Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew Read Free Page B

and found him to be an instant kindred spirit. Like me, he attended film school and had a paranormal experience years earlier. By mid-2003 we were partners making high-end wedding videos, commercials, and video projects for Vegas acts like Penn and Teller, Siegfried and Roy, and Rita Rudner. Then one day he told me about his experience on a ghost hunting trip in Virginia City and the mining towns around it.
    Click.
    It was all clear to me. At that very moment I saw a way to combine my curiosity in the afterlife with my passion for filmmaking. Nick and I decided we would set out on a mission to document an apparition on film in the historic haunted mining towns of the area. But we knew two cameras weren’t enough. We needed a third, and it had to be cheap; someone willing to work for nothing, since that’s all we had. Nick threw out Aaron Goodwin’s name and we met him one night at The Road Runner in Las Vegas. It felt right. The three of us had good chemistry and we decided to go for it. But there was an obvious problem. We weren’t paranormal investigators. We were simply three curious guys armed with cameras and in our youthful exuberance, thought that was actually a good thing.
    A road trip through Nevada’s desolate mining country might not sound like fun, but I reveled in the moment. We drove to remote towns like Goldfield, Gold Hill, and Rhyolite, which turned out to be scarier than the filming. We started in the windswept town of Tonopah, where coyotes outnumber people. Our first paranormal investigation (which it could only loosely be called) was an old hotel called The Castle House. I swear the original owner invented the telegraph it was so old.
    The current owners clearly thought we were nuts when we unloaded bags of equipment and a Ouija board during the worst thunderstorm I’d ever seen. The lightning was so intense that I swore I was going to get struck and killed carrying a tripod. Not my preferred way to die. Inside the hotel was a macabre scene of playful horror. Over a hundred dolls were strewn about an upstairs room staring at us like a jury of weird. Things happened that evening that didn’t make it into the documentary. Doors opened and closed on their own as if someone was using them, aromas of perfume wafted through the air like scarlet women, and of course there was static electricity—enough to power Las Vegas for millennia it seemed.
    In Virginia City our quest morphed from fun adventure to deadly serious mission. The people of the desert were affectless, like walking puppets of the dead. We chalked their demeanors up to having daily ghostly experiences and left it at that. Being in Virginia City was like going back in time. I was told a prostitute had killed herself in the bathtub of our room at the Silver Queen Hotel, so to tempt fate I slept in it. Several times I heard water splashing around me from what we thought was a lady spirit who didn’t like people in her room. In the middle of the night, Nick and I heard knocking on the room’s door and saw a mist coming through it at the same time. We captured it on film and knew right then that our lives were about to change.
    But it was another event that changed our lives forever. At the Goldfield Hotel in Goldfield, Nevada, we felt a heavy force bidding us to leave. It was hard to move, like walking through a pool with ankle weights. Nick wasn’t himself. He was lethargic and moved in and out of coherence. In the basement of the hotel, we knew something otherworldly was present with us. Discarded bricks in a dark corner drew us in when suddenly one flew across the room in an arc that scared the living crap out of us. It was almost painful when it happened because it honestly felt like arrows shooting through our skin. The message was clear—“Get out of here!”
    We complied.
    I still wonder what would have happened if we had stayed. That event is one of the reasons I wanted to do this full-time and return to get answers someday (we