I am Haunted: Living Life Through the Dead (12 page)

So we went walking around Bucharest and quickly met up with our fixers. Fixers are production managers on location. Their job is to help us out-of-towners with everything—logistics, security, navigation, communicating in the local language, you name it. We put our lives in the fixers’ hands. They could take us out into a field and kill us for all we know, but we trust them. So far we haven’t found a reason not to. I’ve had hundreds of fixers over the years, and in Bucharest we had two: Andre and Crazy Name. Andre was awesome. He was a cool-ass dude, and I really enjoyed his company.

Andre and Crazy Name took us out, and I began to notice how many stray dogs there were. Later I learned that Romania has the highest population of stray dogs in the world. They’re like birds in America. There were hundreds of dogs everywhere we went, and as a dog lover and activist against animal cruelty, I couldn’t help but notice them. I fed them whenever I could, like sausages from gas stations. This was always risky because the second I broke out food, the packs would come running, and I never seemed to have enough to go around.

The next day we drove to Sighisoara to film our show where Dracula was born. Billy Tolley, Andre, and I rode together. Every mile or so along these Romanian roads, we noticed a bunch of women. I’d never seen so many women just walking along the road, so I asked Andre what was up. He told me that they were gypsies. To us Americans, the word
gypsy
conjures up all kinds of magical images, and I was intrigued to see some in person. Maybe they have some sort of genetic connection to the spirit world and could help me understand it better?

Unfortunately, in Romania, gypsies are a minority that’s treated very badly. They’re considered dirty, untrustworthy creatures and subhumans, which saddened me, especially when I found out why there were so many of them on the open roads. Andre told me that many of the women we saw were prostitutes selling their “goods” to passing drivers, but they also had a way of making a legitimate living. Every few miles there were tables manned by gypsy women where they sold homemade honey, sap, and CHEESE! I love cheese, so we stopped at one of these tables, and I bought five big hunks of cheese and a little bit of honey.

But I didn’t really think it through. It was hot during the day, with temperatures reaching into the upper 80s, and I had no way of cutting into these cheese bricks while we were filming. So five giant blocks of cheese sat in Andre’s car, getting hotter and hotter. One of the bricks that I left under my seat basically cooked and saturated Andre’s car with its funk. It was like stinky, sweaty feet that had been wearing boots for a month and then marinated in rotten egg salad. I felt awful that I had jacked up Andre’s car so badly. By the end of the trip, it was rank. To this day, if Billy or I ever smell that type of cheese again, we’ll puke all over the place, like the kids in
Stand by Me
did.

We filmed for a day in Sighisoara and had a great shoot. Afterward Billy and I got in Andre’s stinky cheese car to drive to a town called Cluj-Napoca—in a different part of the country away from everyone else—but I quickly developed a problem. My asthma was acting up, and I didn’t have a rescue inhaler with me. It wasn’t bad enough that I was in danger of dying from a completely closed airway, but it was uncomfortable to say the least, and the stench of my cheese didn’t help.

Keep in mind that not all of Romania has modern roads. We were driving along kidney-jarring back roads for a long, painful time…with asthma and stinky cheese funk. It may have been the worst road trip of my life, and we had a long way to go to Cluj-Napoca to film in the Hoia-Baciu Forest. Another car went with us to carry the gear, and the driver of that car (who was also a dentist) also had asthma and saw that I was in agony. At a rest stop, he told us that to cure my ails we needed to stop at a salt mine that was on the way. I’ve never heard of smelling salts being used as a treatment for asthma and was immediately against it. I just couldn’t see how it was going to help.

But the dentist was convincing. He said that people come to these salt mines from all over the world to cure their ailments, so I reluctantly agreed, and we set off for the middle of nowhere, Romania. Remember what I said about fixers being able to take us anywhere and leave us for dead? This could have been the intro to a horror film.

We drove a long way through forests, past giant medieval castles, and through gypsy towns where huge cranes built nests under the protection of the locals. These magnificent birds looked to be five feet tall and were well cared for, because the gypsies believe that cranes who have babies bring good fortune. It’s funny how some animals are considered evil and hunted, while others are considered sacred and protected. Luck of the draw, I guess.

We finally arrived at the salt mine, and let me tell you, it was a crazy place. First we boarded a shuttle bus full of people and drove into a cave in the side of a mountain. It was pitch black, and I felt like I was on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland. The bus narrowly missed every wall. Even stranger than the drive were the people, who looked like they were going to the gym with towels, exercise clothes, headphones, and bags full of recreational equipment. I felt so out of place, which is saying a lot for a guy like me.

The bus stopped, and everyone went through a door to come face-to-face with the staircase from hell. It was straight down and looked to be at least 500 steps.
Wait,
I thought.
I have a respiratory problem. If we go down there, how am I going to get back up?
I didn’t want to go, but those jackholes talked me into it. I would have felt like a quitter if we traveled all that way and I didn’t even try, so down we went. Instantly I tasted salt in the back of my throat and took some deep breaths. I wanted to scramble back up to the surface with every step, but I forced myself to tread on.

When we reached the bottom, I was dumbstruck. Through a corridor was a huge cavern, and people were enjoying themselves like beachgoers in Jamaica. There were Ping-Pong tables, shuffleboard games, restaurants, taverns, and even tents for people with more severe respiratory problems who stayed for weeks at a time. It was very weird but also very cool, and it took only a glance for me to realize that this was probably a good thing. I felt bad for doubting the fixers. They are chosen to be fixers because they have an innate knowledge of the local community and can be relied on to take care of us foreigners.

