat for the night, so if we wanted to leave, we’d be making a swim for it. Now that’s a true lockdown.

  Usa la mia energia became a point of contention between me and Zak at Poveglia. Zak would yell back at me, “No! Don’t say that.” He didn’t think it was a good idea to allow these spirits to use our energy. I should mention here that we had machetes to get around the island because the vegetation was so thick in some places.

  One weird thing was that there was no electricity running to this island, yet we were getting EMF readings, and the batteries on my camera were being sucked dry. When that happens, I feel like something big is on the horizon. Soon it wasn’t just my batteries—I felt the energy draining out of me. I was getting dizzy and nauseated, and then I saw that it wasn’t just me. Aaron and Zak were also feeling strange. It hit us all at the same time. Then Zak started to get into this prepossessed stage. Something was attaching itself to him. Shit was getting weird now and we had nowhere to run.

  Zak started going nuts and was hitting the wall. I’d been through this before. I could see we needed to get Zak out of this room right away before there was a full-on attachment. He was going into a blind rage… and the dude had a machete strapped to his side. I pulled him out of the room so he could get some air.

  I was getting really uncomfortable at this point. There were only three of us on the entire island, we were all feeling drained, and now Zak was about to have an attachment. There was no exit plan.

  Once Zak was outside and settling down, I felt a little better. But, crap, we were in a foreign country and didn’t speak a word of the language. On that tiny haunted island I’d never felt so far from home and safety.

  Once we’d split up to take solo vigils, the location got even more intense for me. When I went into the ruins of the main hospital building, I stood still for only a few moments to let my eyes adjust. Some ambient light came in through the windows—just enough so I could see shadowy figures moving around in the dark. There’s no fear compared to when you know you should be alone but you realize you’re not.

  Our best capture of this investigation happened when I was in that hospital building. Sure enough, our night vision camera caught a shadowy figure darting by, which validated what I was seeing. I’m always blown away when the evidence backs up our own personal experiences.

  I’ve never felt so grateful to see the sun breaking on the horizon as I was the next morning on Poveglia Island. In some respects, this location was easier for me to put behind me. Something about the island made these entities feel isolated to me, as if I knew they couldn’t follow me. They were stuck there, thousands of miles away in the Laguna Veneta.

  QUESTIONS FANS ASK

  Is there a location you’d really like to do a lockdown?

  Since our first season I’ve wanted to investigate the Kings Park Psychiatric Hospital on Long Island, New York. This giant hospital closed in 1996 after more than a century of operation. The big abandoned buildings just speak to me.

  RETURN TO THE WASHOE CLUB

  The Washoe Club in Virginia City keeps calling me back. As I’ve said, I feel some kind of personal connection with this place. The more I go there, the more I feel like I should go back.

  The strangest experience I had inside this storied building didn’t happen as part of a Ghost Adventures episode, though. It happened during a paranormal event we held in town for our fans, in October 2007.

  One of the highlights was taking the attendees into the Washoe Club with us for a séance. There were about twenty of us sitting in a circle in the upstairs ballroom, which was the exact spot where I’d caught that apparition for the documentary. EVP specialists Mark and Debby Constantino were there, as was Janice Oberding, a longtime author and paranormal researcher who’s been on a co
uple of Ghost Adventures episodes. And my friend Dave Schrader from Darkness Radio was sitting next to me.

  The group took up the whole ballroom. We were all holding hands and getting quiet. I’m not usually one for séances, but I figured if I was going to try this, then I was really going to focus. I concentrated on my spiritual side.

  Pretty soon different women in the circle claim they’re being touched. One woman says her hair was just pulled; another says she just got her hair yanked. These women aren’t even sitting next to each other—they’re spread around the circle. Whatever this thing is around us, it’s getting more aggressive.

  “So, you want to be a tough guy?” Dave Schrader calls out.

  I jump in: “All you can do is push girls? What’s up with that?”

  Together, Dave and I say, “Why don’t you do something to us?”

  I look over to the hallway next to the ballroom—exactly where I’d been right before I’d caught that apparition—and I see a man standing there leaning against the doorway. I know this is in my mind’s eye because no one else is reacting to it. He’s looking at me—it’s like he knows that I see him. He kind of looks like that creepy old guy in Poltergeist II—the black hat and clothes, but not as old. When I see this figure I feel like I’m going to throw up. My head starts sweating, and the room feels like it’s going to spin on me. I keep seeing flashes of this guy—almost like a strobe effect.

  Aaron is standing across the room from me—he doesn’t participate in séances like this—and has a clipboard tucked under his arm. Suddenly the clipboard comes out from under his arm and goes flying down the hallway, like someone’s just grabbed it and thrown it. I’m thinking, Holy crap.

  I get up, Dave gets up, people are getting hurt, I’m getting sick, and I want this to be over. We are all unnerved, so we break the circle and the activity dies down.

  This was that moment when I knew that the spirits knew me there. And I knew them.

  I would be validated when Mark and Debby Constantino went there for their own investigation years later. They captured EVP that had my full name, “Nick Groff,” even though I was hundreds of miles away at the time. So it was a no-brainer for us to go back and film another episode here in season three.

  I know I’ll be back there again and again. I don’t know when, but it’s destiny when it comes to the Washoe Club.

  LIVE FROM THE TRANS-ALLEGHENY LUNATIC ASYLUM

  Early on during the filming of season two, we knew we had a hit show. Our ratings were solid, and the Travel Channel was thrilled to be working with us. That’s when the network brought up the idea of doing a live Halloween special. In the past, they had done this with the Most Haunted program from the UK, and this year it would be our turn.

