Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (19 page)

“Legba,” she said while shaking her bells. “He is the gatekeeper between this world and the next. He is the voodoo Jesus. Open the door, Legba.” She parted the veil and we all felt a huge wave of energy come through our circle of torches. It hit me first, then Aaron then Nick then Bloody Mary and was without a doubt some form of spirit that she had awakened. During the ritual, a member of our crew snapped several photos, one of which held a frightening apparition of a woman’s face in the smoke behind a flame. There were distinct eyes, eyebrows, a hairline, and a nose.

I immediately tried to debunk it. I can look at a mirror and find fifty faces in it. I can look at a dirty window and see the image of several kids. So I know how the mind matrixes and finds identifiable patterns. But this was different. It wasn’t the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. It was a woman and it stared back at the camera, inviting us to learn more about her. The next night we captured a lot of paranormal activity, and I’m convinced Bloody Mary’s parting of the veil helped make that happen. When dawn came and our time at Magnolia Lane was over, I took the voodoo doll that Bloody Mary gave me and left it on the floor of one slave cabin as she instructed me to.

But not every door has to be opened through ancient rituals or voodoo magic. Sometimes you can open a door for spiritual communication with modern technology. That’s exactly what I did in Idaho State Penitentiary.

Idaho was little more than a lawless territory in 1870 when construction began on a new jail that would eventually witness several deaths inside its sandstone walls, quarried by prisoners from the ridges that surround Boise. Nestled against these barren, brown ridges, the prison became a macabre amphitheater during executions, since they were normally hangings carried out in the open courtyard. Citizens from Boise would come to watch hangings from the elevated heights that offered a perfect view of the proceedings over the walls. Ten people were executed in the Idaho State Penitentiary, including the state’s only double-execution hanging.

Determined to avoid making his death a public spectacle, Douglas Van Vlack, a convict sentenced to be executed for kidnapping and murdering his wife and two police officers, took matters into his own hands. The day he was slated to die, Van Vlack escaped his guards, climbed into the rafters of the prison and stayed there contemplating his death. As the guards closed in on him, Van Vlack jumped, smashing into the concrete floor below and dying five hours later.

Like many prisons, Idaho State Pen also had its share of riots. In 1971 and 1973 prisoners, angry at the living conditions inside the walls, rose up in revolt. Several were shot during the 1971 riot while trying to escape. Another was killed by his fellow inmates and rolled up into a gym mat. The 1973 riot also resulted in major damage, and one inmate was gang raped to death.

The Idaho State Penitentiary is a vortex of pent up rage. The facility incorporated the “Pennsylvania System” of reform that emphasized isolation, labor, and religious reflection as a means to seek penitence and remorse from the inmates. Like others that incorporated the system, it was eventually abandoned due to high suicide rates and the increase in mental illness. The residual suffering of the prison is represented by the tale of Idaho’s Jack the Ripper, Raymond Allen Snowden. Snowden was convicted of the murder of Cora Dean and sentenced to death by hanging. By some accounts, Snowden hung by his neck for fifteen minutes before he died. He was the first and only prisoner hanged in the new gallows and is the last person executed by hanging in Idaho. It’s the spirit of Ray Snowden that I believe I encountered while trying to use technology to open a portal for him to communicate.

Instrumental Transcommunication is not an indigenous ritual (obviously), but it serves the same purpose—it opens a doorway for spirits to communicate. It works by setting up a video camera five feet from a TV, pointed directly at it. The camera is connected directly to the TV so that it shows what the video camera is capturing (the TV). This creates a video feedback loop that allows spirits to make themselves seen. After recording for a set period of time, it’s best to analyze the footage on a computer with the right movie editing software, just as we do with EVPs.

The drawback to ITC is that it’s time intensive. The video camera shoots at thirty frames per second, so if you shoot ITC for thirty seconds, then you have nine hundred frames to go through one by one to see if you captured anything. If a spirit decides it doesn’t want to be seen in those thirty seconds then you’ve wasted a lot of time. So using ITC is a gamble. Fortunately for us, it paid off.

