Ghost Adventures is a weekly American paranormal television series that premiered on October 17, 2008 on the Travel Channel. Currently produced by MY-Tupelo Entertainment (a merger of MY Entertainment and Tupelo-Honey Productions),[1] the program follows and stars ghost hunters Zak Bagans, Nick Groff, and Aaron Goodwin, as they investigate locations that are reported to be haunted. Hosted and narrated by Bagans, the show initially airs new episodes on Fridays at 9 p.m. Eastern Time on the Travel Channel. The tagline of the series is: "Can you handle the lockdown?"
Self-considered "raw" and "extreme," the program originally began as an independent documentary television film, which was filmed by the crew in 2004 and produced by 4Reel Productions in 2006. The Sci-Fi Channel first presented 4Reel's Ghost Adventures on July 25, 2007. The documentary centers on the trio's investigation of alleged paranormal activity in and around Virginia City, Nevada, which the crew returned to on the third season of the series,[2] and in Goldfield, Nevada in which the crew returned to in order to finish their lockdown at the Goldfield Hotel.
SUMMARY
Bagans, Groff, and Goodwin investigate reportedly haunted locations mostly in the United States, hoping to collect visual or auditory evidence of paranormal activity. Each episode begins with the trio touring the investigation site with its owners or caretakers. These introductions typically include Bagan's voice-overs of the "dark" histories of the places and interviews with people who claim to have witnessed paranormal phenomena at the location. The crew places X's with black or gray tape at the sites of alleged activity and later returns to set static night-vision cameras on these "hotspots."
After completing the walkthrough, the three men plan their strategy and then are "locked down" into the location by themselves ("to prevent any kind of audio contamination"[) for an overnight ("from dusk until dawn") investigation. During the "lockdown," they use a variety of equipment, including digital thermometers, EMF meters, handheld digital video cameras, digital audio recorders, and infrared night-vision cameras in an effort to document evidence to support paranormal events. On some investigations, the members follow provocative techniques, such as using "trigger objects" and aggressive language, in an attempt to increase their chances of capturing such phenomena. At the end of some episodes, the investigators analyze their audio, photos, and video footage (often with the assistance of "paranormal experts") and present any unexplained phenomena that were captured.
Throughout the series, the crew claims to have captured and experienced various anomalous phenomena, some of which occurred almost simultaneously: equipment malfunction, like battery drainage; EMF spikes, or fluctuations in electromagnetic fields; sudden changes in temperature (increase, decrease, or both); unexplained noises; electronic voice phenomena (EVPs); apparitions, shadow people, mists, and orbs; physical contact and harm; moving objects; spirit possessions; and other phenomena, like responses in an Ovilus and drainage of an EM Pump.
So far, the investigators believe to have experienced and filmed three apparent possessions. Bagans believes that he was possessed twice: first at the Preston School of Industry and second at Poveglia. Groff, who admitted that he had never believed in possessions, now claims that he was possessed once at the Moon River Brewing Company.
CREW CAST
Zak Bagans
Zachary Alexander "Zak" Bagans (born on April 5, 1977, in Washington, D.C) is the lead investigator and host of the series. Formerly working as a wedding DJ and sporting membership in the American Society of Freemasons, he is also an executive producer and editor of the show. As of September 2010, GAC's membership consists of over 730 paranormal organizations. He currently resides in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Being a former skeptic himself, Bagans says that his passion for investigating the paranormal resulted from a face-to-face encounter with the spirit of a suicidal woman who haunted his old apartment building in Trenton, Michigan in 2002. Afterward, his life-changing experience caused him to actively pursue capturing video evidence of the afterlife. In the introduction of each episode, Bagans states:
"My name is Zak Bagans. I never believed in ghosts until I came face to face with one. So I set out on a quest to capture what I once saw onto video. With no big camera crews following us around, I am joined only by my fellow investigator Nick Groff and our equipment tech Aaron Goodwin. The three of us will travel to some of the most highly active paranormal locations, where we will spend an entire night, being locked down from dusk until dawn. Raw; extreme; these are our Ghost Adventures."
Using a self-described religious, scientific, and emotional approach, Bagans is known and criticized for his aggressive and confrontational methods used during investigations; however, he maintains that he respects the afterlife and only provokes evil entities in order to elicit responses. In a June 2009 interview with the Paranormal Underground magazine, he stated, "I don't want the public perceiving us as the taunting, provocative ghost hunters. We do that only to the bad spirits who we know are attacking the living."Bagans also mentions this concept in various interviews and episodes throughout the series.
In season 3, Bagans summarized his greatest fears while climbing an aged staircase inside a shot tower at the Remington Arms factory: "Heights, snakes, freakish dolls, and clowns... those are on Zak's top four I-don't-like list."Zak encountered situations involving these fears in the episodes at Sloss Furnaces, Idaho State Penitentiary, and the Riddle House, respectively.
In a 2010 special, Bagans said his "scariest moments" (at his top three creepiest places he listed in a 2009 interview) include feeling a "burning" sensation on his back while being scratched by a demonic entity in the basement at Bobby Mackey's Music World, being partially possessed by a spirit at the Preston School of Industry,[17][18] and being overwhelmed by "some dark energy" while on Poveglia Island.
Nick Groff
Nick Jesse Groff (born on April 19, 1980, in San Jose, California) is a co-investigator and cameraman on the series. He is also an executive producer and editor of the show. Groff is also the co-founder of the GAC. He and his wife, and baby daughter Annabelle currently reside in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Groff's family moved to Nashua, New Hampshire when he was 1. He spent the early years of his childhood in Nashua before his family moved to Salem, New Hampshire, and then later to Pelham.
Groff's fascination and curiosity of the paranormal began since childhood, during which he had experienced phenomena that he could not explain. When he was 8, he saw a figure on an old cul-de-sac on Lancaster Road in Salem, New Hampshire. After graduating from Pelham High School, Groff studied film at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Following college, Groff became a ghost hunter. After Groff met and befriended Bagans during Groff's wedding in Las Vegas, the two partnered with mutual interests to investigate the paranormal. Recently, Groff and his wife had a baby girl named Annabelle Groff.
One of Groff's most life-changing experiences was being apparently possessed by an entity at the Moon River Brewing Company in Savannah, Georgia. Another such experience, which startled him, was an alleged face-to-face encounter with a female spirit at the Linda Vista Community Hospital in Los Angeles, California.
