I am Haunted: Living Life Through the Dead

by Zak Bagans

  The Gribble House warehouse felt like this to me, and though it’s not necessarily fraudulent, it’s specious at best. Telling the story of what happened there in a fantastical way just establishes the conditions for people to have the experience you want them to have. That’s why professional paranormal investigators have to go into a location with a completely open mind and no preconceived notions. This isn’t the same as not doing research, though. We always research our locations, but we don’t let the research fool us into thinking that we’ve captured something paranormal when we really haven’t.

  THAT WOULD RUIN OUR CREDIBILITY,

  WHICH IS A CRITICAL PART OF OUR

  STANDING IN THIS FIELD.

  27

  DEBUNKING

  If you don’t do it right, then you’re just a scam artist.

  Paranormal investigators are a lot more skeptical than you might think, but we focus our skepticism on ourselves rather than on the ghosts. We know they’re there, but that doesn’t mean every little bump in the night is paranormal unless it’s been thoroughly debunked and there is no other possible conclusion. Debunking is the act of proving something false, and it’s a critical part of every paranormal investigation. To be considered a professional paranormal investigator, you have to go the extra mile to debunk what may or may not be a piece of paranormal evidence. There’s so much skepticism surrounding the paranormal that every possible measure has to be taken to remove as many variables as possible and ensure the integrity of the evidence.

  The measure of any good investigator is not only how he investigates the unknown, but also how he explains the explainable. You have to be willing to take the time to prove that a weird event could be totally natural. Being able to do that shapes you into a good paranormal investigator and strengthens your evidence. When a door slams or you hear a voice or see an apparition, you can’t just assume that it’s paranormal. Debunking means asking the hard questions: Where could the sound or vision have come from? Is there anything else it could be? And a hundred more questions, until there’s no doubt in your mind that it’s truly paranormal.

  Frequently, new teams we meet present us with evidence they’ve captured, but I never assume that it’s paranormal until I’ve thoroughly examined it myself. While investigating Thornhaven Manor in Indiana, for example, we met a GAC-affiliated team who were certain they’d captured the voice of a woman screaming on a digital recorder. It definitely sounded like a woman screaming for her life. But after these folks left, and before we started filming, I decided to investigate this scream. I sent Nick inside the house with a camera, and I stayed outside to determine whether we could find any kind of contamination to explain the recurring sound. A lot of famous haunted locations have this kind of phenomenon: a recurring event like a woman in white walking along a balcony that attracts visitors, but is really just reflection of light. I wanted to make sure that this wasn’t the case at Thornhaven Manor. And my hunch was right.

  As I stood outside, a neighbor drove his old car past the house, and sure enough, as he stepped on the brakes, it made a screeching sound that sounded exactly like what I’d heard on the digital recorder. Immediately Nick called me on the radio and said that he’d heard a woman scream inside the house. I was like, “I think this is debunked, brother.” And it was. Jay Wasley replayed the audio of both events and compare the waveforms, and they matched. There was no doubt that the scream was actually the neighbor’s car brakes, which we presented to the owner of the house and the team. Don’t get me wrong…this is a good team that does great work, but this one piece of evidence wasn’t debunked properly.

  FUN FACT:

  WHILE FILMING PARANORMAL CHALLENGE, I WORKED WITH THE BEST PARANORMAL EXPERTS, AND WE CAME UP WITH HIGH STANDARDS FOR DEBUNKING EVIDENCE. TEAMS WHO DEBUNKED PROPERLY SCORED MORE POINTS WITH THE JUDGES, BECAUSE DEBUNKING IS OFTEN MORE IM PORTANT THAN CAPTURING EVIDENCE.

  Titles like “Most Haunted Home in America” always raise a red flag for me. People who come up with titles like this, or with lists of the most haunted locations, often take evidence into account that hasn’t been debunked. So the claims of “most haunted” are usually exaggerated, because a lot of the events that people capture there are actually explainable. I’m okay with calling a place “super-duper haunted” if it really is—like if it has verified deaths or legitimate demon attacks associated with it—but I get irritated with places that lure tourists by bragging about how haunted they are when they really just have squeaky floors and loose air vents.

  The Whaley House in San Diego is legitimately haunted, but we were able to debunk a big part of it when we did our investigation there. In the 1850s, Thomas Whaley built the house on the site of a gallows where a lot of people were hanged, including a man named Yankee Jim Robinson. Whaley probably cursed himself by putting his house there, but people do strange things. It’s said that the house is haunted by Yankee Jim and others killed on the site, but there’s more. Whaley’s daughter committed suicide in the house, and there have been documented instances of police officers being strangled by unseen forces in the house. Many of the hauntings that the Whaleys experienced were documented, and there are a lot of reports of dark energy, so all the necessary elements were in place for a great investigation.

  We heard a lot of reports about a woman crying on the main staircase, so we focused our attention there one night. We were setting up a laser microphone experiment with Bill Chappell when Nick stepped on a stair, and we all heard the sound of a woman singing or crying. But then it happened again when Nick stepped on the same stair, which made me think that it wasn’t paranormal. After following the boards through the wall and down the hall, we discovered a domino effect—one board would rub against another and make the sound. It wasn’t paranormal at all. It was just a loose board that was connected to another loose board, and when pressure was applied to it (like Nick stepping on it), it made a strange noise that could easily be mistaken for a woman’s voice. Debunked!

