by Zak Bagans
In the end, anyone who has achieved a modicum of fame has to realize that you will never have a normal life again. You just have to suck it up and deal with it. I worked hard to get into the limelight, and now I have to deal with the unpleasantness that it brings into my life. The alternative is never to leave the house, which is almost where I am at this point. I used to get excited about meeting people and sharing stories and theories about the paranormal, but I’ve been crossed by so many people with an axe to grind that it’s made me jaded and gun-shy. I hate that, but it’s just the way things are now. We all make sacrifices to get what we want, and for me to make Ghost Adventures successful means that I don’t have any privacy. Ever.
UNLESS I’M IN MY DUNGEON.
33
SOUTHWEST HELL
Wrong place at the wrong time.
I hate flying for many reasons, but mostly because it does one very weird thing to me. Every time I fly I have to pee…a lot. Someone can just say the word water and I’m sprinting to the lavatory in mid-flight. I’m sure there’s some sort of medical name for it, like depressurized bladder syndrome, but the last thing I want to do is see a doctor about it. That’s a waste of healthcare dollars. I just suck it up and sit in the aisle seat so I can get there faster.
When I fly (which I do a lot), I usually have to pee six to eight times during a two-hour flight. And when I do get up and go to the lavatory, I can’t pee, even though I have to. So I stand there listening to the flight attendants do their thing just outside the lavatory, with nothing happening for me down below. Then I start imagining that there is no wall and I’m standing there with 200 people staring at me. And then I get scared that one of the doors will break open and I’ll get sucked out of the lavatory with my wiener hanging out, or maybe the suction of the toilet will pull me out of the plane. It’s like a whole new bag of crazy stage fright or social anxiety disorder. I hate it.
When I get back to my seat, eight times out of ten I hit my head on the overhead compartment, and it’s like Keystone Cops theater with the whole plane full of passengers watching me. It’s impossible to play it off when 200 bored people see you ram your forehead into a piece of plastic with a loud THUMP and laugh at your pain. So the bottom line is, I hate flying, especially when something goes wronger than wrong.
I was coming home to Vegas on Southwest Airlines after filming an episode. I was in the front row of the plane in the aisle seat so I could get to the lavatory quickly each and every time I took a drink of anything. It was just another flight, except for one thing…the flight attendant was gorgeous. I mean Danica Patrick hot. And on top of that, she was super nice to everyone. Like genuinely nice, and not in an “I’m being nice to you because I have to” kind of way. I don’t make snap judgments, and I sure wasn’t on a love quest, but I definitely had a little high-altitude crush going on.
We were getting ready to land, and once again I had to go to the bathroom. We were descending rapidly, so I knew that if I didn’t go right away, I’d be holding it for a long, painful spell. You know the deal: After landing, the plane has to taxi, and then we all wait until they bring out the jetway and open the doors, and by the time I get to a bathroom inside the airport, I’m probably standing in a pool of my own urine. No way that was going to happen, especially not in front of this perfect ten. I was going to go even if I had to barrel through a platoon of air marshals to get there. You’re not supposed to get up after the “Stay in your seats under penalty of death” light goes on, but I wasn’t having it. But if I had known then what I know now, I would have stayed put.
I got up, went to the lavatory, locked the door, and lifted up the toilet seat, and there he was: Mister Stankie. A big, nasty log of shit was clinging to the side of the toilet. I got a noseful of it and…oh dear God. I was nearly sick to my stomach and had absolutely no desire to pee anymore. I didn’t dare touch the flush button, because I assumed that whoever had the gall to lay down this redwood log of doom and not make sure that it got flushed probably didn’t wash his hands, either. I had one driving mission at that point: to get out fast. I turned and bolted with the toilet seat still up and the log still maintaining its death clutch to the side of the bowl. I should have tried to get rid of it so the next person wouldn’t have to see it, but I was too grossed out. It was self-preservation.
But as I came out of the lavatory, I looked down the aisle and saw the super-hot flight attendant walking toward me from the rear of the airplane. At first I didn’t care, but as I clicked my seat belt it hit me. She was heading toward the lavatory!
A million things flashed through my mind, none of them good. This was a really bad situation. She was going to come up there and check out the lavatory and think I laid down that log. She didn’t see how long I was in there. She didn’t know that I’d walked in and walked right back out again. She was going to think that I went in there and took a giant shit and didn’t flush. Panic set in. I grabbed the media control handle on my armrest and thought of all those silly video game combinations to unlock a secret move. Maybe left-left-up-down-spin-spin-kick would eject me from the social hell I was in, which only got deeper with each step she took.
The seconds ticked away like an eternity as she slowly made her way to the front of the plane. I was in the front row and had no seat to hide behind as she reached the front and started doing flight attendant things. I started sweating. I was moments away from a full-fledged panic attack. She put the trash in a bag and turned all the red switches on the control panels and did all the stuff they do to prep for landing. Maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe she wouldn’t…
But then she did. She opened the door to the lavatory, and my worst fears came true. She looked in the toilet and saw what I saw: Mister Stankie staring back at her, meaner and smellier than ever. She turned to me with the most disgusted look on her face, and I knew that any chance I had to meet her was flushed (pun intended). To add insult to injury, she balanced on one leg, lifted the other to the flush button like a Cirque du Soleil performer, and hit it with her toes while her gorgeous face frowned the frown of eternal damnation. At that point, I didn’t care if the plane crashed like a lawn dart.
