Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (17 page)

While filming my documentary in 2004 we captured a fullbodied apparition as it walked across the top floor of the Old Washoe Club in Virginia City, Nevada, just behind my partner, Nick Groff. It was a man, who walked from left to right across the camera and was one of the clearest apparitions ever caught on film.

Apparitions have the most emotional impact on the observer and frequently make believers out of skeptics, yet I had to defend my piece of evidence repeatedly to the naysayers. Part of the public’s disbelief stems from their own personal values (mostly family and religion), but a lot of skepticism comes from the advances in technology that make film editing easy, even for the amateur home video enthusiast. That’s understandable, so I went to great lengths to debunk the Old Washoe Club footage, taking it once again to video professional Slim Ritchie to prove that the film had not been tampered with. Under the scrutiny of an oscilloscope, he verified that it was genuine (Film critic Josh Bell of
Las Vegas Weekly
magazine would later call this piece of evidence, “the most convincing of the supernatural.”)

Apparitions are the hardest to capture by modern technology. We’re constantly trying new ways to capture apparitions, like full spectrum cameras, infrared, and ultraviolet. I don’t think we’ll ever find a spectrum of light that makes our world like the movie
Thirteen Ghosts
, where the characters had special glasses they wore that illuminated all the spirits around them. When the conditions are right and an apparition is visible, it’s like a lightning storm in the desert—it’s rare, but it happens, and when it does, it’s quick.

Apparitions are the Holy Grail of paranormal investigation because they’re rarely caught on film and even when they are, the paranormal investigator faces an uphill battle to get people to believe the evidence. Everyone has a gold standard of their profession—scoring a touchdown, landing a big client, getting a Christmas bonus. It’s the main goal of what you do. For me, capturing an apparition on film is the pinnacle of achievement.

Apparitions are not the same as ectoplasm mists. They usually appear in a complete human form instead of being just an odd, moving shape with no outline. One of the strangest things about apparitions is that they are frequently observed wearing clothes, usually the clothes they wore while alive. Apparitions have been seen in period garb from flowing, nineteenth–century, “
Gone with the Wind
” dresses to modern-day bikinis and everything in between. It’s one of the great mysteries of the paranormal: Why do people take their clothes with them after death? An apparition I encountered at Sloss Furnace in Birmingham, Alabama, might shed some light on the subject.

It’s hard to imagine the most powerful nation on Earth being a broken, dysfunctional remnant of an insane dream called Freedom, but that was the situation in 1865 when the Civil War finally ended. The South was in ruins having endured several invasions from Sherman’s scorched-earth march across Georgia to Grant’s capture of Vicksburg and the multitudes of battles that ripped Virginia to shreds. Reconstruction was the problem, and iron was the answer. Confederate Colonel James Sloss returned to his native Alabama after years of fighting and helped found the city of Birmingham from three smaller towns. Birmingham quickly found its post-Civil War identity in iron, steel, and railroading, earning the nickname “Pittsburgh of the South.” In 1882, Sloss started his own pig-iron-producing plant outside the city that was immediately successful, though Sloss himself got out of the business just four years later
.

For eighty-nine years the Sloss Furnace labored night and day, churning out what would become the spine of America— steel. But in 1971, after suffering from years of low iron ore production in Alabama and needing extensive modifications due to the Clean Air Act, Sloss Furnace was closed and the land was donated to the Alabama State Fair Authority to be made into a museum.

Walking through the dilapidated furnace grounds is deceiving. The kid in me sees the intertwined vents and latticed piping as a jungle gym just waiting to be explored like a new playground. But the mature adult looks back in time to envision the brutal working conditions and stifling humidity of central Alabama and sees nothing but hardship. Add to that the thousanddegree heat of the blast furnaces and the close proximity the men worked to very heavy machinery and it’s easy to see why so many of Sloss’s employees perished on the job. Men were incinerated, sucked into rotating gears, and fell to their deaths from the furnace’s tower all too frequently.

“My daddy used to have a saying,” former employee Patrick Shelby told me during our walkthrough. “Kill a man, hire another one. Kill a mule buy another one. Don’t kill a mule, they cost twenty-five dollars.”

I’m glad I don’t work in a place where an ass is valuable and a human life is worthless.

We didn’t even have a chance to get fully set up before paranormal activity, as unpredictable as ever, started. The sun had just set over the heart of the South and the smell of rusted steel and corroded history hung in the damp air. We didn’t have our cameras on and I was trying to determine the best locations to set up static camers when I looked down a passageway and jumped back at what I saw. A worker, dressed in a white T-shirt and blue denim overalls that reminded me of a 1950s train engineer walked from my left to right about thirty feet away from me. He was as visible as any real human that I’ve ever had a conversation with as he passed into my view and then out of sight through a little opening in the factory’s jumble of pipes.

