I am Haunted: Living Life Through the Dead (10 page)

I was disappointed, but Reno is like this. Everywhere we went that week was rough, dirty, and full of shady characters, which is unfortunate. I used to go to Reno in the early ’90s when my parents lived in Tahoe, and it wasn’t like that back then. It’s amazing how quickly a place can change for the worse.

“So what’s the point, Zak?” you’re probably thinking. “You nearly got into a fight, but in the end nothing happened.” Well, I left the crackhead encounter feeling like I had done some good by standing up for myself, and I wanted to pass this story on so that other people will, too. Maybe I scared them a little, and the next time they’ll think twice about starting a fight for no reason, and the butterfly effect will save someone from having the same experience down the road. Or maybe I’m fooling myself, and this moment meant nothing.

We were leaving Reno the next day, but I had some time to kill after the lockdown, so I went back to the same area to look for them. I wanted closure, but I had a different goal than the day before. I didn’t want to beat up the big dude as much as I wanted to confront him and make him realize the error of his ways. He clearly needed help, and the best therapy for some people is guilt. If that didn’t work, then maybe he needed medical attention for whatever his addiction was. Reno used to be a great place to me, and I wanted to do something to bring it back to how I remembered it, even if it was a small gesture.

Later, I asked myself if it really would have been a good thing to get into a fight with three crackheads. Nope. I should have let them be and walked away. As we get older and wiser, we can see that the hotheaded decisions we made as youths are rarely the right ones. What do I care about a low-life druggie talking shit? He hasn’t achieved one-tenth of what I have and never will, so why get into an altercation with him? Why risk everything I’ve built over being disrespected by someone who doesn’t matter? These are the things you think of in your thirties but not in your twenties. Age has changed me for the better, I think.

But the fight didn’t happen. They weren’t there. They’re probably still wandering around the city doing drugs and terrorizing other people.

MAYBE I’LL JUST TAKE IT AS A SIGN
TO STAY AWAY FROM RENO.

This job is riskier than you think.

This life is not without risks, but the beauty of it is that we have a choice whether to take those risks or not. You can encapsulate yourself in fifty layers of Kevlar shielding, or you can be a buffalo-riding cliff diver. It’s your choice. I’ve made a conscious decision to make connections with spirits and battle dark entities. Each time I do it, I come one step closer to unlocking the mysteries of the afterlife, but there’s always a price to pay.

People don’t fully understand the physical, mental, and spiritual dangers of paranormal investigation. Just as coalminers can develop black lung, paranormal investigators face undefined and possibly deadly risks. If you don’t think that’s true, take a walk with me through some of the hazards of my profession and then tell me if it’s really something you would want to pursue.

Let’s start with the physical risks. I’ve always had a deviated septum (see chapter 19, “Overland Hotel,” for more on that), but I never had asthma until recently. I didn’t have to use an inhaler until the thirtieth or fortieth investigation into a dank, moldy, asbestos- and vermin-infested hole. In the early years, I didn’t wear a respirator during investigations. My philosophy back then was, “How can someone host a TV show with a muzzle on his face that makes it hard to hear him?” That thinking was shortsighted, and now I regret it.

Once we were investigating the Remington Arms factory in Connecticut and went underground to check out a firing range located deep beneath the facility. Aaron wasn’t on camera at the time, so this isn’t something you will see in the episode, but he was wearing a respirator while Nick and I weren’t. It was blacker than black down there, and we were blinder than bats but without their radar. We had night vision equipment, but it sees only so much. Night vision is rarely as good as the naked eye (though it’s much better in a few situations).

We were wading through an old tunnel with six inches of stagnant, muddy water soaking our feet and ankles. A hundred yards in, Nick and I started coughing—and not just a little, but a lot. It was strange, so we were forced to turn on the white lights. As soon as we did, it looked like we were in a blizzard. There were nasty particles filling the air. I don’t know whether they were toxic or not, but I didn’t care. We raced out of that tunnel as fast as we could, and I’m convinced that place had something to do with the breathing issues I have today.

Should we have done more research before going down there? Possibly, but so many of the buildings we go into are old and abandoned or have no existing records or custodians. They haven’t been inspected or up to any kind of building code in decades, and they’ve got mold, lead, carbon monoxide, asbestos, chemicals, funk, crud, vagrants, hypodermic needles, and dead rodents. And it never ends. Nearly every site we investigate is abandoned.

Sometimes I worry about the breathing problems I’ve developed. I’ve been to pulmonologists, gotten X-rays, use an inhaler twice a day, and wear a respirator wherever there’s a risk, but it’s too late. I have issues now and will have to live with them forever.

We face other physical risks in these dilapidated rust buckets, like breaking through a floorboard, getting snagged on a rusty nail, falling down a mineshaft, running into an iron bar in the dark (Aaron is the clumsiest man in the world when it comes to such things), or having a wall fall on us. It makes me want to buy more health insurance, but try explaining what you do to an insurance representative over the phone.

“You do what? And you go into these places on purpose?”

Click.