I have never taken, and will never take, a dump on an airplane. I can barely pee, and in the many hundreds of flights I’ve taken in my life, I’ve never once felt the urge to go number two, no matter how long the flight was. I’m fine with people who do it, but for Chrissakes, flush. Not flushing is like blowing your nose in your hand and then shaking my hand—it’s just not right.
I took the blame for that log, and it wasn’t even mine. I wanted to stand up and tell the flight attendant that it was the guy two rows back whom I’d seen go in there a minute before I did. As if this nightmare couldn’t drag on any longer, it did. She kept flushing, but the demon poo refused to go down, like it was attached to the bowl with some sort of crazy monkey glue compound. With every flush, I descended to another level of hell…and not the kind I’m used to.
To this day it still bugs me a little, because she probably tells her friends about that disgusting guy from Ghost Adventures who didn’t flush, and they all laugh about it while watching my show. We all have embarrassments like this that we want to forget. It was a horrible moment of being in the wrong place at the wrong time that will stick with me forever.
I HATE FLYING.
34
THE DEVIL
Just leave him alone.
The paranormal field has more questions than answers, and working in it day after day can be maddening. So many times I feel like I’m on the edge of a discovery but end up right back where I started. Religion is especially tricky. My years of poking and prodding the very basis of our existence have convinced me that God and Jesus do exist, but when you believe that, you have to acknowledge that the other side must exist, too. It’s not easy to admit that the devil is real. I’ve been there, and I can tell you that he’s as bad as people say he is.
So many people pray every day. Prayer is a ritual that involves cer
tain movements and postures: bowing the head, making the sign of the cross, holding hands together in humility. It’s one ritual of many in the church. There are rituals for taking the holy sacrament, rituals for confessing sins, rituals for joining together in holy matrimony, and many others, depending on your denomination. Houses of worship everywhere welcome millions upon millions of people who feel that they have a relationship with God and ask for forgiveness of their sins.
So where does sin come from? Is it human nature, or does the devil try to influence the world by making people sin? And why do some people commit more extreme sins than others? Abuse, corruption, violence, murder—these are all ways I believe the devil feeds. The spiritual battle between God and the devil is always at work, every day, every minute, every second. When a possession occurs, we see this struggle firsthand. We see supernatural things happen: the possessed person levitating and speaking in tongues, holy water scarring the skin, evil being cast out by good. It’s powerful.
So what happens to those who seek God? If they worship God wholeheartedly and lead holier lives than others, does God give them the gift of tranquility and erase all violence from them? Does God make them pure, and do they live more peaceful lives? I bet many of them do. Do I have a deep connection with God and Christ? I would say that I do, but at times I question it. I ask the same question that atheists and agnostics always ask: why God or Jesus would allow so much pain to happen in life, especially to innocent children. My faith isn’t shaken, but I continually ask why these awful things are allowed to go on. If God created life, then why doesn’t He maintain it? Why doesn’t He show us His Godly power and correct the things that are happening in the life He gave us? It’s not anti-religious or wrong to question God. I pray sometimes. I wonder whether anyone hears it, but I believe that there’s a cleansing power in prayer. It reminds your body that there’s something beyond its confines. You can train yourself through prayer. Just like everyone wants me to show them a ghost or spirit, people want to hear and feel God to believe in Him, so they pray and hope that those prayers are answered.
Funny thing: I question God and Jesus, but I don’t question exorcists. I’ve seen so many exorcisms. They’re powerful. They invoke the name of God to eradicate a demon from a living body. I’ve had a demon inside me and felt the stinging and burning when holy water was sprinkled on my forehead. In that moment, I felt God, and lately I’ve been thinking more and more about how evil spirits and entities can try to make you sick and even kill you (though to be fair, good spirits can also do you harm if they try to use your energy or channel through you).
And what about the people who try to pursue the devil—not necessarily to worship the devil, but to explore it? Demonologists are usually very religious individuals who only seek to understand the devil. Why wouldn’t they? It’s only natural to want to find the answers to our questions about religion and explore what lies beyond God and Jesus. To do that, we have to go where the action is, and where’s that? On a battlefield. And where is the battlefield between God and the devil? Exorcisms.
Exorcisms are ground zero for the struggle between good and evil. Both sides fight fiercely to control an innocent human being—a pure soul who has no desire to be part of the battle. It’s usually a soul with a lot of potential that the devil wants to control and the angels want to leave alone to live a peaceful and productive life. The body becomes the battlefield, but there are other battlefields, too—real ones made of earth and stone that humans, whether they mean to or not, sometimes mess with, opening up a portal that should have been left undisturbed.
