Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (25 page)

Looking back on it, I can identify some mistakes we made. All of us were struggling on the inside with what was going on and not being vocal about it. We all had emotional issues, but held them in and tried to deal with them alone, which is always a bad idea. For Aaron, the spirit box kept saying personal things that affected him, but he kept quiet about it. Individually Aaron and I wanted to kill the bishop, and I’m not exaggerating. I kept hearing voices tell me, “Kill him. Kill him.” At one point I remember the bishop gave me a cross and asked what I wanted to do with it.

“Beat the shit out of Nick with it,” I responded. I wasn’t even joking. The rage in me was fierce. I remember someone (I assume the bishop) giving me holy water, and it tasted like crap. That’s a sure sign that I was in trouble because malnutrition and dehydration is the main cause of death during possession. The demonic entity does not allow the host body to be sustained and rejects all food and water.

Thankfully my judgment prevailed and I was able to get a hold of myself, but on the way back to the hotel, I wanted to fight. I didn’t care who, I just wanted to fight.

People will laugh and scoff at us for this, but let them. I don’t care if you’re a believer or not. It happened. I know it’s real. I would tell the nonbelievers to go to Bobby Mackey’s themselves and see what it feels like, but that would be irresponsible. That’s like telling them to look over the edge of the Empire State Building and then pushing them.

A Word of Warning

Places like Poveglia, Italy, and especially Bobby Mackey’s, contain truly evil entities and are not starter investigations for people wanting to get into paranormal investigation. They’re more like graduate-level research and should be left alone if you’re inexperienced at this. These are the types of spirits who should not be approached by novices and even I have a hard time dealing with them. They want to hurt you. They want to traumatize you and if you walk into places like these with a cross, a vial of holy water, an attitude of invincibility, and a camcorder, you may regret it forever. By no means should anyone who wants to begin a career in paranormal investigation go to one of these places before they’ve developed the necessary experience and knowledge on how to deal with them. If you choose to ignore this warning, then you’re on your own.

I believe the demonic entities that exist in Bobby Mackey’s Music World could have been invited there by some very dumb (or hateful) humans. It’s known to have been a place for satanic rituals in the past, which could have opened a portal for the infestation inside. After our final investigation at Mackey’s Bishop Long completed a ritual there and the paranormal activity subsided. But now I hear people are returning and inviting the demons back in, which is dangerous.

Let’s look at this place from a different angle. Remember my theory about the Villisca Axe Murder House having an evil entity that possessed a man and used him to kill eight people? Mackey’s could be the same situation times ten. There have been so many documented attacks and murders that I have to believe something compels people to act in a way they normally wouldn’t once they get inside. I know it happened to me, so I can only conclude that evil lurks in the crevices of Mackey’s, waiting to pounce on an unknowing victim and take control of them. In my case I was fortunate enough to have someone with me who recognized the signs of possession and the knowledge of how to stop it.

Before I started on this journey, I wasn’t terribly religious. I was baptized as a Catholic, but church only meant one thing to me—cookies after the service. But as my investigations go on over the years and my encounters with spirits and demons persist, I believe in God and pray like my life depends on it, especially before entering certain establishments. It’s a by-product of looking a demon in the face and having a BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious) that heaven and hell undoubtedly exist. It’s not just faith for me, but practical application too. I’ve seen the forces of God at work so I believe in them completely now.

For many people this is an uncomfortable topic. To believe in heaven you also have to accept the concept of hell and to believe in guardian angels, you have to accept the notion of nefarious demons as well. You really can’t believe in one without the other. There has to be a yin to every yang, which means for every good spirit wandering the Earth there is probably an evil one that balances it out, kind of like the good Jedi and Sith Lords of
Star Wars
who balance out The Force.

If you’re reading this book, then you’re at least a little bit of a believer in the afterlife and can accept the notion that the spirits of the dead may be roaming the Earth. So convincing people that ghosts exist is not a huge stretch, but convincing them that angels and demons also exist is a whole new bag of squid. Believing in demons is an admission that there are servants of hell and forces of darkness out there. Evil challenges our core beliefs in religion and forces people to admit there is not just a heaven and hell, but a judgment day and an almighty power that chooses which one we go to.

No one wants to think about eternal damnation and the dire consequences of our actions (I can tell you that I had a hard time accepting it), but moments like these when a profound evil is undeniably present force us to confront this possibility. I don’t like hanging out at the crossroads where religion and the paranormal meet, but it’s almost unavoidable. Now that I have personally encountered good and evil spirits, I believe that there is a heaven and hell.

After three investigations at Bobby Mackey’s where all kinds of unexplained evil and creepiness happened, there’s one question that still bothers me. Why hasn’t anything happened to Bobby himself? Like Red Roberts at the Goldfield Hotel, in all the years that he’s owned the place, Bobby Mackey has never been attacked except for a piece of ceiling that fell on him after he decided to tear the property down and rebuild on an adjacent lot (that lot was then rendered useless by a mysterious fissure six inches wide by sixty feet deep that appeared out of nowhere just as Mackey was about to develop the land).

Incredibly, Bobby is actually a nonbeliever in the paranormal! To this day he says he does not believe in any of the bad things that have happened there, even after being sued by a patron for a demon attack. I think he’s in demonic denial or is a puppet for the infestation and may have even been predestined to be the building’s owner. Is it coincidence that he was born just down the railroad tracks from the building? Is it coincidence that his name is Robert Randall Mackey and the crooner killed in the place was Robert Randall? Is it coincidence that he knew the blueprint of the building before he ever stepped foot in it? Before Bobby converted it, it was an abandoned slaughterhouse that no one went near. Then he renovated it and brought in fresh meat for the demons that Carl Lawson released when he opened the well. Bobby Mackey’s reminds me of the bar “Titty Twister” in the movie
From Dusk till Dawn
, where the owner is allowed to live by the vampires who have nested there. He has some sort of strange agreement between himself and the otherworldly forces that makes him untouchable. If our nightmares came true, the world would be filled with despair and darkness—and Bobby Mackey’s would be the gates of hell.

