by Zak Bagans
As I turned to leave, Jim did as promised and popped off a couple of blanks into my back. It was loud—way louder than I expected. And I felt the sparks from the gun hit my back. I stumbled forward and found myself in total agony. Just taking a few unexpected steps caused me immense pain, and my nose instantly started bleeding. Every second felt like a year until I was finally stable and standing still again, but then I got a little worried. Did the sudden jerking motion jack up the surgery, and would I have to return to Vegas to see the doctor immediately? It felt like it. We ended up using this shot in a brief reenactment that you see for only a second, because it just didn’t go off very well.
I toughed it out, but the rest of the shoot was hell. That moment caused a ripple effect over the next few days. I spent a lot of that shoot in my hotel room. I had strep throat when we filmed at the Riddle House, and my throat looked like it had a golf ball in it, but this pain was far worse. When you have pain in the center of your face that shoots down your nerves, it will drive you crazy, and several times I had to force myself to keep working.
When we arrived for the lockdown, I was trying to move very softly. Again, pillow shoes. Wish I had some. The funny thing was, I thought it was going to be a calm shoot, but it ended up being one of the most insanely active lockdowns ever—maybe even in the top three in the history of Ghost Adventures. Upstairs the spirits were extremely active, and we were all on edge, but it was an ordinary phenomenon that would have the biggest impact on me.
Have you ever seen those plug-in air fresheners that spray out a mist every seven minutes and make a loud hissing noise? Well, in the middle of the night during an active paranormal investigation, they’re very unwelcome. I was walking down the hall when one suddenly hissed and I felt the spray hit my face. I yelled and jumped, and again that motion killed my nose. The surgeon’s words echoed in my head: “Don’t make any sudden movements for two weeks after the cast is off, or you will jeopardize everything. You may even cause a blood clot.” The air freshener caused the second big jolt I’d had in Pioche, and it hurt so badly that we had to take a break from filming so I could sit down to let the pain subside.
Later that night, we were getting great evidence from the spirit box when I felt something shoot through me. It was an amazing force, and I fell backward and hit the ground. You know what happened next: pain. Intense, shooting pain, like I’d been shot in the face with a flamethrower. This didn’t last for three minutes; it lasted for three days. As soon as I got back to Vegas, I went to the doctor to get checked out. Thankfully, everything was fine, and a few weeks later I was back to feeling like myself.
I was unprepared for that powerful moment, and I wasn’t able to really dive into it to figure out what it was. Normally I would have tried to get more interaction with the spirit, but I was down for the count. I shouldn’t have put myself and everyone counting on me in that position, but I did. It was an amazing paranormal moment, but if I had been 100 percent, I wonder what else we could have learned from that encounter. I’m definitely not done with that place; I intend to go back.
In the end, having the surgery was definitely the right decision, and my message to anyone considering plastic surgery is to weigh the risks and rewards carefully. I didn’t have surgery to make myself look better, but to help me breathe better, and it has. I’m much happier and healthier now that I get more oxygen into my system. My voice is different now, and recording voice-overs has been a hell of a challenge (we usually record them after shooting an episode), but when it’s all said and done, the pain was worth it.
Ironically, we caught a voice on the spirit box at the Overland Hotel that said, “I need my medicine.”
I FEEL YA, BROTHER. I FEEL YA.
20
DREAMS
Why I have a true fear of clowns.
Do you remember any of the nightmares you had as a preschooler? I do. Between the ages of three and five, I had too many nightmares to recall. And not just your run-of-the-mill kid nightmares, either—these were scary, visceral visions that still haunt me to this day. They were so vivid and detailed that I would wake up and not know whether I was still in the dream.
I don’t know how someone that young could have such violent, terror-inducing nightmares that were so memorable, but it happened to me. I’d never seen violent TV, been exposed to violent video games, or watched the news to see the myriad ways people hurt each other—so how could I have known such fear? To be afraid of something, you have to be aware of the possible consequences. To be afraid of flying, for example, you have to know that a crash can result in gruesome death. At five years old, what did I know about the world that could have caused me true fear? Nothing. And yet many nights I was terrified to go to sleep.
They say that nightmares are often based on something you see or hear just before going to sleep, like a terrible news story or a horror movie. Traumatic life events can cause nightmares for years, and some people never get over them. I didn’t experience any trauma growing up, so I don’t know what could have triggered these awful nights. I was less than five years old but was dreaming about things that would make a middle-aged man cower in fear.
One of my most persistent dreams involved clowns, but let’s put that one on hold for a moment. There was another dream that’s just as significant. It involved a man breaking into our house, and I’ll never forget it. This evil guy would hold my hands so I couldn’t move them and then stick sewing needles into my hands as far as they could go, one after the other. I would scream and cry and feel that pain. My mom and sister couldn’t find me—like we lived in a maze like the Winchester Mystery House, but it was still our house—yet I could hear them screaming for me as I screamed for them. I still think about that dream and try to decipher it. When I left Florida and moved to Chicago and then Detroit, I left my mom and sister behind and entered into the darkest period of my life. I felt a lot of pain, and things went very badly. Now that we all live in Las Vegas, I wonder if this dream is a message that when I’m away from them, I’m unsafe or in danger.