  To gain and maintain credibility and respect, you have to dismiss false positives at every opportunity. The worst part of not debunking information is that it can build up and become an urban legend. If one person or team doesn’t debunk an event, then the next team goes in looking for that particular event to happen, and it snowballs. Eventually you end up creating a ghost where there isn’t one—or worse, a ghost that becomes false history. That does a disservice to the location and the people who lived or work there. Paranormal investigators should preserve the integrity of a haunted location, not desecrate it.

  I’m always asked why we investigate at night. “Don’t ghosts come out during the day, Zak?” Of course they do, but our chances of catching them are a lot higher at night. One of the biggest reasons we investigate at night is that the world is a quieter place after dark. There’s less possibility of noise contamination from cars, humans, animals, technology, unicorns in heat, whatever. Light contamination is also a problem during the day because the sun casts shadows that can be mistaken for spirits (or basic movement) when there aren’t any present. And special equipment like infrared and full-spectrum cameras that frequently capture ethereal events like mists and apparitions don’t work as well during the day. So there are plenty of reasons why paranormal investigators are nocturnal creatures.

  We were investigating a haunted bed-and-breakfast in Charleston, South Carolina, and showed a third-party investigator why we work at night. We did an investigation during the day equipped with a full-spectrum camera and a regular camera, and it was easy to see the shadows wreaking havoc all over the film. They were everywhere, and the sunlight caused many different visual distortions in videos and digital still photos. The background noise levels were much higher, too, so just getting a basic EVP was a chore.

  But the biggest reason we work at night is so that we can use infrared light. If you know anything about the light spectrum, you know that the amount of light humans can see with the naked eye is very small. We can’t see ultraviolet or infra
red light, but since we’re smarter than the average ape, we’ve developed the technology to help us see beyond what is normally visible to us.

  Why is this important? Many people (myself included) feel that spirits reside in the infrared and/or ultraviolet spectrum, or at least can be illuminated by these forms of light. Night vision cameras shoot in infrared and amplify existing ambient light, so they have the capability to see things we can’t see with the naked eye. I believe that infrared light can illuminate a ghost’s composition—an orb, a mist, a vapor, or an ectoplasm—under the right conditions, so I use this equipment often. I’ve thoroughly investigated the Portland underground, which is an active place during the day, but it’s not the same as working at night. Like people, the paranormal activity down there is vastly different after the sun goes down.

  AND ALL OF IT HAS TO BE DEBUNKED.

  28

  GUEST INVESTIGATORS

  Some are great. Others are just distractions.

  The Ghost Adventures Crew has been doing this job long enough now that we can literally calibrate our energies and connect without speaking. We can all sense when something paranormal is happening to someone else. We’ve been in many dire and scary situations, and we know that each of us is solid; we have each other’s backs. But sometimes it’s good to throw an unknown entity into the mix to see what happens.

  We got the idea to bring in guest investigators for a short period to give Ghost Adventures a different energy and offer the viewers a new outlook on the location. Sometimes the guest’s energy adds to ours to improve the experience, but it isn’t always harmonious. Some of the celebrity investigators we’ve had on the show were not the easiest people to work with.

  In this field, you have to work with people you know and trust and who take the operation seriously. I like to work with people who are sensitive to paranormal energy or have some other sort of gift or value to bring to the table. The more I’ve grown in this field, the more I enjoy not having celebrity investigators anymore. More often than not, they’re a distraction that throws off our energy. Either they’ve never done this sort of thing, or they think you have to put on a show for them and bring out unbelievable ghosts to entertain them. I don’t need that kind of pressure when I investigate.

  However, I do have a couple of favorites among the guest investigators we’ve had on the show. UFC heavyweight contender Brendan Schaub is a genuine person whom I met during a pet rescue charity event at the Stanley Hotel outside of Denver. I’ve been a UFC fan for a long time, so it was great to meet him, and we became friends afterward. We ended up returning to Denver months later to film an episode at the Peabody-Whitehead Mansion, so I decided to bring Brendan along.

  Why? Simple: Professional fighters have a different mentality than most people. Normal people don’t make their living fighting in a cage with another trained warrior, and they don’t have the courage to stand their ground against dark entities. Going into the kinds of places we do and accomplishing the mission of gathering paranormal evidence requires a trained body, mind, and spirit. Paranormal investigation at a high level takes a lot of dedication and preparation, and guys like Brendan have that edge. I also invited him along because I wanted to see how a modern-day warrior would react when he came face-to-face with one of these evil spirits.

  What’s interesting about the Peabody-Whitehead Mansion is the urban legend that some sort of rape and murder occurred in the basement during a renovation of the property. There is no factual data to support this story, and we said on air that it was unvalidated, but several people around the area spoke about it as if it were real. Not all legends are fiction, so we left our minds open to the idea that it could have happened.

