Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (20 page)

Beyond the mental hazards of paranormal investigation, there are the physical dangers of entering dilapidated buildings teeming with black mold, asbestos, and even homeless vagrants. I’ve had pneumonia and bronchitis several times, and it’s not fun. I now take every possible protective measure I can to avoid situations like those, such as wearing protective masks and walking through a building in the daylight to identify hazards. Injuries are always possible in abandoned buildings. There’s usually debris everywhere that can twist an ankle, fall on you in the dark, or jump out and surprise you. I’ve run into doors, support columns, and even a steel bar across a cell door at Eastern State Penitentiary.

Sometimes the worst hazard is getting what you asked for. Back at the Amargosa Hotel and Opera House in Death Valley, I was taunting the Boss Man when he answered my challenge with a strike of his own.

“If you’re the nasty spirit that likes to push people, I hate bullies,” I said. “Come and face me. Bring it!”

Suddenly a voice came from the Boss Man’s room. “All the lights are off,” I heard without the need for a digital recorder. Minutes later I was coughing uncontrollably, light headed, dizzy, and unable to get myself right. I strongly believe I was being channeled by the Boss Man. It went deep, making me feel physically sick like a dying patient in Amargosa’s old mining hospital. But instead of trying to contact me, he was trying to hurt me.

In the movie
Powder
, the main character grabs a dying deer in one hand and grabs a man with his other, transferring the pain of the suffering animal to the human. Like that, I feel the Boss Man was grabbing me and making me feel the pain and suffering he or his victim experienced. Was I feeling black lung from a suffering miner? Was I feeling the last breaths of a suffocating patient?

“Something is really wrong with my body,” I said to Aaron and Nick.

“No one cares,” came a disembodied response. He was mocking me, but no matter how hard angry spirits like him push, I won’t back down. If I did, the bullies would win.

That’s not happening.

ove to the sound of the guns.”
It’s an old army saying that basically means “if you hear gunfire, march toward it instead of run away from it.” Soldiers should always get into the fight, not go in the opposite direction. In paranormal investigation I move to the sound of the ghosts. At Pennhurst Hospital I heard a loud bang when the building was abandoned. It startled me, but while most people would run away from it, I ran toward it. It’s the knowledge that a spirit just manifested and took action that makes me run to wherever it just happened and explore it. If I ran away, what kind of “investigator” would I be?

Sure there are spirits who intentionally try to harm the living and running headlong into them can sometimes be foolhardy, but those are also the ones that get me excited. I don’t know why, but I live to fight the truly evil entities on their own grounds and always look for ways to defeat them. I get very angry when I think of the evil spirits and demons that want to harm the living, and instead of shying away from the challenge, I welcome it.

Mean Spirits

Why are there spirits who want to harm the living? Why do they want to cause us pain and suffering? Why are there spirits who seek to drive us crazy with malicious, taunting behavior? The answers to these questions have huge implications on the paranormal because proving that these evil entities exist shows that our identities cross over with us after death. If a person was a bully who took sick pleasure in hurting others in life and continues to do so in death, then that shows intelligence and personality exists in the afterlife. If an asshole in life is an asshole in death, then to me that’s proof positive that our identities cross over with us. It also provides a glimpse into the plane they exist in, because it shows that emotion and intent are trapped with them between this world and the next. So in a way, evil spirits strengthen my belief in the existence of ghosts probably more than good spirits do.

I’ve run across many mean spirits (and yes, there is a difference between mean and evil that I’ll get into soon). The first time I ran into one I was taken aback, because I really wasn’t sure what I was getting into. I wanted to believe that all the spirits of the dead had found some sort of rapturous closure and felt some sort of peace after death. After all, we all want to believe that death brings peace and our souls become one with the universe. I found out the hard way that this is not the case.

