I am Haunted: Living Life Through the Dead (27 page)

Dave and I calmly pointed out how crazy this story sounded and how she should listen to what she was implying. Only the Holy Spirit can impregnate women without physical contact. I am not the Holy Spirit, and I was pretty sure that neither was her daughter. We again implored her to leave before the police came, and thankfully she did without resorting to violence, but I was on edge the whole time. Some people are good at hiding their intentions and will swing into unpredictability at a moment’s notice. I kept expecting her to do something rash, but thankfully she never did. I never saw those two again, but I’ll never look at a Big Mac the same way.

Unfortunately, the paranormal world attracts a lot of people like this. Though I suspect that every field of entertainment has its fair share of eccentrics, there seems to be a large concentration of bizzaro characters in the paranormal world. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I don’t know if it’s the subject of death or the spiritual side of life that attracts oddballs, but we seem to flock to it…myself included. I’m not normal and I never have been, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to get obsessed with me, like this next person did.

Dave Schrader used to host events through his Darkness Radio platform where he would invite 300 to 500 fans to spend three days at a haunted location with us and some of our friends in the paranormal profession, like Jeff Belanger and Mark and Debby Constantino. Anyone could come and greet us at a social get-together, listen to lectures on the paranormal, participate in a ghost hunt, and help raise money for charity. While it was a great time for everyone and 99 percent of the fans were great, there was always that 1 percent who were better suited to
America’s Most Wanted
than
Ghost Adventures.

A couple years ago we were doing one of these events at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado. The Stanley is a beautiful estate nestled in the mountains about two hours outside of Denver. It’s famous for being the hotel where Stephen King had a paranormal experience that inspired him to write
The Shining.
Though it’s definitely haunted, it’s not a very violent place, so it’s a perfect environment for bringing in fans with little or no paranormal experience. On the first night we did an auction to raise money for local charities. (That part isn’t relevant to the story. I’m just proud to say it.) I was passing through the hotel lobby after the auction when a woman stopped me and asked if she could show me a picture she had painted of me. I said sure, and I thought it was a really cool gesture—until she pulled out a painting of an empty room.

“Is this someplace I’ve investigated?” I asked.

“No. This is the room you’re going to die in,” she answered.

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah. This is the room you’re going to die in, of respiratory failure.”

It’s amazing how fast the human mind can switch from happiness to hellfire rage. I went off. I couldn’t help it. Something about this incident really incensed me, and I lost my mind. I yelled at her to get out of the building before Chris Fleming, who has a knack for getting between me and crazy fans, stepped in to calm me down. Some people think that I won’t stand up for myself—that because I’m a public figure, they can say what they want and I’ll just laugh it off because I don’t want to be seen losing my cool on TMZ, but they’re wrong. I’ll defend myself if I feel threatened, and I won’t care about the damage it causes until later. Part of me regrets blowing up at her, but another part of me doesn’t.

When this happened, I honestly wasn’t sure whether this woman was possessed by a demon that was trying to torture me. Chris got the same feeling, and I’ve learned to trust his instincts. It may explain why I got so mad so fast. I don’t know what Chris did to get rid of the woman, but I saw him a little while later, and he just said that he had resolved the situation, like some bad-ass sniper.

Okay, one more crazy fan story. I have a hundred of them. I’m not trying to ridicule anyone, but you just can’t make this stuff up, and there’s a point to it all eventually.

The scene was Scarefest 2013 in St. Louis. Scarefest draws a lot of people and is a great time, but because I’m an empath and a sensitive, it can also be a daunting adventure in sensory overload for me. When hundreds of people are standing in line to meet me, I can feel their emotions and energy, and it’s overwhelming. It’s like being in the middle of a loud, crowded rave with lights flashing and bass thumping. Your senses are assaulted from all sides, and there’s no way out. Just like a paranormal investigation, an event like Scarefest where I interact with hundreds of people is totally draining, and when it’s over I want to crawl into bed for a week or get lost in Red Rock Canyon.

I’ve always enjoyed Scarefest, though. It’s run well, and they go out of their way to make me feel comfortable and secure. In 2009 I had just filed a restraining order against the craziest fan of all time, who had threatened to show up at Scarefest and kill me. So the organizers made sure that I had two jolly green giants escorting me everywhere I went. It was overkill, but you never know when someone is going to follow through on a threat, and then everyone is left to say, “We should have seen it coming.” So I appreciate what they did for me.

At the 2013 show, I arrived early and went to check out my booth. I noticed that there was no security, and the VIP ticket holders were allowed to walk freely around the main floor before the show started. I was cool with that. But while I was setting up the booth, a strange woman approached and showed me a collection of photos of me in various places—photos I’d never seen before. She had pictures of me doing everyday things like getting juice at a health food store and hanging out with a friend. It was like a private investigator’s file or something.

“You better watch yourself,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I know someone who’s photographing your house in Vegas and your cars when the garage is open and every facet of your life.”

Like I was during the encounter with the woman who said that I was going to die of respiratory failure in the room she’d painted, I was instantly angry. This woman may have been mentally off, but I don’t tolerate this sort of stuff. I genuinely like to meet fans and hang out with the people who have made myself and the show popular, but not if it means putting up with threats or being bullied. I’m not taking time out of my life to interact with people who just want to harass me.