We conducted ITC in the gallows of Idaho State Penitentiary where Raymond Snowden was executed and caught an image that looks very much like a man with a skinny neck wearing a hooded cloth. The image clearly had a head, neck, and shoulders and was exactly what I was hoping we’d find.

We did three ITC sessions that evening, resulting in 2,700 video frames. Only three frames had this image, so it can’t be explained as any sort of repeated pattern or glitch in the video. The image jumped out and stayed for one-tenth of a second, just long enough to see, but not make any real contact. For this image to suddenly appear and then disappear couldn’t be explained away as a malfunction of technology or random interference. Like Slag who left his imprint on the floors of Sloss Furnace, this could be the imprint that Raymond Snowden left on the universe just before he died. Just imagine the emotional and pain-induced charged energy as Snowden was hanging for fifteen minutes to die at the end of that rope. I feel that energy manifested itself onto our ITC experiment.

In the same room earlier in the investigation we caught a picture of a black mist hovering over my shoulder. The two pieces of evidence convinced me that we were in the presence of Raymond’s spirit. A third data point, like a spike in EMF, an EVP voice, or a drop in temperature would have made this encounter ironclad. Second and third data points boost the credibility of a paranormal experience, and in a different prison I had that very encounter.

Face Your Fears

Fear is a product of knowing the consequences of your actions. If you don’t know how badly you can get hurt doing something, then it’s easy to be fearless. Small children aren’t afraid of much because they don’t really understand the concept of getting hurt or killed. Instead of being afraid of flying they just see it as a fun ride because they don’t know how a crash can result in maiming and death. If you’ve never experienced the stinging pain of a broken nose or the nauseating sickness of a kick to the liver, then you might not be afraid to get into a fistfight.

I know what can happen during a paranormal investigation, so I carry some fear around with me, but it’s actually the dangers of this physical realm that scare me more. I’m afraid of snakes, open water, and heights. But I also believe you can’t let phobias dictate how you live your life, so I face my fears whenever I can to get over them.

At Castillo de San Marcos I rowed a little canoe across an open channel with a current so strong that the Rescue Officer made us aware how easy we could drown if we toppled over and he wouldn’t be able to rescue us. I love Aaron Goodwin like a brother, but he’s also the Will Ferrell of paranormal investigation. He’s big and clumsy, which rocked the canoe and took my fears up to 11.

At Idaho State Penitentiary I handled a wild snake. At Sloss Furnace, I climbed the massive rusty, eroding water tower with missing bolts on every stair to get a clear view of the grounds and try to experience what the men who worked there did. Many men fell to their deaths from this tower, and combined with my acrophobia, my legs wobbled more and more with every passing stair.

By the time I got to the top, I was gripping anything solid with every muscle I had, convinced the whole thing would topple over at any moment (hey, the dudes who were there even said we were crazy to climb it). It wasn’t a publicity stunt or a dramatic effect for the show. It was a real fear that I felt needed to be attacked head-on to grow as a person, although all I could think of was, “How high are we?” I’ve never kissed the ground before, but Alabama soil nearly got a big smooch when I got back down.

Temperature Fluctuations

An old paranormal theory is that manifesting spirits cause the ambient temperature to drop or even rise. If we assume spirits are made of weak energy and have to absorb more energy to manifest into an apparition or a disembodied voice, then it’s plausible to theorize that they absorb heat when they manifest as well. This can cause the temperature to drop in the immediate vicinity of the spirit.

There’s a theory that spirits cause temperature drops because as they absorb energy in the room. They cause the ambient temperature to decrease the same way rain droplets absorb heat as they pass through the air (ever stand on a porch and feel fine, but then step out into the rain and feel really cold?).

