I am Haunted: Living Life Through the Dead (22 page)

Except for one.

I wanted to bring in guest investigators for an hour each to add to the experience. We brought in Mark and Debby Constantino, who are awesome investigators and EVP specialists. We also brought in one of the leading psychic mediums, Chris Fleming, and some fans, including Kelly Crigger, who helped me write this book and my previous one,
Dark World.
Kelly got locked in a seclusion cell at the asylum and heard the creepiest disembodied scream ever.

Around the fourth or fifth hour, we brought in Robert Bess, whom I’d never met. I’d investigated with the Constantinos and Chris Fleming, and they always do amazing work (and got amazing results that night at the asylum). But the first time I met Robert Bess was the moment I met him live on camera. For some reason we had never crossed paths during the preparation for the show, so I was meeting him in front of millions of people. It was risky (especially because the stress of the unknown could trigger a migraine), but I figured it was worth the risk because he brought a new piece of technology to the show, and from what I had heard, it got results. Looking back on that night, it wasn’t the best idea.

I think it was Dave Schrader who told me about Bess and his Parabot device: a chamber large enough to hold a human, flanked by large electric Tesla coils. It is supposed to be able to attract and contain the electromagnetic energy created by spirits. Dave sent me a video of the device in action, and it looked really interesting. It looked and sounded like something from
Ghostbusters,
but it came from a credible source, so I said yes, let’s bring him on the live show. I love experimenting with new technologies and techniques, and this thing was pretty captivating. Could it really capture and hold a spirit?

A few days before the live show, the production crew had a couple of incidents with the Parabot that they told me about. While it was sitting in a hallway of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, the glass on the inside of the device cracked. Bess explained this as angry ghosts that didn’t like the device and were trying to sabotage it. I actually got to step inside the Parabot and see the cracks. Another day the fluorescent lights above the Parabot came crashing down on it unexplainably. So I was really amped to get this thing on the show and work with Bess.

I met Bess on set (decked out in his cowboy hat and long leather coat) in the middle of the night in front of the world. He fired up the device, and I was immediately concerned about the sheer amperage coming off of it. It was like he was trying to resuscitate Frankenstein’s monster with massive jolts of electricity. The Parabot made a sound every few seconds—
boom boom boom
—and I could feel the shock waves in the air every time it fired. Clearly it had power. It was like the human version of a bug zapper, and I was waiting for one of us to get electrocuted. I seriously thought one of us was going to get killed by the thing, especially when Bess said to me, “Don’t get within three feet of it.” Getting incinerated on live TV would not be good.

But while this thing was pumping out electricity, I could feel the environment change. The air was supercharged, and since spirits are thought to be made of electromagnetic energy, I thought maybe this was a great invention and we were going to see some results. Bess said that when the door opened, the ghosts would go toward the energy, and he would capture them in the pod by closing the door. I thought,
Okay. Let me see this.

So we let Bess do his thing, and I will say that legitimately strange things started happening. Nick said that he felt something grabbing his leg, so I took a still shot of his legs and captured a huge white anomaly. It was like a spirit was being dragged toward the Parabot and was grabbing Nick’s leg to avoid being sucked in. Then I took another picture down the hallway we were in and captured a green manifestation moving toward the Parabot. Aaron started freaking out because he was standing close to the coils and felt like the device was messing with him internally, so I pushed him back and told him to keep his distance, because none of us knew what the side effects of this thing were. It was an experiment, and we all know how horribly wrong an experiment can go and how quickly it can turn.

I was feeling pretty good about the Parabot and Bess when it all went bad. Something hit the floor, and it was loud—loud enough to make Nick, Aaron, and me jump. I had no idea that the EMF detector that was in Bess’ hand had left his hand, hit the floor, and slid down the hallway. All I knew was that something had hit the ground, and we all reacted.

It wasn’t until after we had finished with Bess and the Parabot and moved on to the final hour of the show to investigate an abandoned hospital that we got the bad news from the guys back at the nerve center: It appeared that Robert Bess had thrown the device. “Hey, Zak, listen, man,” Bruce said in my earpiece. “We reviewed the X-cam footage, the night vision footage, and the static footage from the robotic camera, and it really looks like the EMF detector was thrown.”

No way,
I thought. We were almost across the finish line, and this news stopped me in my tracks. Then Dave Schrader’s voice came across my earpiece: “Yeah, this looks really convincing that he threw it.” They asked if I wanted Dave to say something to the audience from the nerve center, and I agreed. I told them to have Dave word it in a way that made it seem suspect, and to suggest that it was not paranormal. Dave delivered the perfect NFL analogy when he said, “Was this intentional grounding?”

They then asked if I wanted to confront Bess about the incident. “Hell yes,” I said. Unfortunately, that meant cutting the last investigation short, because we were on live TV and had a time limit, but it was worth it to resolve the issue. We planned a final goodbye on camera with all of our guests, like Pat Sajak does on
Wheel of Fortune,
but they gave me an extra three minutes to confront Bess afterward. It was going to be uncomfortable, but my reputation—and that of everyone else who had worked on the show—was on the line. It had to be done publicly and immediately. I knew it was important to send a message to everyone that we have high standards for our investigations. I never condone behavior like that, and since I was in charge of the investigation, it was my responsibility to say something about it on the spot.

At the end of the show, I was interviewed by the host, Dean Haglund (the dude from
The X-Files
), and then I went up to Bess and asked him face-to-face what had happened. I told him that I hadn’t seen the video, but everyone was telling me that it looked like he had thrown the EMF detector. He denied it, but days later, when I reviewed the evidence, it seemed pretty clear that he had thrown the device.