When we went to Ireland to film for Ghost Adventures, we decided to research and try to interpret some of the ancient legends, and to attempt to find the devil himself. Ireland is such an intriguing place. So many mysterious things have happened on these ancient lands, and still do. There were the Druids, an ancient Celtic people whose religious leaders seemed to understand the struggle between good and evil and got themselves mixed up in it. To this day, historians don’t understand much about the Druids and the rituals they performed, but some accounts say that those rituals involved human sacrifice. When Christianity came to the Emerald Isle and everyone turned their attention to Jesus, it’s said that the mythological creatures, gods, and goddesses buried themselves in the ground, where they still lie dormant, waiting for the right time to reappear.
To travel to lands that are home to ancient burial grounds and stone passageways and grave cairns is amazing. These kinds of places are found all over the island, and there’s so much that’s unknown about these ancient peoples and their religious practices. It’s like layer upon layer of questions with no answers. Two of these sites—the Hellfire Club atop Montpelier Hill in County Dublin and Loftus Hall to the south—are said to have been visited by the devil himself. These stories have been passed down for centuries, so they seemed like the right places for us to begin our investigations. But then the shit hit the fan.
We tried to summon Satan. We tried to call him out. I hate to admit it, but we thought we could pull it off, and I witnessed one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen since I started doing this job, and it may have permanently affected one of my best friends.
The Ghost Adventures Crew doesn’t live by a code book for paranormal investigating. Some other paranormal groups think that you have to live by a set of rules, and everybody has to investigate this way or that way. People preach that there’s one right way to investigate. That’s like some backwater group telling a priest how to pray. It just doesn’t make sense, and they look stupid when they try to force their investigation methods on others.
Now, I won’t be a hypocrite and suggest that we don’t have our own processes and standards that we share with our GAC-affiliated crews. We’ve been doing this a long time, and we’ve developed many effective techniques for conducting paranormal research. But there are groups who are so set in their ways that they aren’t flexible enough to adapt to different situations and end up missing out on great opportunities. Every haunted location is different. What works in one place may not work in another. Spirits are people without physical bodies, and every person, living or dead, is an individual.
Bruce Lee was the true father of mixed martial arts, and he taught his students this philosophy: Don’t let yourself be so rigid and inflexible that you can’t adapt to your opponent. When it comes time to fight, be like water and flow. Let the environment dictate how you move, not the other way around. The same can be said for paranormal investigation. Every place and every ghost is unique, and you have to be able to adapt. In the end, the results are more important that the process. Evidence and progress are what count the most.
Now, there are groups out there that take this job to extreme levels, vandalizing property and mutilating themselves and other ridiculous bullshit, and I agree that they’re not doing it right. But the GAC tries hard to let investigators be investigators and move the field forward. We like to expand ourselves by participating in rituals and having emotional experiences, just as people go to church and pray to better themselves. Just as they seek to calibrate themselves to have an experience with God, we calibrate ourselves to connect to the spirits.
But we may have taken it too far in Ireland.
We were on top of Montpelier Hill at the Hellfire Club. At the top of this hill there’s a beautiful old hunting lodge that was built around 1725 by a wealthy man who used stones from a nearby passage grave. The story goes that he had no idea what he’d done. Not only were the stones taken from a prehistoric burial ground, but the woods surrounding the lodge were said to be filled with ancient demons and creatures that had buried themselves there when Christianity came. It’s said that the devil himself visited the lodge and blew off the roof just after it was completed. Years later, the secretive satanic Hellfire Club held its rituals there to call upon the devil. It’s said that Satan appeared in the lodge during a card game among the members in cloven feet and fireballs. It sounds kind of crazy, but it’s r
ight up my alley.
So we investigated this lodge and went through the ritual to summon Satan when something unexpected and terrifying happened: We got an answer. First we captured rocks and glass moving and the sound of a claw scratching across something, probably the ground. Then something happened to Aaron. He claimed he felt a claw-hand firmly grab his ear and pull it backward with force, along with a powerful jolt of dark energy, and he believes to this day that Satan touched his ear. Later, I asked the spirits who touched Aaron, and a woman’s voice said, “Satan.” It was the only voice we got that night, and we knew immediately that we’d pushed it too far.
I saw my friend in a state of absolute panic, which I’d never seen before. He started crying, and for once in my life I had no idea what to do. I was truly disturbed to see my friend in such agony because I knew that something very powerful was present in the Hellfire Club and lashed out at him. I was very concerned for Aaron because earlier in the day he felt compelled to remove a stone from the satanic circle in the lodge and left with it. I think he cursed himself when he did that. But it goes farther than that. A couple of years earlier, we were at the Hellfire Caves in England (which are connected to the Hellfire Lodge in Ireland), where a witch doused Aaron in goat’s blood during a pagan ritual. He wasn’t the same after that ceremony; I think he was toying with things that he wasn’t prepared to deal with. His experience at the lodge was a combination of both events, not a singular event. He’s a strong person, but no one is equipped to deal with the devil and his demons.