The Demon Lair of Sin City

Just when I think I’ve seen it all, something new jumps out and grabs me or I have a realization that opens up a whole new bag of craziness. Bobby Mackey’s has a profound hold on me, but I never realized just how deep it was until I spent a few days investigating an old mansion in my hometown of Las Vegas. This place holds either a spirit, a group of spirits, or maybe even a lair of demons that seems to have some sort of trans-demonic communication with the ones at Bobby Mackey’s. You heard right—a demonic cell phone network between Las Vegas and Kentucky.

Nestled inside a gated community of ridiculously huge mansions on the outskirts of the city, there is an old estate that may have had a “killing room” as one of its central features (imagine what that does to the property value). It was reportedly used by an organized crime family in the 1980s to torture and kill their enemies in seclusion and now is infested by a malicious entity or possibly even a group of them.

Today it’s a gutted and lonely shell of its former self, but during the years that the last owner lived there, he was nearly driven insane by the continuous attacks on him, his family, and even his dog. Women were taunted by disembodied, perverted voices, men were choked by an unseen force, and a near-possession was even reported.

I know evil lurks there, but the interesting question is what kind of evil? Better yet, how many evil entities are there? The experiences we had there crossed the lines between defined demons. The activity in this mansion was so inconsistent and fell into so many categories that it was (and still is) very hard to classify. Entities there have carried out demon-style attacks, thrown objects like a poltergeist, and preyed on women like an incubus. It was ripe with paranormal activity and showed characteristics of so many types of hauntings that I’m still not sure what to make of the place. I like to keep an open mind, so there’s a possibility that this mansion is infested by a group of evil spirits, all of whom are struggling for control of the space. Now
that
would be a den of evil like no other.

But this place affected me on a personal level before I even set foot in it. Two nights before the investigation I had a dream I was at this particular mansion and I was standing next to a demonic being that was attacking people in the house. No matter how much they screamed, he kept doing it, but the weird part is that it left me alone. Not only that, it seemed to smirk at me like I was its sidekick and it was teaching me the ropes. In the dream, it wanted me to witness what it was doing and did not do any harm to me, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do anything to prevent it. It was like we were cool with each other and had an unspoken bond.

A few days later I interviewed a man who lived at the Vegas mansion. He told me about being attacked by an unseen force in the house and how he was in a state of oppression afterward, as if the dark entity had gotten inside him and was struggling for control of his mind and body. He had violence in him that he never had before. Then he said something that made my blood run cold. “I felt like this entity and I clicked and we were cool with each other.” That freaked me out. Not just a little, but a lot.

Two nights later we were investigating this mansion, which was chock full of ghoulies and activity, when I heard something that shook me to the core—“Three Blind Mice.” It was being hummed the exact same way the demon at Mackey’s had done it. On top of that, we captured an EVP of a disembodied voice mimicking my voice—the same way they had at Mackey’s!

This was something way beyond anything I’d encountered. The EVPs I might be able to dismiss as coincidence, but probably not since I also caught one saying my name at Goldfield and the Ancient Ram Inn, but the humming of “Three Blind Mice” is just out of this world spooky. It’s the most profound thing I have ever encountered because it hits me on a personal level. It’s as if a demon or network of them are toying with me at these locations, which would indicate that they either have the ability to transport themselves or communicate with each other. Either way, they know how to find me and know where I will be, which is disturbing.

I think I have had some sort of demon attached to me since the first time I set foot in Bobby Mackey’s. I think it sang the same song at Mackey’s as it did in the Vegas mansion to let me know that it was there and that I could not get away from it. I think it mimics my voice to taunt me. And I think it’s possessive of me to the point that it will scare away the women I date, but leave me alone. Some people claim to have a guardian angel. Do I have a guardian demon?

So You Want to Date Me?

“I want to hang out with you.” I hear this statement all the time, but to be honest, no you don’t. A lot of weird stuff has happened in my house to girls I have dated. I don’t mind when it happens to me because I know how to deal with it, but when a spirit or a demon follows me home and attacks a guest, it really gets on my nerves. So if you were hoping to be invited over to my home for a barbeque or to hang out in my dungeon (yes, I have one) then I hate to say it, but it’s not happening. I rarely have people over—not even close friends—because these are the things that can happen to them:

• A friend saw a ghost of a guy sitting in a chair in the middle of the night.
  
• A container of Palmolive soap hovered over a sink.
  
• A friend’s cell phone levitated off a table and was thrown to the ground.
  
• My washing machine lid raising by itself and slammed shut.
  
• Rosary beads were ripped off a friend’s neck and found in a room down the hallway and behind a closed door (that one was really creepy).
  
• Footsteps run up my stairs all the time. When you’re going down the stairs and the spirit runs up, it can be very frightening.
  
• Voices tell my friends “leave!” and “get out of here.”
  
• The padlock in my dungeon rattled by itself, scaring a friend.
  
• A cold breeze once hit me and several other people very hard and filled us with a feeling like we should leave.
  
• A friend felt that she was attacked in my kitchen. An unseen force played tug of war with her purse so she ran out of the house screaming and speaking in another language. True story.