In addition to the physical dangers, the spirits themselves can harm us through attacks and possessions. I’ve been infested by demons, been scratched by dark entities, and had bricks and rocks tossed at me. At Pennhurst State I was nearly impaled by a coat rack with a rusty tip that I believe was thrust at me by a spirit trying to stop us from investigating. At this same location, Nick was pushed onto a pile of glass shards and received several cuts. It’s no cushy desk job in a cubicle with a padded chair and a laptop. We risk our lives for this passion, and I have dozens of stories like this. I advise all paranormal investigators to take precautions. You don’t want to become a ghost while pursuing them.

Spirits can be mean, too. They will try to scare you to your very core so that you’ll never be the same again. We place ourselves in some of the most haunted places in the world, where people from all walks of life have experienced life-changing events and have been scarred permanently. Many of the guides we’ve had over the years refuse to enter the places we lock ourselves into because they’ve been damaged to their very souls there. They’re like, “Have fun, guys. Later!”

Unless you’re heartless, this job can also affect your view of humanity. We’ve investigated a lot of hospitals and battlefields where unimaginable atrocities took place. What some people are willing to do to others—especially those who are supposed to be under their care—is horrific and shameful. I mentioned Pennhurst State earlier, which was pure hell for the patients who suffered there, as were so many of the other sites we’ve visited, like Poveglia Island, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Letchworth Village, Ashmore Estates, and Linda Vista Hospital. And so were the battlefields that were soaked with blood, like Gettysburg. The hell of what people went through in these places is not easily forgotten.

And then there’s the personal evolution that this job causes. Paranormal investigation is addicting, but first let’s take a detour. Think about all the places you’ve been that may be haunted without you ever knowing it. You’re walking down a hallway and have an encounter, a brief moment when a spirit interacts with you. To you it’s nothing—a few goosebumps, a shudder, a quickening of your step to get away from it, and you feel normal again. But then you feel different. You’re overcome by sadness or anger for no apparent reason. An inexplicable change comes over you, and you want to do something you normally wouldn’t. You don’t understand it and probably don’t want to, but you’ve been bitten by a bug that injects the toxin of dark angst into you. It’s rarely good. In these moments, I believe you’re coming in contact with a powerful spirit that’s trying to get inside you for some reason—to communicate, to educate, to harm. Maybe it needs help. Whatever its motivation, it wants to have an effect on you.

Now imagine you’re me. I’ve overdosed on this type of encounter—I open myself up more and more to spiritual energy and other phenomena and invite them in to do what they please. It can be difficult to tell good spirits from bad ones, but coming into contact with a spirit is always a rush, and it always invites you to keep digging for more. When you become addicted—to drugs, alcohol, sugar, anything—your body deteriorates, and you begin to surrender yourself. I’ve started down this path, but stopped myself from continuing when I saw the signs. I’ve become more religious because I’ve seen the forces of good and evil at work, so being a paranormal investigator has given me a sense of clarity in that department.

At the Winchester Mystery House, we conducted a big experiment, attempting to make contact with dark spirits in two different locations at the same time. It’s a long story, but we tried to set up a portal for demons at Bobby Mackey’s Music World in Kentucky and spirits in the Winchester House in California to connect, and strange things happened to people at both locations simultaneously. At the Winchester House, Aaron collapsed in tears, and what happened to him had to be edited out because it was so personal. Something dark came through at both locations, so we cut off the experiment. But we went back into the Winchester House to continue our investigation, even though we were shaken up.

While I was walking around the hallways with a MEL meter, something terrifying happened. The MEL meter alarm went off, and at the same time my heart began beating irregularly. But here’s the weird part: The meter alarmed at the exact same tempo as my heartbeat. Whatever it was detecting was moving or existing at the same pace as my heart. I froze, unable to speak and terrified that I was going to have a heart attack, so I did something I’d never done before: I cut off the investigation. I wasn’t myself, and I ended a lockdown early for the first time ever. It wasn’t just that I felt weird; something much deeper was wrong. Something serious and powerful told me to stop, and for once I listened.

The next day, I found out what really happened. At the exact moment my heart raced and the MEL meter alarmed, my grandmother died. That really hit me hard. I was closer to her than anyone else on my father’s side of the family, and she never missed an episode. When she died, a part of me died, too. I can’t believe that this is a coincidence; it’s just too impactful and personal. And I don’t think the electrical system in my body has been the same since then. I feel a deeper connection to spirits now.

So are the health risks of paranormal investigation real? Hell, yes, they’re real. And just as risky as the physical and mental aspects is the possibility of being infested, oppressed, or possessed by dark energy. As I describe in my first book,
Dark World,
there are three levels of demonic interaction with humans:

• Infestation is the lowest level. It occurs when a demonic entity has made a nest in a building but has not yet chosen a human body to reside in. Sometimes the demon intends to remain there without disturbing the humans it comes across, and sometimes its intentions are much more dastardly.
  
• Oppression is the middle level. This occurs when a demon has chosen a human host and is trying to destroy that person’s intellect and will. This is sometimes referred to as a transient stage, when the demon is not fully in control of the human but is trying to achieve full control. To banish a demon at this level, a priest like Bishop James Long can perform a minor rite of exorcism.
  
• Full possession is the highest level. At this point, the demonic entity has full control of the human host, and banishing it requires a solemn rite of exorcism. A demon can and will kill its human host if it is not banished.