As you may have noticed, I have a short fuse. I don’t ever want to blow up and do something stupid that’s going to get me in trouble. I know this about myself, so I brought a friend with me to Scarefest who’s about 6'8" and 280 pounds. He told the woman to leave, and she did, but she continued to cause problems throughout the event. All weekend she spread rumors that people were watching me and I was doomed. It was disturbing, and I wasn’t happy about her having unrestricted access to me, so that was the last time I attended Scarefest. It’s unfortunate that one fan can ruin it for everyone else, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

Some people just don’t have any boundaries or filters and go out of their way to try to hurt you for whatever sick reason they’re harboring. I don’t want to get shot by a disgruntled stalker or, even worse, see a fan get caught in the crossfire when a stalker comes after me, so I stay in my house 90 percent more than I used to. But you know what? I asked for this life, so I have to deal with all the trappings that come with it.

In the end, anyone who has achieved a modicum of fame has to realize that you will never have a normal life again. You just have to suck it up and deal with it. I worked hard to get into the limelight, and now I have to deal with the unpleasantness that it brings into my life. The alternative is never to leave the house, which is almost where I am at this point. I used to get excited about meeting people and sharing stories and theories about the paranormal, but I’ve been crossed by so many people with an axe to grind that it’s made me jaded and gun-shy. I hate that, but it’s just the way things are now. We all make sacrifices to get what we want, and for me to make
Ghost Adventures
successful means that I don’t have any privacy. Ever.

UNLESS I’M IN MY DUNGEON.

Wrong place at the wrong time.

I hate flying for many reasons, but mostly because it does one very weird thing to me. Every time I fly I have to pee…a lot. Someone can just say the word
water
and I’m sprinting to the lavatory in mid-flight. I’m sure there’s some sort of medical name for it, like depressurized bladder syndrome, but the last thing I want to do is see a doctor about it. That’s a waste of healthcare dollars. I just suck it up and sit in the aisle seat so I can get there faster.

When I fly (which I do a lot), I usually have to pee six to eight times during a two-hour flight. And when I do get up and go to the lavatory, I can’t pee, even though I have to. So I stand there listening to the flight attendants do their thing just outside the lavatory, with nothing happening for me down below. Then I start imagining that there is no wall and I’m standing there with 200 people staring at me. And then I get scared that one of the doors will break open and I’ll get sucked out of the lavatory with my wiener hanging out, or maybe the suction of the toilet will pull me out of the plane. It’s like a whole new bag of crazy stage fright or social anxiety disorder. I hate it.

When I get back to my seat, eight times out of ten I hit my head on the overhead compartment, and it’s like Keystone Cops theater with the whole plane full of passengers watching me. It’s impossible to play it off when 200 bored people see you ram your forehead into a piece of plastic with a loud THUMP and laugh at your pain. So the bottom line is, I hate flying, especially when something goes wronger than wrong.

I was coming home to Vegas on Southwest Airlines after filming an episode. I was in the front row of the plane in the aisle seat so I could get to the lavatory quickly each and every time I took a drink of anything. It was just another flight, except for one thing…the flight attendant was gorgeous. I mean Danica Patrick hot. And on top of that, she was super nice to everyone. Like genuinely nice, and not in an “I’m being nice to you because I have to” kind of way. I don’t make snap judgments, and I sure wasn’t on a love quest, but I definitely had a little high-altitude crush going on.

We were getting ready to land, and once again I had to go to the bathroom. We were descending rapidly, so I knew that if I didn’t go right away, I’d be holding it for a long, painful spell. You know the deal: After landing, the plane has to taxi, and then we all wait until they bring out the jetway and open the doors, and by the time I get to a bathroom inside the airport, I’m probably standing in a pool of my own urine. No way that was going to happen, especially not in front of this perfect ten. I was going to go even if I had to barrel through a platoon of air marshals to get there. You’re not supposed to get up after the “Stay in your seats under penalty of death” light goes on, but I wasn’t having it. But if I had known then what I know now, I would have stayed put.

I got up, went to the lavatory, locked the door, and lifted up the toilet seat, and there he was: Mister Stankie. A big, nasty log of shit was clinging to the side of the toilet. I got a noseful of it and…oh dear God. I was nearly sick to my stomach and had absolutely no desire to pee anymore. I didn’t dare touch the flush button, because I assumed that whoever had the gall to lay down this redwood log of doom and not make sure that it got flushed probably didn’t wash his hands, either. I had one driving mission at that point: to get out fast. I turned and bolted with the toilet seat still up and the log still maintaining its death clutch to the side of the bowl. I should have tried to get rid of it so the next person wouldn’t have to see it, but I was too grossed out. It was self-preservation.

But as I came out of the lavatory, I looked down the aisle and saw the super-hot flight attendant walking toward me from the rear of the airplane. At first I didn’t care, but as I clicked my seat belt it hit me. She was heading toward the lavatory!

A million things flashed through my mind, none of them good. This was a really bad situation. She was going to come up there and check out the lavatory and think I laid down that log. She didn’t see how long I was in there. She didn’t know that I’d walked in and walked right back out again. She was going to think that I went in there and took a giant shit and didn’t flush. Panic set in. I grabbed the media control handle on my armrest and thought of all those silly video game combinations to unlock a secret move. Maybe left-left-up-down-spin-spin-kick would eject me from the social hell I was in, which only got deeper with each step she took.

The seconds ticked away like an eternity as she slowly made her way to the front of the plane. I was in the front row and had no seat to hide behind as she reached the front and started doing flight attendant things. I started sweating. I was moments away from a full-fledged panic attack. She put the trash in a bag and turned all the red switches on the control panels and did all the stuff they do to prep for landing. Maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe she wouldn’t…