I am Haunted: Living Life Through the Dead (5 page)

So I kept
Inside Edition
on the porch and did an interview with them there, and right away I wasn’t feeling well. Not myself at all. I didn’t know if I was sick, tired, or what, but I was foggy and unable to concentrate. It felt like everyone was speaking in slow motion. I didn’t want to be there, but I kept telling myself to be professional and fight through it. You can Google that interview and see how out of it I was. Later, the crew told me that I was different every time we went to that place. Even if we were just putting in a smoke detector or walking around, I seemed to get meaner and more short-tempered. I’ve been around a lot of bad energy and I’ve fought with a few nasty demons, but this place was different—so much that it actually made me stop filming for a while.

One day we were troubleshooting a camera system. No filming was going on except for the surveillance cameras, when I suddenly went off on a crew member for no reason. I was shouting at him, and things got physical. This man weighs 200 pounds, and I picked him up and pinned him against a wall, something I’m not sure I could do on my own. Later he said that I seemed to have superhuman strength and didn’t look like myself when it happened.

So many things have happened to people in that house—workers removing mold, plumbers, the building inspector, everyone has some type of experience while they’re there or after they leave. Strange things even happened to people I interviewed for the documentary after they left the house.

To be honest, I feared for my life a few times there. Something kept telling me that I had to do this, but I don’t want to sustain permanent damage. There’s something about the house that I’ve connected with, for better or worse. After I pinned that guy up against the wall, I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to leave. I remember being at the front door looking back inside and seeing a tall, dark figure standing at the threshold of the kitchen leading down to the basement—the same type of figure the police officers saw. This is beyond anything I’d ever witnessed before. This is beyond the power of human spirits. This house may not be a portal to hell, but it’s a portal to something that is powerful and evil.

At that point, I don’t think I realized what I had gotten myself into. For most investigations, I can show up, do my job, come into contact with human spirits, go home, have a lockdown hangover for a day or two, and I’m fine. This place is different. It’s indescribable. Something in this house is aware of me and uses me. An incident that occurred a few weeks later confirmed this belief.

A woman who claims to have lived in the house in the 1980s saw me on the news and reached out to my producers. After we validated that she had in fact lived there as a teen, we agreed to meet her at the house. She wanted to go inside, but I was hesitant. It was an open investigation where bad things had happened to children, and this woman had her family with her. It was dangerous, but she was insistent. She had lived there for many years, so finally I caved, and we all went in together. At first it seemed harmless. She showed me which room was hers, and we spent some time talking about what it had been like to live there. She even revealed that she’d had nightmares as a kid, and when she had a specific nightmare, someone she knew would die the next day. I honestly wasn’t surprised given how evil this place is.

Then we headed downstairs to the basement, but as we moved through it, something happened to the woman’s leg, like something hit her or a dog bit it. She said, “Ow!” and turned to her son to yell at him, but he was ten feet away and had nothing to do with it. She was angry. “Why the hell did you do that?” she spat. It was a strange moment, and she immediately went upstairs and left the house. The visit pretty much ended right there.

Days later, she called to say that her daughter was possessed and hadn’t been the same since being in the house. Apparently her daughter tried to kill herself and her mom just a few days after I met them, an act that was totally unlike her. Even worse was that she called me from the ER in Indianapolis, where her daughter was still being treated for a suicide attempt.

This was it for me—a punch in the gut, a slap in the face, and a kick in the crotch all at once. I was in deep. Really deep. I’d bought a portal to hell that had some sort of guard dog demon prowling around it, and it shook my self-confidence. It’s like deciding to hang out with a bad crowd and seeing them do bad things and knowing you don’t belong there. Your first instinct is to look for a way out.

But then I remembered that I was stronger than that. I had to be there. I had to do this. I had to see what was going on in this house and document it. I felt responsible for allowing these innocent people into the house, and I’ll never be able to take that back, but I could make it right, too. I could fight the darkness that had set up this awful situation. It was the demon’s will. It persuaded me to let a new family into the house so that it could do damage to them, and I wasn’t strong enough to stop it. Well, that won’t happen again. I bought this portal to hell, and it’s too late to get my money back, so I’m all in. There are no refunds when it comes to fighting evil.

But the challenges are constant. Around this time I discovered that Father Mike had signed a contract with another producer (just four days after signing one with me), and it hit the media immediately. So I called him and reminded him that he had signed an exclusive agreement with me, and that exclusivity was implicitly outlined. He said that he wanted to do a documentary with me and a Hollywood feature film with the other guy, and he didn’t see a problem with doing both. I explained that he couldn’t. There’s more legal information that I can’t write about, but the point is that he signed a contract to be a part of my movie and also wanted to be part of a separate movie, which was a violation of my contract.

Father Mike and I had a good talk, but suddenly I got a call from that other producer while I was at the house. He immediately said that I’d better watch it because I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, which I took as a threat. He belittled me over and over again on the phone and tried to bully me to get me out of the picture. He kept throwing out the amount of money that his movie had made to make me feel small, but it had the opposite effect. I hung up the phone and dug my heels in for a fight. Money changes people, and I can say that with the benefit of experience on my side. This guy threw his money around like it was morals and he was a better person than me because he had more. That logic doesn’t work. That’s like saying the sun revolves around the Earth. I suddenly felt like I was in a different movie, where I was the protagonist trying to tell the story while a big-money antagonist tried to stop me. I wasn’t flinching.