So back to the clowns. In that dream, my family and I were walking down a dark street at night. I was on my dad’s shoulders, which tells you how young I was. I can’t remember whether we were at a fair or not; I just remember that it was kind of busy and definitely dark. I looked to the left and saw some kind of booth. It looked like a giant tent that opened to the street, with a table in the center. In the tent were these evil-looking clowns, probably eight of them. Their eyes were glowing, and there was the scent of sawdust in the air like at a traveling circus.
The clowns were walking around the table like they were conducting a ritual or summoning something powerful. As we walked past, my head was turned as far to the left as it could go. Suddenly the clowns stopped their ritual and stood and stared at me with evil, glowing eyes. Then out of nowhere they started running at me, and no matter how much I screamed, my father wouldn’t run away. He continued to walk leisurely as they came closer and closer, no matter how much I begged him to flee. Suddenly I woke up, shaking and terrified. I have had this dream on multiple occasions over the years.
Now fast-forward to today. Every Halloween in Las Vegas, there’s this attraction called Fright Dome, which is a haunted house kind of thing that Jason Egan owns and has been running for about ten years now. It has fake animatronic beings and eerie Halloween sounds pumped in, but it’s pretty cool, so I decided to go with Aaron and some other friends one year. I mean, for a demon hunter like me who’s faced pure evil, there’s no real threat, right?
Except there was. One of the haunted houses (I think there are five or more) was circus themed. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but as we rounded a corner I turned to my left to see five demonic-looking clowns standing and staring at me with glowing eyes.
Trigger the panic attack.
I almost dropped to my knees and fainted. This image from my childhood that had scared me to my core was staring me in the face, and I froze. The meaning of the t
erm déjà vu hit me like a haymaker punch as something I had lived through in the past came back to me with extreme force. Usually you can’t remember where you’ve seen a déjà vu before; all you really know is that it’s familiar. But I knew exactly where I’d seen and felt this moment. The look of the clowns and the glow in their eyes were exactly the same. What they wore, the way they ran at me, the way my head was turned to the left—it was all identical to my dream. It’s as if my nightmares growing up had been premonitions of this very moment. It was powerful, and I believe there’s some sort of supernatural connection here.
I remember telling the friends I was with that I’d seen this before. (Or I mumbled it—I can’t be sure.) Yes, it may have been a coincidence, but I have been to a lot of haunted houses and fairs and had never seen anything so instantly recognizable. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that these were the same clowns from my nightmare, and I never knew I could be scared shitless at a haunted Halloween attraction. I mustered up all the strength I had to get myself out of there, and I can tell you right now that I am never going back to Fright Dome.
It’s so interesting to me that the people we meet and the things we see, hear, and smell are all shaped by our own consciousness. Ten people can live in the same house but lead ten completely different lives, guided by the conscious that filters their experiences and tells them what’s right and wrong, possible and impossible. But I find dreams especially mysterious because we have no control over what we’re going to dream about. It’s the one time we can’t control our conscious, and our subconscious takes over. There are a lot of mysteries to dreams that science can’t truly study. It’s a fascinating element of human life.
Think about this: How many times have you had a dream about people you want to cross paths with? Or maybe you’re with someone in a dream and you wake up feeling sad because you wanted to be with them more and now it’s over. Gone. Poof. Maybe the person in the dream is your soul mate or at least someone you’ll run into later, like the clowns in my dream. You’re interacting with these people and your subconscious is shaping your perceptions of them, but who are they? Are they from your past? Your future? Are they ghosts? Dreams to me are like the paranormal encounters. When you experience them, you question how and why they happened. You awake wanting to know more, but you have a hard time even remembering what happened for more than a few hours afterward. Except for the worst ones, of course.
For me, dreams are an escape, as I expect they are for many people. Life is noisy and busy; you wake up with 5,000 things to do, places to go, and people to see. But in dreams, the physical world doesn’t matter. Before I fall asleep, I lie in bed and wonder if the afterlife is like my dreams, where I can think, laugh, and experience emotions like fear and pain and interact with people I’ve never met.
One day I thought, I want to have fun with my dreams. I wanted it to be like The Matrix, where I could do what I wanted without consequences. Typically our dreams choose us, not the other way around, but I thought, What if I took control and did what I wanted in my dreams? So I trained myself to reverse this power.
I still remember how the dream went. It was just another day in Las Vegas. I looked up, saw myself in bed dreaming, and thought, Okay, let’s go have some fun. In the dream, I killed people knowing that it wasn’t morally wrong. I tricked my mind into doing something totally against its ethical code because I knew it wasn’t real. When I think about it, it’s kind of disturbing, and now that it’s over I don’t even like talking about it, but at the time I understood it. I knew I was dreaming and it didn’t matter. I’ve never been able to do it again, and I don’t want to.