All the air in my body ran away in fright, and I stood there, motionless, trying to comprehend the shockwave rolling through me. It took a moment for my brain to realize that I was indeed a paranormal investigator and my job was to go places most people won’t. Letting the moment pass me by would be irresponsible, so I willed my legs to move and ran toward the last point that I saw him while calling for Nick and Aaron. When I got there, he was gone and there was no evidence of any human being in the area.

Aaron and Nick did exactly what they were supposed to. They grabbed a camera, asked what I saw, inspected the area themselves, and looked for anything that could debunk it. We looked for any reflective surfaces or possibility of light fooling us and ran in each direction to make sure there was no one in the compound but us. There wasn’t.

People who have a long relationship with Sloss Furnace tell a common story of Slag: a sadistic and oppressive foreman. Slag was a generally angry man, taking his frustrations in life out on his employees and making an already difficult job almost unbearable. Finally they enacted revenge on him (allegedly) by pushing him into a large vat of molten steel from behind. I believe that spirits who died suddenly and don’t know they’re dead go about their business in the same manner as if they were alive. They continue to work as if nothing had changed, and that’s why I saw Slag walking the floor of the furnace that evening still dressed in his work clothes. It would stand to reason that a man so used to being in control of his environment would want to still be in control after death and continue doing what he loved to do—work his employees to death.

One theory that attempts to explain apparitions like this is that Slag’s energy left an imprint on the universe the same way a foot leaves an imprint in the sand. As we go through our lives our energies leave an imprint on the very fabric that the universe is made of. Just like our hands leave an imprint on a window, our bodily energy leaves a mark on the field, so as Slag walked around the furnace, he left an imprint. And as our energies increase during times of extreme emotion, the imprint gets more pronounced.

Imprint Theory states that everything in the universe is stored on a repository field the same way a computer chip stores data. This field is the very fabric of the universe and everything, including you and I, make an imprint of our energy on that field, especially during times of extreme emotion. I can understand how the living and the spirits (who are also made of energy) can leave a signature behind for us to see under certain conditions, so Imprint Theory to me seems feasible.

But imprint theory is limited. It only explains passive apparitions who are going about their lives as they remember them, and as I described in an earlier chapter, there are definitely intelligent spirits who interact with the living. They maintain their identity after death. Another level of spirit is the mischievous ones, who not only thrive in the afterlife but have a mission as well.

Malevolent Mischief

The untrained or the uneducated try to categorize spirits as either good or bad, black or white, but as with just about everything there are shades of gray. Some entities exist whose intentions are not virtuous, but not purely evil either. These entities seem to have a mission. Overall their goal is harmful to humans, although their ability to actually cause any harm is limited. I’ve had personal experiences with two.

A poltergeist is not a demon that infects your children through static on your TV set, nor is it something that possesses young girls and makes their heads spin around. I loved the movie, but I’m not drinking that Kool-Aid. Poltergeists are like ghosts on steroids. They’re more powerful than normal spirits and have the ability to move objects and transfer their emotions onto the nearest human. They’re generally blamed for unexplained noises, missing items, and grumpiness, but they’re not as dangerous as most people think. They’re capable of pushing people over and even starting small fires, but instances of human injury is rare. If anything, it’s their ability to scare that can lead to injury in the cases of people fleeing in panic and running into something.

I believe poltergeists are intelligent entities, but I don’t think they’re all angry spirits. At the Villisca Axe Murder House in Southwest Iowa, a poltergeist made his presence known by slamming a door very hard that was captured perfectly on a video camera. No one was in the house at the time, so it can’t be said this action was aimed at anyone. Instead it seemed like an attention-getting maneuver. There was a clear sound of footsteps approaching and seconds later the door violently slammed shut. There was no wind and no natural slant to the door that would make it close on its own. When it happened it sent a shockwave of energy through the house that we could feel all the way in the barn next door.

I think poltergeists are trying to tell the living something and have more energy to do it, but their way of making contact is sometimes perceived as evil or mischievous. To me, poltergeists are at the top of the spiritual food chain that can be separated by levels of energy and activity. I believe spirits can be classified by their “energy rating.”

• Level 1 are weak spirits who pass through you. They reach out and use touch to try to contact the living, resulting in emotions, cold drafts, and goose bumps.
  
• Level 2 are spirits who communicate through electronic communications such as EVP. This is the most common type of spirit paranormal investigators encounter.
  
• Level 3 are spirits who manifest visually, like Slag the Foreman. They’ve either learned to make themselves seen or are residual hauntings.
  
• Level 4 are spirits who can move objects at will if the conditions are right. These are poltergeists like the one at the Villisca Axe Murder House.