  Brendan came in full of smiles and great energy, so we took him down to the basement for a spirit box session. The spirit box is a controversial piece of equipment, but I believe in it. It scans AM and FM radio frequencies very rapidly (the same way a military radio frequency-hops) so we can tap into the radio waves portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. A major belief in the paranormal field is that ghosts are made up of electromagnetic energy. If that’s true, then it stands to reason that they would try to communicate through the electromagnetic audio spectrum, and radio waves are in the electromagnetic spectrum. So if ghosts reside in the electromagnetic spectrum, then it makes sense to use radio waves to communicate with them, which is why the spirit box is so effective.

  FUN FACT:

  ELECTROMAGNETISM IS ONE OF THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL FORCES IN THE UNIVERSE. THE OTHERS ARE GRAVITY, THE STRONG NUCLEAR FORCE, AND THE WEAK NUCLEAR FORCE.

  We remove the antennas from our spirit boxes to eliminate the possibility of radio interference or noise contamination (critics seem to ignore that a lot). By doing so, we can let the device sweep with little to no chance of picking up any radio stations. The SB7 scans radio frequencies at such a high rate of speed—it can cover the entire radio spectrum in less than two seconds—that it’s impossible to hear a coherent voice on one single frequency. There’s a slim probability that a single syllable could come through, but it’s virtually impossible for the spirit box to pick up multisyllabic words or phrases. And when the word or phrase that comes through is an intelligent answer to a direct question, you just can’t chalk it up as radio interference. You can listen to nothing but white noise for hours with a spirit box without hearing a single blip of a DJ, music, or talk radio, even in the biggest metropolitan areas and next to powerful radio towers. This creates a contamination-free audio forum for nearby spirits to be heard.

  Throughout the hundreds of investigations I’ve done, the rituals I’ve participated in, and the contacts I’ve made with the spirit world, the spirit box has been my favorite tool. I’ve put it through dozens of tests to prove to skeptics and myself that it legitimately captures spirit voices. I even hooked up two SB7 spirit boxes to two separate computer software programs so I could analyze the waveforms, and then swept a room at the Black Swan Inn. Both boxes were synchronized to sweep the same frequencies at the same time. Then I asked, “What was the lady’s daughter’s name?” The answer “Madison” came through one spirit box, which I could see on the waveform.

  Why is that significant? Because if it was a random radio wave, then both boxes would have caught it, and it would have been visible on both waveforms. But since it was audible (and visible) on only one box, then the chances that it was a radio signal were exactly zero. Also, since it was the correct answer to the question I’d asked, that indicated intelligence, and I believe it was a great piece of paranormal evidence. I also used this device in the Perryville battlefield house, where I got the first and last name of a Civil War soldier, which was validated by the museum director as a casualty of the battle.

  During a different investigation in Savannah, Georgia, we conducted a 90-minute spirit box session. Savannah is a large city with hundreds of radio stations, and during the entire hour and a half, we didn’t get one single piece of contamination (or paranormal evidence, for that matter). If the spirit box was susceptible to outside interference, as skeptics say, they would have picked up something—anything—during that session, but it was completely quiet. The bottom line is this: It works and I believe in it.

  Now back to Brendan Schaub. We brought him into the basement of the mansion, turned on a spirit box, and started asking questions, but nothing was coming through. It was quiet. Then I asked, “What happened to a girl down here?” and suddenly everything changed. “She was raped,” a man’s voice said, clear as any voice I’ve ever heard. I’d never seen a bad-ass heavyweight UFC fighter jump without his legs moving. It was like a cat sitting on a ledge that had a shoe thrown at it. After that, we got four more intelligent answers related to this rape that we shared with the Denver police department. They even gave us permission to excavate the property to search for bodies, but the jury is still out on that one. I’m a paranormal investigator, not a paranormal excavator.

  To put a cherry on this sundae, I asked the spiri
ts what the name of the guy sitting next to me was, and a female spirit clearly said, “Brendan.” It was awesome.

  So the benefit of having guest investigators is that they bring a new energy to the room that spirits sometimes react to. Also, they’re usually skeptics, so to see them react so positively to an event helps our credibility and shows our openness to bringing in outsiders. We’ve never had anything to hide and never will. We are not magicians or frauds or snake oil salesmen. We’re credible investigators and are open to bringing outsiders in to prove that. And Brendan was a valuable addition to our team because he prepared himself properly and acted professionally. That’s not always the case, though. Some guest investigators are…interesting.

  In 2012, we investigated Frank Sinatra’s private suite at the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, which is said to be haunted. Sinatra’s parties were legendary, so we thought that if we threw a little party with musicians and women and even some of Frank’s old friends, it would awaken the spirits there, maybe even Old Blue Eyes himself. So we invited someone Frank knew and partied with: Vince Neil, the lead singer of Motley Crüe.

  We got a lot of bad press for Vince’s appearance on the show because he was drinking during the investigation and showed up accompanied by several women. In his defense, it was meant to be this way. Sinatra was no teetotaler. He drank—a lot—so we wanted to create an atmosphere that he would have been comfortable in; we needed a party atmosphere with booze, women, and rock stars. We even brought in his old piano player and had him play some of Frank’s favorite songs.