This pissed me off back then and still pisses me off to this day. Robert Bess tarnished what was otherwise a great investigation. Forget that it was a live TV show and the production crew and Travel Channel executives were there; we brought Bess into our crew to do paranormal research, and he violated our trust, which disrespected us and everything we had worked for. It was disappointing, because so many people worked so hard to make it a great event, and everything else had gone off without a hitch.

I take personal responsibility for bringing Bess on the show and therefore anything he did as our guest, so as soon as I saw the video and knew that he’d thrown it, I was upset with myself. Even though 95 percent of the show went perfectly, I still felt like I’d let everyone down, but I also believe that I did the right thing in calling him out. If I hadn’t, then it would have made
Ghost Adventures
a party to the crime. In the end we turned a negative into a positive.

THAT’S WHEN THE MIGRAINE FINALLY HIT
.

Not every “haunted” place turns out to be a paranormal hotspot.

I hate letdowns, but some of the locations we investigate just don’t turn up any good evidence. Keep in mind that just because we don’t turn up any evidence during our investigation doesn’t mean that the place isn’t haunted or that there’s no activity there; it just means that we weren’t able to capture any on that particular night. Still, I consider it a personal failure, because it’s my job to entice the spirits to make contact with us. It’s my role to research what happened at a location and find out what makes the spirits trapped there want to be heard or seen, and then use that knowledge to bring them out. Otherwise I’m just a chump walking around in the dark asking silly questions.

The most disappointing location we’ve filmed for
Ghost Adventures
was probably the Gribble House Warehouse in Savannah, Georgia. The Excalibur nightclub in Chicago and the jail at Cripple Creek in Colorado were also disappointments, but the Gribble House Warehouse was the pits. There’s a fine line between a truly haunted location and a location that’s being sensationalized by a tour company, and I got a lesson in the two on that trip.

Now, I’m not saying for certain that this is the case at the Gribble House, but there was something fishy going on down south. A local tour company was touting the location as the “Gribble House Paranormal Experience,” which should have raised red flags in my mind. I’m not against companies teaching the public how to ghost hunt and leading them into certain areas to give them a true paranormal experience—I’m all for it, in fact, so I can’t speak negatively about the practice. But I do think it’s being sensationalized there.

The real Gribble House is gone. It was a private residence that was built in the early twentieth century, and three women were murdered there in 1909. The house was torn down in 1940, and now there’s just a warehouse where the Gribble House used to sit. It’s new and clean and didn’t feel anything like the places I’m used to investigating. Where the Gribble House once stood, supplies are now stored, and to me it felt like I was walking around a Sam’s Club. There are walls within the warehouse that separate a storage area, and the tour operator says that area is about the same square footage as the old Gribble House and claims that the company has detected a lot of paranormal activity there. Sorry, but I don’t buy it.

I think land has something to do with paranormal activity, but structures play a larger role in hauntings—walls, floors, ceilings, bricks, and mortar store more paranormal energy than the land itself does. Sacred Indian lands, burial grounds, mines, and tunnels can hold onto spiritual energy, but an open field where a house once stood is hard to believe as paranormal. Think about the Stone Tape Theory, which says that certain natural materials can store supercharged emotional events and play them back like a cassette tape under the right conditions (more on that in chapter 14, “Carrying Spirits”).

The Gribble House is gone, so none of the materials that were present during the murders are there anymore. Where the house once stood is just a spot in a warehouse. When we were there doing interviews, I felt like the people who lived and worked there were hamming it up for the cameras and their own tour group. It’s an interesting story, and I give them mad props for telling the tale of what happened there, but as far as hauntings go, I was not convinced then and am not convinced now.

During the Gribble House tour, people are given information that I believe feeds into their psyche and leads them to think that paranormal events are happening when they’re not. They’re told things like, “People in this room feel their neck being squeezed,” and, “Over here where the house was, we hear women screaming, and over here where the slave quarters were, African Americans feel uncomfortable.” When the tourists (who are not professional paranormal investigators) are told these things during a haunted tour they are taking to get a spook or a thrill, they’re going to experience those things whether they really happen or not. They’re being programmed to hear or feel them, and they think they do. It’s Mentalism 101.

When I was filming an episode of
Paranormal Challenge,
we did an experiment with the publisher of
Skeptic
magazine (who is not a believer…shocking). He took a couple of groups on the show around the Linda Vista Hospital and gave them different pieces of false information in the same rooms. He told the first group that in a particular room there was a spirit of an old man that liked to poke people in the head, and told another group that in the same room a young girl had died and would put her hand in your hand. Sure enough, someone in the first group felt a poke in the head, even though that “evidence” was patently false. It’s one way to show how the mind can be tricked or even programmed.

The Gribble House warehouse felt like this to me, and though it’s not necessarily fraudulent, it’s specious at best. Telling the story of what happened there in a fantastical way just establishes the conditions for people to have the experience you want them to have. That’s why professional paranormal investigators have to go into a location with a completely open mind and no preconceived notions. This isn’t the same as not doing research, though. We always research our locations, but we don’t let the research fool us into thinking that we’ve captured something paranormal when we really haven’t.

THAT WOULD RUIN OUR CREDIBILITY,
WHICH IS A CRITICAL PART OF OUR
STANDING IN THIS FIELD.

If you don’t do it right, then you’re just a scam artist.

Paranormal investigators are a lot more skeptical than you might think, but we focus our skepticism on ourselves rather than on the ghosts. We know they’re there, but that doesn’t mean every little bump in the night is paranormal unless it’s been thoroughly debunked and there is no other possible conclusion.
Debunking
is the act of proving something false, and it’s a critical part of every paranormal investigation. To be considered a professional paranormal investigator, you have to go the extra mile to debunk what may or may not be a piece of paranormal evidence. There’s so much skepticism surrounding the paranormal that every possible measure has to be taken to remove as many variables as possible and ensure the integrity of the evidence.