There are, without a doubt, mean spirits who want your body to feel physical pain and your mind to be plagued by mental anguish. They’re not satisfied with merely scratching you or throwing something at you. They want something more. They want to use your own fears against you and cause long-term psychological damage and grief counseling. Their lives are over and their afterlives are miserable, so they want to ruin ours as a final “screw you” to the world they’ve left behind. They’re cowardly and get me riled up if you couldn’t tell. What’s important to remember when encountering spirits like this is that they do not have any special powers. They cannot lift an axe and chop you to pieces or shoot laser beams from their dead eyes. They’re former human beings and are limited to only those actions that a normal spirit has. I say this because investigators like me have to keep it in mind or our fears will run wild and get in the way of conducting a proper investigation and finding answers.

The Goldfield Hotel in Goldfield, Nevada, was my baptism by fire into the paranormal world. It’s the place where I made my documentary film with Nick Groff and had the infamous encounter with a flying brick that to this day is one of
the best
pieces of paranormal evidence ever captured on film. It’s where I grew from curious Zak to professional Zak in the blink of an eye and where I realized that this shit is real. The Goldfield Hotel taught me a lot about not walking into a haunted location unprepared. But most importantly, it’s where I learned that evil walks the Earth and my destiny is to fight it.

Two years after the flying brick incident (and remember it wasn’t just a brick—boards and other debris levitated in a whirlwind of poltergeist activity), some fellow paranormal friends joined Aaron, Nick, and me in a trip back to the Goldfield Hotel with 100 people to conduct a public investigation. We did this event partly because of the controversy that ensued after we publicized our shocking evidence. We were hoping for some kind of similar activity to occur and be witnessed by people we’d never met before to verify that this place was a hotbed of unexplained activity.

We split up, with me taking thirty people upstairs to the fourth floor to conduct EVP sessions and use provoking techniques to entice the spirits in the building to make their presence known. I lined my guests up down the main hallway, stood at one end and started provoking the spirits. “Show yourselves. Show these people that you’re real,” I demanded. “Show them what you did to us when we were here! Come out here and let us know you’re real.”

At the opposite end of the hall I heard a screech followed by another one. For a moment I feared I had gone too far and caused a malevolent spirit to harm a guest. An uneasy nausea came over me as I ran toward the commotion. Once there I was stunned by what was happening. Several small rocks on the ground were being levitated vertically and thrown horizontally at an older gentleman at the end of the hall, pelting him several times. At the same time all of his electronic equipment (a digital recorder and a video camera) went dead. This was the biggest reward; having all these people witness this. This is what we were waiting for!

At the same time that this happened the hotel’s caretaker, Virginia Ridgeway (who also appeared in our documentary), had an experience that she would never forget and still blames me for. As I was asking the spirits to move something and my tone escalated, Virginia claims two dark shadow figures entered the room she was in and attacked her. She was (allegedly) lifted off the ground and thrown against a wall. She shrieked, so we immediately rushed her out of the building to recover. I remember she was extremely shaken up as if something had really traumatized her.

The flying pebbles were bizarre and frightening because we were still new to the paranormal world and I wasn’t sure how to react to such aggressive activity. I wasn’t sure if I should thank the spirits for responding to my challenge or chastise them for being mean. Things like this happen around me a lot nowadays, but back then I was still a babe in the woods and had yet to get comfortable with spirits throwing objects at my request and trying to hurt my guests. After all, these people were my responsibility. I was leading this party.

I remember the people who witnessed that remarkable event came up to Nick and me afterward and thanked us with tears in their eyes. “This is why I traveled twelve hours in my car,” they said. “I didn’t think this stuff was real, but you guys showed me the truth.” That was very rewarding, but I had to disagree some. “We didn’t show you,” I said. “They showed you.” I felt like Ray in the movie
Field of Dreams
when only he and his family could see the ghosts in his cornfield. Then finally that one moment came when everyone could see them. The smile on Kevin Costner’s face was my smile, but it wasn’t in a fictional movie.