Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (15 page)

There are so many places that I’ve been and so many spirits who have had a profound impact on me that taking care of my own mental health becomes a priority at times. But building a wall and separating yourself from the spirits is not the answer. If they sense that you don’t care, then they won’t either. I think someone who’s cold toward these spirits is actually a skeptic because they don’t really believe that they’re making contact in the first place or they don’t care about the subject. They are there to simply capture a piece of evidence and run off with it. I’d rather feel their pain than just my own indifference.

hate bullies. It’s a personal thing, but bullies
are next to pond scum on the worthless scale as far as I’m concerned. Just about everyone has experienced confrontation and schoolyard fights growing up. It’s what youths do and is pretty much a rite of teenage passage, but getting over it is also a necessary step in the process of maturing. Unfortunately there are some people who never forego their aggressive ways and walk through life daring anyone to knock the chip off their shoulder. Even in death they prey on the weak the same way they did in life.

I’ve encountered spirits who bully other spirits and take pleasure in intimidating the living. This happens frequently in the dark holes that we toss the worst of humanity into, like prisons, penitentiaries, and reformatories, where the meanest of the mean spent their days. Often emotionally unstable, we sequester them with their own kind behind mammoth stone walls so we don’t have to gaze upon life’s castaways and only think about them when a Johnny Cash song catches our ear. We do this for the public good, but also because seeing them reminds us of our own fallibility.

I’ve investigated a lot of places where disturbed people once lived and died, but at the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel in Death Valley Junction, California, I encountered a spirit who made Caligula seem like a saint. The employees of the hotel called him The Boss Man and our fixer (a local paranormal investigator) said he liked to taunt people, push them, feel them, scratch them, and do generally malevolent things, even to the hotel staff. He was the type to raise up to a challenge—the bigger and more aggressive the human, the more active he was. Some people would scare away from this, but I go in the opposite direction and get excited for a confrontation. He’s nothing more than a bully and has to be dealt with accordingly.

“Take my energy. I welcome it,” I told him during the daytime walkthrough. I needed to coax him out, a tactic that agitated our fixer and made her concerned for my well-being. I didn’t care though. If everyone continues to take a soft approach to spirits like The Boss Man, then they just continue to torment the living. I can’t stomach that, and I set about taking the fight to him instead of waiting for him to come to me. It’s risky of course, but in death as in life, being a victim gets you nowhere. Every year thousands of people have violent paranormal experiences with aggressive spirits and walk away from it scared or confused. They need to know they’re not alone and that someone is on their side. I was eager to confront The Boss Man, but I would have to wait several long hours until the sun went down and the conditions were right. Hold that thought.

The Signs of Omens

Sunset is the time between what you know and what you don’t. For paranormal investigators it’s the moment before you step into the cage. Neither adversary is injured. There’s been no contact, no engagement, and no pain. There’s only hope, fear, expectations, and a whole lot of unknown that challenges you to understand it. I’d like to say it’s the quiet before the storm, but for me it’s always a busy time when I’m getting the last few cameras set up or going over the game plan one last time. Yet even when I’m surrounded by technology and people, omens seem to happen.

In Boise, Idaho, I was an hour away from conducting an investigation of the Old Idaho State Prison when black storm clouds blew in from the west and the temperature suddenly dropped. That wasn’t significant by itself, but two gaping holes in the sky opened up over the prison like eyes looking down on us. It was a meteorological phenomenon, but it still gave me a feeling that something memorable was going to happen during the night. On that investigation we caught an apparition on film during an instrumental transcommunication session that I believe was the spirit of Raymond Snowden, a murderer who was executed by hanging just feet from where our equipment was at the time.

In Italy I was in a boat heading to Poveglia Island when an X formed by the contrails of two airplanes appeared in the skies over the island just as the sun was setting. That night proved to be one of the most active and violent investigations I’ve ever conducted. I experienced a near-possession and felt a rage like no other course through my body as the tormented souls of Poveglia made contact with me.

On the day that I was supposed to investigate the abandoned Vulture Mine in Maricopa County, Arizona, a flash flood tore through the only road in and completely blocked it. There was more rain in three hours than in all of 2009 for that area, on the same night as our lockdown. So we were forced to wait until the following evening to conduct our investigation.

The morning after my first investigation of Bobby Mackey’s Music World, probably the most evil location in the world, I learned how close my crew and I came to death. A landslide had crashed down the hill outside the building during the night, which we never heard. Had that landslide been twenty feet closer, it could have taken the building off its foundation and swept it into the Licking River with us in it.

