- For DVD, see Ghost Adventures: The Original Documentary (DVD).
Ghost Adventures: The Original Documentary (also known as Ghost Adventures: The Beginning and Ghost Adventures Documentary or simply Ghost Adventures) is an award-winning documentary Made for TV film starring paranormal investigators Zak Bagans, Nick Groff, and Aaron Goodwin, first aired on Syfy on July 25, 2007 and is the precursor to the full Ghost Adventures television series. Focusing on the haunted locales of Virginia City, Nevada, it documents the height of Zak's originally planned three-week ghost-hunting expedition amongst Nevada's rural mining towns, and his subsequent investigation of the Goldfield Hotel. The film received several awards, including the 2006 Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival (NYIIFVF).
Synopsis[]
Zak Bagans had the existence of ghosts proven to him while he was living in an old apartment building in Trenton, Michigan during 2003. Every night at 3:00 AM, he was awoken by the sound of a woman calling his name "Zak", and on the sixth night, he felt someone on his back, briefly rendering him unable to move. When he got up, he saw a figure shoot across his bed, so he ran outside into the parking lot. Zak would leave the apartment at a later date, but he would come back later to find a maintenance man renovating that apartment room. The man explains that before that haunting began, there was a lady up in a penthouse across a road who had committed suicide in the bathtub around 3:00 AM.
His experience with a ghost gave Zak a desire to prove his claim of the existence of ghosts, so a year later, Zak was to set out from Las Vegas, Nevada on a three-week ghost hunting expedition across historic mining towns within Nevada to make a documentary called "Ghost Adventures", and he would be accompanied by two other men: fellow paranormal investigator Nick Groff and equipment technician Aaron Goodwin. However, for the first fourteen days of their expedition, all they captured were some small unexplained lights and sounds, and Nick and Aaron's patience and interest were beginning to wear thin. But then they entered Virginia City, Nevada, reportedly one of the most haunted cities in the U.S., and nothing could prepare them for what would transpire.
Virginia City[]
The team's first stop is the Silver Queen Hotel, haunted by the aggressive ghost of a prostitute who committed suicide in Room 11 by slitting her wrists in the bathtub, and Zak books that room because the ghost is said to have prompted people staying in Room 11 to leave in the middle of the night. The hotel's manager Darlene Dommond falsely claims to other visitors that the ghost is very friendly, to Zak's frustration; Dommond told Zak over the phone how this was not a friendly entity at all. A photograph showing blue ectoplasm in the bar is shown to the team.
Zak's group begins their investigation; while Zak sleeps in Room 11's bathtub, Nick on the bed, and Aaron outside in their van. At 4:00 AM Zak reports to his camera that he is hearing what sounds like the tub filling up with water, even though the faucet was clearly turned off and there was a loud banging noise on the wall next to the tub. Zak falls back asleep soon afterward, but Nick would later be awakened by unexplained noises at the foot of his bed. He focuses the camera in the sound's direction toward the room's door, and records a slight, unexplained mist in front of the closed-door forming and disappearing briefly, accompanied by a slight knocking sound comprised of three rapid subsequent taps
The next day, while walking along the town's boardwalk, the group interviews Joyce Cole, a direct descendant of the notorious "Donner party". While she was working in various stores in the area, when she would tell customers stories about a sheriff in the past who would flat out shoot and torture his prisoners, cigar smoke would appear and follow around her, which would cause some customers to leave scared. She also talks about other experiences she had in a couple of stores she worked in, including being tapped on the shoulder when no one was there. Joyce says that pretty much all of Virginia City is haunted.
Zak's team arrives at the Gold Hill Hotel in Gold Hill, Nevada to check-in and talk with the hotel manager Mandy about the nearby Miners' Cabin they would be staying the night in, near a mine shaft named the Yellow Jacket Mine, reputedly one of the more haunted places around. Mandy relates how people say the ghosts of miners are still trying to mine in there because of the digging sounds they hear at times. Over 125 years before in 1873, thirty-eight unnamed miners died at the mine when the mine caught fire and are said to haunt both the mine and the cabin. Zak's team arrives at the Miners' Cabin, the cabin which was used as a changing room and an overnight bunkhouse by all the miners; while standing outside the cabin, they hear and record an unexplained, metallic screeching noise emanating from the mine shaft in the distance.