When I woke up, I knew I had done something bad and freaked out a little. I actually ran to the bathroom to look for the knife I had used to stab everyone to make sure it was still there and not bloody. Was I still dreaming? It was so vivid, yet I knew it wasn’t real. I was somewhere between unconsciousness and reality, and it was weird. It was almost like I’d tapped into a world I shouldn’t have.
This brings me back to the paranormal. Just like I’ve tapped into the spirit world on so many occasions, I’d tapped into the dream world, and I didn’t know if it would have the same ill effects. Being a paranormal investigator, I’ve brought evil things home that took me a long time to get rid of. I sincerely hope that’s not the case with this dream; I’ve already got a line of demons to free myself from. But these are the things that keep me going. What’s really going on in dreams? How do dreams and the paranormal intertwine? There are so many mysteries in this world that I can’t stop thinking about and want to solve. Sometimes I feel like my mind gets obsessed and my body pays the price.
THAT’S NOTHING TO CLOWN ABOUT.
21
APRIL 5
It’s a special day.
Here’s a sad and weird little fact: My two favorite singers died on my birthday. Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Lane Staley of Alice in Chains both died on April 5. I always listened to them growing up while they were still alive, and no one had any idea that they would end their own lives on my birthday.
It’s a strange coincidence, but still, when I’m having a bad day and my mind is a mess, I turn to them. No matter what day it is, what time it is, or how bad of a mood I’m in, I’ll listen to two specific songs to pull me out of a funk: “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” by Nirvana and “Nutshell” by Alice in Chains. These songs have so much soul; you can just tell that these two lead singers had so many demons, so much noise in them. These guys were born with unimaginable talent, but when they sing these softer songs, you can connect to the pain and darkness that each of them harbored inside. It was almost as if you could have predicted their deaths.
There’s another song by Johnny Cash called “Ain’t No Grave” that I listen to a lot. When I made my album, Necrofusion, we recorded a song called “Dead Awaiting” that seems to connect with all three of them. “Dead Awaiting” is about the dark thoughts we all have about death and the sadness and fear that come with pondering what will happen when we die. All this great life we know—the smells, sounds, colors, love, happiness, achievements, family, whatever—will stop. The comfort of our consciousness and our selves will be gone, and we don’t know what to expect afterward. “Dead Awaiting” is a blend of that fear and the fear of the unknown and the spirits that mark you in this life. The afterlife is a big unknown even for people like me who constantly peek our heads behind the curtain.
I don’t ascribe any supernatural meaning to these two singers dying on my birthday, but it is weird that I’ve been drawn to them and connect with these two songs on a deeper level than any other music out there. Sometimes I’ll go on YouTube and watch the live unplugged performances of these songs, and it really connects me to the pain they were going through.
Cobain and Staley were two of the most creative people ever, with minds that never shut down. I like to think of myself as a creative person, and, like theirs, my mind never stops. I can go out and film for a week, but when I come home (depending on how bad the lockdown hangover is), I can be on my phone and computer working hard on the next episode before I even unpack my bags. The creativity never turns off, and I feel that if I don’t get on a computer and write down what I’m thinking, then I’ll go crazy. I’ve never been able to sit still, and I think Cobain and Staley were the same way.
But they were also haunted in a way. They had everything—fame, friends, money, attention, people at their beck and call—but it was just noise that added to the overpowering cacophony in their heads and destroyed them in the end. For some creative types, the added attention makes things worse instead of better. They simply can’t handle it. Cobain and Staley both killed themselves to end their pain.
I worry about that sometimes, especially when I look at how reclusive I’ve become. I used to enjoy being around people, but more and more I just want to be left alone and have the freedom to do my job without so many intrusions. Don’t be alarmed; I’m not suicidal. But I see myself exhibiting some
of the same behavior patterns that they did at times.
One of the great things about being an artist is that you can leave behind a legacy and continue to influence people long after you’re gone. Your voice or your art lives on and delivers a powerful message. To this day, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” has 22 million views and counting on YouTube. I hope that people find meaning in my work and in episodes of Ghost Adventures long after I’m gone. I hope that the show helps someone get over their fear of the paranormal or teaches someone to make contact with a loved one. Maybe an episode of Ghost Adventures will open the mind of a child to the possibilities of what could be waiting for us when we die and inspire him or her to get into the field and make a breakthrough in paranormal communication.
AND MAYBE THAT EPISODE
WILL AIR ON APRIL 5.
22
OUIJA BOARDS
It takes two to tango.
Ouija boards are old. Since before the turn of the twentieth century, they’ve been used to conjure up spirits in the comforts of home, which makes the Ouija board the oldest piece of paranormal investigation equipment around and easily the most social. You don’t need a haunted location, a professional paranormal investigator, or any special equipment; just grab a friend, light some candles, put your hands on the board, and start freaking out. But Ouija boards have a reputation for being a parlor trick—a reputation that’s probably deserved, because they’re cheesy and cheap. However, I’ve seen amazing things happen while people were using them. So should you believe the hype? Stay tuned.