  The concept was a seven-hour live program where we investigated a location. I didn’t even have to think about it. I believe my exact answer was, “Oh, hell yeah!” I looked at this as a new challenge. The only part of live television that concerned me was the technical aspect: How would we cut from one camera to another? How would we transition? And what other elements could we bring in?

  Doing what we do live wouldn’t be any different for me because during our lockdowns we only ever get one take at capturing paranormal phenomena. The cameras are always rolling, and we’re always ready for what might happen.

  But—and it’s a big but—I also know that hours can go by when nothing happens. I know from filming our lockdowns that setting up our equipment and base camp isn’t riveting television. When we walk from one section of a building to another, it’s just walking. No one wants to watch that. This live show would take some planning.

  We kicked around a few different location ideas but eventually decided on the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia. The place is huge and haunted—and, come on, it’s a former asylum. That’s GAC all the way.

  The building itself presented some technical issues. Because the walls were so thick, we wouldn’t be able to use wireless cameras to send the signal to the broadcast booth. And the building is huge, which meant we would need miles of cables for everything.

  That also meant that the three of us would need to have cables dragging behind us. I wasn’t happy about that, because when you have thirty or forty feet of cable behind you it can get caught on things like doors and chairs and cause dragging noises far away from you. But there was no other way in this case. We would have to work around it.

  On each floor, Aaron and I would have to plug into a wire in a predetermined position. Those transitions had to happen quickly. We decided we would preproduce short segments ahead of time to play during those transitions. The segments would include interviews with witnesses who had had experiences in the sections of the building we were about to investigate.

  To help us out during the investigation, we brought in some of our friends and leading experts in the field. We had psychic Chris Fleming, Mark and Debby Constantino, Ghost Adventures fans who were going to join us for part of the lockdown, and a support staff inside to review our evidence as we gathered it.

  ABOUT TRANS-ALLEGHENY LUNATIC ASYLUM

  In 1858, workers broke ground on an ambitious new building complex: the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. For the next twenty-three years, employees toiled to construct the largest hand-cut stone masonry building in North America. Earlier, in 1848, psychologist Dr. Thomas Kirkbride had developed an asylum design that revolutionized care for mentally challenged people. Instead of locking these folks in prisons or chaining them up in basements like some dirty family secret, Dr. Kirkbride proposed that sprawling campuses be built that could be self-sufficient. Staff, and some patients, would grow their own food, make clothes, and cook their own food. Kirkbride’s plan worked. When the mentally challenged were treated like human beings, they enjoyed some happiness and learned some skills. The plan was copied all over the United States and soon there were more than a dozen Kirkbride hospitals in America.

  Following the Kirkbride plans for mental asylums, the Weston facility featured expansive wings in a staggered formation, which allowed as much sunlight and moving air as possible for the patients inside. Originally designed for 250 people, the complex reached its peak population in the 1950s, when numbers swelled to 2,400 patients in overcrowded and poor conditions.

  This impressive campus of buildings found itself caught in the crossfire during the U.S. Civil War. Construction had begun using Virginia funds, but when West Virginia seceded from the Confederacy to join the Union, construction was halted and the grounds were used for training soldiers to fight for the North. Today there’s a Civil War wing of the building that appears to be active with spirits from that era.

  Construction was completed after the Civil War and the building was renamed the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane.

  As with so many Kirkbride hospitals, Trans-Allegheny went from cutting-edge and humane treatment, to overcrowded conditions, to underfunding, and finally to ruin. In 1994, the building closed its doors, leaving the paint to peel, the wood to rot, and the metal to rust. But even before the doors were locked, staff knew there were more patients present than they could account for. Nurses reported hearing disembodied footsteps and the cries of mentally tormented patients.

  In recent years, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum has enjoyed a rebirth as a tourist destination. Though the building offers historical tours during the daytime, it’s the evening ghost hunts that bring in visitors from all over the world. With so many people in anguish while the place was open, it’s no surprise that ghostly accounts still pour out of the giant compound. Many of the hauntings seem to be residual, a kind of psychic imprint left there. In fact, residual hauntings are the most common kind. It’s not a trapped spirit, it’s not interactive, it’s just a sort of memory of the location.

  There are accounts of these types of hauntings at Trans-Allegheny, but there are also stories of dangerous interactions with spirits. One tour guide was assaulted by an unseen force in the stretcher room of the
main building. She was pinned down and flailing when two of her friends came to her rescue. There are still rooms and hallways that staff and tour guides avoid. Every part of this building has some reported activity, and though some seem to be benign former patients, others are out to harm.

  Asylums are havens for negative energy. All of that torment and human drama leave a stain. The conditions inside Trans-Allegheny were sometimes inhumane. I spoke with one former volunteer who told me how, when she was counseling a patient going through an alcohol rehab program, she watched cockroaches crawling out from under his sleeves. The place was so dirty that patients didn’t even bother to wipe the bugs away anymore.

  QUESTIONS FANS ASK

  If you could get an EVP from one person from history, who would it be and what would you ask them?

  I was so close to my grandmother that I’d probably reach out to her spirit and ask her what happens after you pass on from this world. I’ll admit I’m afraid to actually try this because I don’t want her spirit to linger.

  Doing the live show here was exhilarating for me. I loved the pressure of no second chances, of everything having to work properly the first time. During the episode viewers were asked to text in where they wanted to see me get locked in alone. The choice was between two buildings and the former morgue. Of course the viewers picked the morgue. More than five hundred thousand people texted in to vote.

  That night we captured multiple EVPs on our digital recorders and were able to play them live during the show. We also had personal experiences like cold spots, and during one session with Chris Fleming, Zak heard an audible spirit voice next to his ear.