In Sacramento, the city flooded. In Chattanooga I nearly missed being crushed by a dock that lifted off its foundation and flipped during a freak storm. Some will say these incidents are pure coincidence, but I’ve been around the paranormal long enough to feel otherwise. I see the signs around me now. I believe in serendipity, fate, and karma, though not enough to say we don’t all have our own free will. The signs that I encountered were at some of the most heinous places I’ve investigated, and looking back on Bobby Mackey’s, I think the experiences we had there were warnings. The entities living there didn’t like us and didn’t want us to come back.

Too bad I don’t listen.

Stirring Up Trouble

I’m a different person when I investigate. I’m not a mouthy guy by nature, but when I get in the midst of evil or hurtful entities, I become the arrogant guy at a party who looks the linebacker in the eye and challenges him and the entire defensive line to a duel. I taunt and provoke, but you have to understand that I do that for a reason. I want to elicit a response. Remember that my mission is to capture on film and digital recording devices evidence of the paranormal. Many times, I can’t do that by being nice.

The spirits that roam places where humans were incarcerated only respect strength and courage. They’re like Mixed Martial Arts fighters. In their world everyone is tough. What sets one tough guy apart from every other tough guy is respect. So I don’t come into a place where dangerous men lived (and killed) each other with a plate of cornbread and cookies. I come in there with the attitude of a Barn Boss wanting to get a response or it’s a waste of time. In prison you can’t be a victim (not that I know personally).

I only provoke nasty spirits. When I investigate a building with a reported child haunting it, I take a different approach. Scaring a child or even a well-intentioned spirit of an adult will only cause them to retreat and hide, and that gets you nowhere. Provocation is a form of emotional investigation. The goal is to appeal to the spirits emotions, either good or bad, to get them to manifest by either sight or sound. Other investigators have their own style, such as scientific investigation that only seeks data and sensitivity investigation that places emphasis on using mediums, parapsychologists, and sensitives to make contact. I feel each form has its strengths and I try to take the best parts of each one and use them to my advantage. Prisons make developing a plan of attack easy.

Every man either fears prison or has the same morbid curiosity about it as rubberneckers on the highway that pass an accident and slow down to catch a glimpse of a corpse. I’m both. I watch shows like
Lockdown
and
Gangland
and try to imagine how miserable it would be to get caught up in that world, and at the same time thank God I’ve never had to know. The thought of an oppressed life with little to no hope scares me to the core. Ohio State Reformatory is one such place.

Located between Columbus and Cleveland in the center of America’s heartland, OSR had over 155,000 inmates during its 104-year history from 1886 to 1990. Two hundred deaths took place behind its giant walls and eerie Romanesque architecture, which was meant to encourage inmates back to a “rebirth” of their spiritual lives. The architecture was designed to inspire convicts to turn away from their sinful lifestyle and toward repentance. These techniques were abandoned when it became clear they didn’t work. Now the prison makes a perfect backdrop for Hollywood films, including
The Shawshank Redemption
.

Almost immediately we had power drains on our equipment, and to be honest, it made me angry. “Are you stealing some energy for the fight tonight?” I yelled out, hoping a challenge would entice the dark spirits out. Former serial killers and violent offenders were attacking people every day, and showing weakness was just going to make me another notch in their belt. Not happening. “You may startle us, but we will not run from you! Your attacks are going to stop!”

I got into character. I grabbed a Billy club and a set of keys and walked down the rows of musty old cells, telling the inmates, “I’m the new guard here.” I rapped the club on the bars and got arrogant. In some investigations a soft “good cop” approach is the best way to get a response, but not here. Good cops get nowhere. Bad cops get results.

For those of us who have never been incarcerated, you would think a prison is a prison, but even among hardened criminals there’s a hierarchy of fear when it comes to penal institutions. Experienced convicts have a list of prisons that they do and don’t want to be sentenced to, and Moundsville Penitentiary in Moundsville, West Virginia, topped the list of don’ts. Over its 119-year history, few other prisons were as bloody or violent. Almost one thousand men are confirmed to have died behind the walls of Moundsville, giving it the dubious distinction of being one of the Department of Justice’s top ten most violent correctional facilities ever. Its reputation was well earned, and not just for the harsh living conditions. The unbridled rage spilled over during several riots within its walls, in which both prisoners and guards perished.