In the Miner's Cabin, Zak, Nick, and Aaron gather, and Aaron leaves a tape recorder on a bed that is set to record for an hour after the three leave for their night of investigations: First, they will go to a haunted club in Virginia City named the Old Washoe Club, then investigate the Virginia City Cemetery at night, before returning to the Miner's Cabin to spend the rest of the night.
The Old Washoe Club has long been the site of serious activity and problems, with angry spirits constantly disturbing customers at the building's downstairs bar, and countless eyewitnesses have seen the apparition of a woman floating down an infamous spiral staircase. The old crypt underneath the building was used to stack and store dead bodies that resulted from disease and mining accidents in the late 1800's and is now used as a storage room for the bar; staff frequently report things being thrown in here.
The second and third floors are not open to the public; the second-floor ballroom, in particular, has been the site of so much activity that a psychic that was hired to walk through there to communicate with the bothersome spirits claimed to come into contact with a very evil spirit and declared she would never return there again. The third floor was the location of an underworld-like club called the Millionaire's Club, a dark world of liquor, gambling, and prostitutes in the late 1800's that was the site of several rapes and murders. The ghosts in the Old Washoe Club are assumed to be among the victims of the third floor and the corpses that were stacked in the crypt.
With the second and third floors fully secured for their investigation, Zak and Aaron would begin by sitting in one nondescript room with night-vision camera and digital recorder running, while Nick would go investigate the entire building himself with his own equipment. Immediately, Aaron takes some pictures that capture several transparent orbs. On a couple of occasions, both Zak and Aaron think they hear a noise, and Aaron soon reports feeling quite cold while Zak feels hot even though they're right next to each other. They also think they see a light anomaly somewhere out the window they are camped next to.
Nick passes through the second-floor ballroom on one of his EVP sweeps with a digital recorder, with an infrared camera videotaping him leaving the room through the right exit. What the camera would record next would gain infamy: extremely clear footage of a full-bodied apparition, a transparent, misty human-like figure walking across the room, following Nick out of the room no more than thirty feet behind him. Proving that the footage is showing an actual apparition is the fact that the vaporous being crosses a window where light from a building outside is visible to the camera, and that the light slightly dims to the camera when the figure's head passes in front of it.
With none of the three investigators aware of what was just captured on camera, Zak and Aaron start searching for Nick through the club. As they go through a narrow hallway near the ballroom, both of them suddenly experience unnerving feelings and sensations, with Aaron feeling very hot and Zak feeling very cold, and the hair on their arms visibly stand up as if some electrical field passed through them and is now standing underneath a noose hanging above their heads. Soon afterward, they rejoin Nick and end their investigation.
Reviewing their startling footage at a later date, they conclude that a spirit was using their bodies' energy to manifest itself into a full-bodied apparition that could be seen with the infrared camera, and that this figure actually walked through Zak and Nick in that hallway shortly afterward.
Before the team came to Virginia City, Zak had made a call to the sheriff's office to obtain permission to film at the city's cemetery, and one Monique had allowed them to check in when they got there. Having just received the key to the cemetery from the Sheriff's office, Zak's group arrives at the cemetery at 10:30 PM. They were told that the gates of Virginia City Cemetery are kept locked for a reason: people come from all over trying to catch a glimpse of what the cemetery is infamous for, which are alleged anomalous balls of light known as "cemetery lights" that float above the gravestones. They are believed to be unrested spirits still attached to their bodies.
The previous night, Zak meets a Virginia city local and psychic who requested to remain anonymous. She had informed Zak that in the late 1800's, there was an undertaker who would lure people into a gas chamber vault underneath a monument at the top of a certain hill in the cemetery, east of a monument named the Knights of Pythias, pretending that there was gas lighting in there but ultimately murdering them via gas. For example, he lured a reporter and his friend into the chamber, locked them inside, and opened the chamber up later to find their dead bodies. These murdered souls are believed to be a part of the paranormal activity of the cemetery.
With their cameras rolling, Zak, Nick, and Aaron would soon not only see a spherical cemetery light hovering in the far distance, but record it on their cameras - they would be informed later that they were the first to have captured these lights on film and photograph. After watching the light remain stationary for a moment, and then disappear, they head over to the position of what they saw to find a few isolated tombstones. Trying to figure out what they saw, they try an EVP sweep for several minutes, then head off. Ten minutes after they saw the cemetery light, they see another glowing light in the distance, and Aaron snaps a digital still image that captures a clearly defined, glowing orange/red wispy shape hovering above the ground moments before it vanishes into thin air. Like before, they immediately go over to where they saw the anomaly and find the burial site of an Indian with no other graves within one hundred yards of it and try another EVP sweep.