I was investigating a room at Moundsville State Penitentiary with one camera in my hand and a static night vision camera in one corner so it could record any external changes in the environment. Until this point in the night, the temperature had been relatively comfortable. It was cool, but not cold. At the exact same moment that I captured an EVP, my breath suddenly became visible when I exhaled. When you see your breath, you are seeing water droplets condense. The air has to be cool to do this, but there’s no set temperature for it to happen because it also depends on what the air pressure is at the time. All night I had only seen my breath once—when Aaron and I felt a presence on the main level of the prison. Now here it was again at the same time a spirit threatened me in an EVP.

Coldness, though, is not a piece of evidence by itself unless you’re in the middle of Arkansas in summer and a thermometer suddenly drops to forty degrees. Buildings exhibit natural temperature variances and pockets of cold air move freely. Also most paranormal investigations take place just after sunset, when the temperature begins to drop until sunrise starts to bring it back up again. However, a sudden drop in temperature in conjunction with an EVP adds a second data point and legitimacy to the evidence.

There are two main types of thermometers for paranormal investigators—regular thermometers that measure ambient air temperature in its immediate area and infrared thermometers that measure surface temperature from a distance. Infrared thermometers are useful because they let you read a temperature from several feet away, so when you hear a noise or think you see an apparition you can take a temperature reading quickly without running toward it and scaring it away.

Some spirits run from humans. Some don’t.

The Dangers of Paranormal Investigation

I once had a fan write to say thank you for showing him that there’s nothing to be afraid of when it comes to ghosts. He was afflicted by a paralyzing fear of the paranormal and refused to watch any movies or TV shows that even had a hint of the afterlife in it, never mind a horror flick. Despite that, one day he decided to face his fears and watch
Ghost Adventures
(though he says it was from behind a couch and he couldn’t sleep that night). Still he kept with it and ended up watching every show. When he realized that no real physical harm came to any of us, he got over his fear of the paranormal and is now an investigator in the Washington, D.C., area.

I think that’s a great story, but there’s a big difference between the average residential haunting and the dark demons I encounter. There’s a balance to be struck between the simple investigation that consists of nothing more than a few EVPs and the evil entities I’ve run across that stay with me. Keep in mind that what you see on the TV screen is just the physical part of what I do. It’s a two-dimensional representation of a fourdimensional world.

People who don’t understand the consequences of being possessed or having a demon follow you home think ghost hunting sounds like fun and therefore aren’t afraid of it. Skeptics who don’t believe that spirits exist are usually fearless of going on an investigation because they are convinced there’s nothing out there (which makes a great litmus test. Take a skeptic on an investigation—if he’s afraid, then he’s really a believer).

The main hazard of this profession is encountering a spirit who does not want to let you go. As I’ve stated before, many spirits will stay with you once they know you can see or hear them. They become attracted to those who are in touch with the spiritual world, and even long after I’ve left the physical confines of an investigation, I will have a spirit following me around trying to make contact. That makes this a 24-7 job oftentimes, and it’s usually not Caspar the Friendly Ghost hovering over my shoulder.

At home in Las Vegas, I’ve had four girlfriends attacked by spirits after paranormal investigations (especially after Bobby Mackey’s Music World). Maybe they’re jealous. Maybe they’re protective. Maybe it’s the succubus coming for me and pushing them aside. I don’t know, but they always go after my girlfriends in a bad way. That makes having a relationship difficult, especially when combined with the violent nightmares I get, like the one in London. Nightmares frequently happen the night after a lockdown and though they usually fade with time, this isn’t always the case.

Demon attacks are probably the worst danger. Not only is the physical attack painful and scary, but the blood transfer between the human and the demon can have permanent effects as well. I actually had to have a minor exorcism performed on me after my third investigation of Bobby Mackey’s Music World. Thankfully this doesn’t happen often or I’d have to get some kind of special demon protection insurance. No one offers that, so staying strong with the spirits is the only thing that protects me. I try very hard to not show fear in front of them because if they perceive me as being weak, then they’ll try to push me around. Active taunting is a strategy I reserve for certain types of spirits, but no matter what, I never back down.