Apparently the salt mines attract people who need to breathe the negatively charged air; it brings them comfort without the use of pharmaceuticals. So we had lunch and hung around for a while. I made it back up the stairs and felt a ton better. For the rest of the shoot, I had no respiratory problems at all. It was a detour I’ll never forget, and I am so glad I took it.

Until I had to get on a plane to come home.

AS GOOD AS MY LUNGS FELT,
I STILL HATED FLYING.

I’m an official member of the Sabretooth Vampire Clan.

Like most creative types, I have a mind that never stops working. I’m always looking for new ways to say and do things. Last year I came up with an idea for a new TV show where I would travel the world and explore various cultures and their beliefs about death and the afterlife. I wanted to take
Ghost Adventures
one step further and dive into other cultures and their taboos. Originally it was called
Dark World,
but I changed it to
Netherworld
and got the funding I needed to film a pilot episode.

The pilot was supposed to be shot in Haiti, where we would investigate real-life zombies. Haitian legend states that there’s a cemetery where rituals take place that make people catatonic. The locals bury these catatonic people, but supposedly some of them rise up out of the ground still alive, like zombies. (The movie
The Rainbow and the Serpent
is based on this topic.) So I got the necessary vaccinations and prepared to fly to Port-au-Prince for a new adventure. But obstacles kept popping up that prevented us from doing the episode, so we switched to our backup plan and went to Paris to film in the catacombs instead. I was disappointed, but I was confident that we could make a great show about the legendary underground cemeteries. Paris seemed tame compared to Haiti, but it ended up having a bigger impact on me than I ever expected it to.

The Paris catacombs have a long and sordid history, and there are plenty of legends and mysteries to explore in the massive maze of tunnels that lie just below the streets. They were originally limestone mines on the Left Bank of the Seine River, but in the eighteenth century the mines were converted to depositories for the bones of the dead. Millions of bodies were dumped there over decades of plagues, famines, wars, you name it. It’s easy to see how stories of werewolves, ghosts, and all sorts of strange creatures spread quickly.

I took a direct flight from Las Vegas to France, which was nine or ten hours in the air. If you know anything about me, then you know I have trouble with flying. I hated being in a plane for so long, but even worse was the production schedule that was waiting for me when I landed.

I got to Paris late at night, went to the hotel, tried to sleep, and got up at around 6am to film for something like twelve or fourteen hours. When I film overseas, I like to have a day to adjust to the new time zone, shake off the jet lag, and get acclimated to the new location. My face gets puffy after being in a plane for so long, which doesn’t look good on camera. It sounds superficial, but I make my living on TV, and when I have double bags under my eyes, it’s noticeable. In post-production for this particular episode, we had to cut several shots because of how tired I looked. Not good.

For three solid days, I was filming every possible second and barely had time to sleep. I’m a warrior and really wanted this project to succeed, so I manned up, but to do all this for a pilot was really unnecessary. A pilot episode is like an experiment. You’re not sure if the idea has legs, so you spend some time and money exploring the concept to see if it resonates with fans. If it does, then you keep going. If it doesn’t, then you haven’t lost much. Even though I was the executive producer and the man in charge, I was a little upset with my producers who had put together such an aggressive schedule.

As a documentary filmmaker, I have only so much material provided by the researchers and producers to work with. A list of interviews is really about it, because the filmmaker has to have the freedom to take the story where it needs to go. A documentary film isn’t scripted; it’s an exploration into the unknown. I’m more than just the host. I’m the lead creative executive producer and director, so I call the shots on what to shoot and how I want to feed off the interviews and develop the story. That’s my right, and I take it very seriously.

The ability to do an interview with a central figure and take the story further makes the story more interesting for the viewer. I’m bloodthirsty when it comes to uncovering breaking news and finding new material to push the boundaries of the story and delve into details that weren’t known before. This is how I define myself as a host, director, and filmmaker. But the tight production schedule made this very difficult in Paris, and it took everything I had to stay focused on developing the story. Some filmmakers wouldn’t be able to deal with it, but I work best under pressure and have the ability to overcome obstacles and adapt, so I set out to do just that.

We were deep into the second day of filming when I was informed that no one could find Francis Friedland, the man who had discovered the missing video footage that was a centerpiece of the
Netherworld
story. His experience was critical to the story, so we hired a fixer to find him. Thank God she was so good at her job. She did what no one else could and became an absolute savior for this production. I was desperate for a break when we got the call that she’d found Friedland. I was happier than Pharrell when I got the news.

Like a journalist getting a hot tip, you have to act on a break like this. It doesn’t matter if you can barely stand up (and I was exhausted at that point); a professional finds the strength to pursue the lead. I told my people to get me a car, get me to where Friedland was, and set up an interview, which we did in a café immediately after finding him. Typically only Nick and Aaron are with me when I film an interview for
Ghost Adventures,
but
Netherworld
was astronomically bigger. Seven cameras were shooting Friedland, which turned out to be a logistical nightmare but made for a powerful interview. Afterward I was very excited, and I felt that the footage added a lot of value to the show. I was truly on a mission, and that mission was captured in that interview.