You have to be extremely dedicated to your story as a documentary filmmaker. You have to be constantly aware of new developments. You have to learn how to pursue those developments and find an ending that helps explain or expands on the original story. It’s those different canals that lead off of the main river that add interest and credibility instead of telling the same story that everyone’s already heard. You run into obstacles and barriers, and you have to get through them to get what you want. When you do, you gain respect as a filmmaker. Not everyone has the tenacity to make a great film.

The barriers that have been thrown in front of me since I bought the Demon House have been incredible. I feel like an Amazon explorer trapping a new, unknown spider that everyone wants to see, but I can’t let them see it until I know what it can do.
Inside Edition
pressured me over and over again to get inside the house because they wanted to be the first to take cameras in. But I’d just witnessed something extraordinary, and since I owned the house, I knew I’d be putting their camera crew in jeopardy if I let them in.

As I write this book, I’m midway through filming my documentary about the house. There are so many more things that have happened that I want to talk about, and so many more details that I’d like to share, but it’s complex…and dangerous.

LOOK FOR THE DEMON HOUSE MOVIE
TO COME OUT IN 2015.

Getting away is a necessity.

In the days leading up to a lockdown, we do a lot of preparation and talk to a lot of people. When we filmed in Pioche, Nevada, I spoke with a few old-timers who lived there and found each of their stories to be similar to mine. One used to live in Las Vegas and had escaped to this old mining town because life was simpler there, and another was slowly being overtaken by disease and wanted to spend the rest of his days away from the noise of society. At times like these, I find myself face-to-face with who I may become when the time is right.

There are only a couple hundred people living in Pioche today. It’s one of those communities where everyone gathers around a grill and the old fire truck drives in with Santa riding high atop it for the kids at Christmas. It’s those simple pleasures of life that I pine for, preserved in Norman Rockwell style in these little towns that time has turned a blind eye to.

I’m not saying that Pioche is a perfect, idyllic place, but it is far less noisy and pretentious than mainstream America, and I always seem to be drawn to these types of towns. People who live in towns like these don’t obsess over Bieber and the Kardashians, and the local press is more concerned with relevant civic issues than with worshipping pop stars and socialites.

This day and age makes me sick sometimes. It’s disgusting and selfish in so many ways that it drives me to separate from it. That’s one reason I love traveling: It gives me the chance to escape into these nooks and crannies of space and time. But my experience is always a little different from everyone else’s. Being a sensitive and an empath, I’m not just visiting an old town looking at rundown buildings; I can actually feel the spirits and their energy. If you put a blindfold on me, put me in a van, and drop me off in a town like Pioche, I can instantly feel that I’m in a different time. It’s a therapeutic escape that I miss after the shoot is over and I’m back in loud, neon Vegas. Traveling to these places off the beaten path is my privilege and my sanctuary. I’m definitely a guy who prefers the road less traveled.

This temporary release from the noise of society is one reason I keep making
Ghost Adventures.
It’s a serene island in an ocean of chaos. Everyone wishes they could go back in time and feel what it was like to live in a different world—at least temporarily. We all enjoy the comforts of modern life, like medicine, transportation, electricity, and running water, and I have to admit that I’m no different.

Some of my favorite spots to film are old Wild West mining towns in the desert. I’ve been all over Nevada and the Southwest and have swallowed more than my fair share of dust. But the more desolate a place is, the more I enjoy it. Bannack Ghost Town in Montana is beautiful. Historic old towns like Gettysburg are insanely cool to me as well. I love a location with a good story, and the Colonial East Coast has a ton of stories to tell. On set, I’m no longer in 2014; I’m in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. I wear my cowboy hat and boots or whatever the location calls for, and for three days I’m truly free. I’m not famous or successful, just a guy doing his job, and at times I wish I could stay there. In these ghost towns, I’ll sit in an old rocking chair and observe the people who live there. Many look like they’ve been through hell but are peacefully riding out the rest of their days in solitude. Some days I want that for myself, too.

On the flip side, I also need an element of adventure, in case I get a little bored. The murders, suicides, abductions, scandals, and mysteries that built these towns are spellbinding to me. I’ve always found the dead more interesting than the living because they have more secrets to discover. I can talk to a living person today and learn their secrets pretty quickly, but the dead are tough nuts to crack. They lived in a different time with different lifestyles and even different speech. We sometimes think of them as rudimentary or simple people, but really they weren’t. They had the same problems we do, but different ways of dealing with them. That’s intriguing to me.

When I travel to these towns, there are always mysteries to unravel. I can go back in time and pick up a cold case murder and try to ask the victim what happened. Communicating with spirits from the past is a true adventure. I get to meet the people of that era and area and see how different they were. Some say that the people create the environment, but after all my travels, I think it’s the other way around—the environment shapes the people. Those who live in a dirty place tend to be meaner, less trustworthy, and more violent. People who are brought up in a nicer place are likely to have better manners and care more about helping others. This is a generalization, of course, but I’ve observed a lot of people and find it to be true a lot of the time.

Many people are stuck in a bad environment or situation that they can’t get away from. I was stuck in Detroit for years and kept telling myself that if I just made a little more money, I could leave. It was a miserable time because I never found my place there. There was no purpose to any of the jobs I held. I would go home and then go through the same meaningless stuff again the next day. I had no impact on people. There was no adventure. I wasn’t dissecting life to uncover its mysteries. That’s how I wanted to live, but I wasn’t sure how to accomplish it.