Free Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew by Nick Groff, Jeff Belanger

sometimes.
    Sure, we’re three friends looking for ghosts. But being there is making us something more. This experience changes you. If you don’t accept the reality of ghosts, then why would you be out there looking in the first place? If you accept the possibility andstart to capture little bits of evidence, you change. You become aware that there’s more than the physical world around you. There’s energy everywhere. People aren’t just flesh and blood. Buildings aren’t just bricks and wood and paint. In these early shoots, I felt that change starting.
    At times I found myself nervous, or thrilled, and all kinds of other emotions. I was getting used to expressing those feelings as we were filming. We didn’t have a script or formula; we were just going into these haunted places to see what happened and what we could capture.
    What people don’t realize is that not all the locations we’ve investigated made it into the documentary. When we were staying in Tonopah, we met a woman who told us about a place called the Castle House being haunted. We were told that the previous owner of the building used to hold séances on the top floor in order to communicate with the spirits there. This woman told us how local construction workers were afraid to work there after seeing a ghostly figure inside. I filmed Zak on the phone in the hotel room calling Joni Eastley, the owner of the Castle House, to see if we could get in. Joni said she was okay with it. It felt like a lucky break.
    There’s a shot in our documentary where we’re looking out from our hotel balcony to the Castle House in the distance. In that sense, the building made the documentary. But when we investigated, not much happened.
    Joni was nice—we’d interviewed her for over an hour before we investigated the basement and other parts of the building. Then we went upstairs to what they called the séance room. What made this different from the other places we had investigated was that we took more of an emotional approach. Wewere willing to try to feel something instead of capturing it on our equipment. When we walked into the séance room, I smelled the strong scent of perfume. Aaron smelled it too. It was our first personal experience because we couldn’t figure out where the old-fashioned perfume smell was coming from.
    QUESTIONS FANS ASK
    Why do you think some spirits can be heard only on an audio recorder while others can be heard with our own ears?
    We think it has to do with energy. For a spirit to appear in front of you in a solid-looking form takes a great deal of energy. For a spirit to appear as a misty form takes less, a disembodied voice takes a little less, and projecting energy waves onto an audio recorder takes even less. It could be that we’re dealing with energy forces that aren’t strong enough at that moment to do anything more than leave us an EVP recording.
    The only problem was that, visually, that’s not interesting. The viewer would have to take our word for it that we were really smelling something, which is why nothing from the Castle House made it into the documentary. We figured we were too new to ask viewers to trust us. If our gear didn’t pick it up, if we didn’t capture something on audio or video, then we weren’t going to show it.
    We weren’t completely finished with the Castle House, though. In season five, when we investigated the Mizpah Hotel, we returned to the Castle House to see if the place was still active. We knocked, and Joni answered the door. She still remembered us after all these years.
    The idea was to finish something we’d started years earlier. That evening we conducted a short investigation of Castle House. We set up in Joni’s office, where she experienced the most paranormal activity. We aimed our thermal camera into the office from the kitchen; then we conducted an EVP session with Joni to try to make contact. After letting our recorders roll for a few minutes, we ended the session and