Having had two encounters and evidence captures of the cemetery light phenomenon, Zak's team has no other sightings of the unexplained glows, so they eventually sit against the wall of the monument at the top of the hill where the old caretaker's vault remains entombed, with a camera recording them. After sitting around, they note they hear the odd sound of someone faintly crying, and very shortly after, Zak suddenly feels something invisible pull back on his left shoulder with extreme pressure. Shocked and frightened, Zak bolts up, and all three men seize the energy of the moment to run through the cemetery and come straight back to their van outside. If this was a spirit conveying that they were not welcome, Zak and his friends certainly granted their message.
Zak and Co. drive back to the Miners' Cabin from their investigation of the cemetery, as per their schedule. They are startled to find a strange man wandering around the premises of the cabin at night, attempting to capture paranormal activity on his own in the area. The man relates he had caught an orb up by the mine shaft, and while Zak discusses the alleged phenomena associated with the mine cabin and how that has caused people staying here to leave in the middle of the night, the man relates the story that there was previously another group filming at this place for paranormal activity. The producer of that group had left during the middle of the night, and as she had later alleged, as she was pulling out in her car, she looked over her shoulder and saw malevolent-looking orange energy approaching the car from behind. It seems to Zak and Co. that other paranormal investigators have been attracted to the Miners' Cabin because of its ghosts.
Zak and his crew come back inside the Miners' Cabin, noting that it now suddenly feels wrong inside, with one particular room feeling very hot as soon as they walk in. With the events that had occurred in the cemetery still fresh in their minds, Zak & Co. would have their sense of anxiety rise once again: Zak goes to review the one hour of audio footage from the audio recorder Aaron left running on the bed as they left for their expedition earlier, and is shocked to hear that rather than the one straight hour of dead silence that should have been recorded, at one particular incident is a brief, growling, almost demonic mumble. Listening to this voice over and over again causes them to gather that it is a spirit asking "Is it the Devil?"
This incident really frightens Aaron, because he is very religious and was the one who had physically placed the tape recorder on the bed in the back room. He expresses that he does not want to investigate this place anymore, but Zak gives him a pep talk, saying that finding spirits is precisely what they're here for and that he will make sure Aaron does not back down for the rest of the night. They note that this is the first time they have ever been to a location and have been scared to do an investigation, but they successfully force Aaron to stay with them in the Miners' Cabin for the rest of the night. Zak and Nick decide to conclude their night by trying to contact whoever or whatever was captured on the tape recorder, by using an Ouija Board - a stupid idea in Aaron's opinion - but they have no luck trying to contact any spirit.
They proceed to crash for the night, leaving an infrared camera shooting the back room and rolling for the rest of the night. At 4:18 AM, the camera's audio records an odd sound that is difficult to describe - a blend of a breath, a yell, and a scraping sound all in one, and shortly after, a breathy voice is heard clearly whispering the words, "Who are you?"
The next morning, Zak & Co. pack up and leave Virginia City, and begin their eight-hour drive back to Las Vegas. The three are left in a speechless daze replaying the events of the previous night. For Zak and Nick, this was like an adrenaline rush, while for Aaron and doubtless many others, in theory, this would be too much to handle.
Zak creates the first half of his Ghost Adventures documentary and has it aired, leading to him and the other two receiving some interviews with various news anchors and the publicizing of their apparition clip. Then, the three take their clip to a professional video analyst, Slim Ritchie, to have its authenticity professionally verified. Ritchie's analysis concludes that there was no altering or tampering of the original footage at all. Greenspun Media's Las Vegas Weekly magazine would publish a review of Ghost Adventures in their February 2006 issue. On page 35, outspoken film critic Josh Bell quotes Zak & Co.'s evidence as "proves the most convincing of the supernatural."
After the airing of Zak's footage from the Old Washoe Club, the owner of one of the most haunted and secured locations in the world contacts them; it isn't over yet.Goldfield Hotel[]
From its countless documentation, articles, and media attention, the Goldfield Hotel stands in a class of its own among haunted locations, and is notorious as one of the most haunted locations in the world. There have been several attempts to renovate it, but the ghosts that occupy it won't let that happen, so it sits abandoned in Goldfield, Nevada. Aaron could not make this trip, so Zak and Nick go to the Goldfield Hotel by themselves, where their plan is to have themselves be padlocked in it for an entire night, without any electricity or light whatsoever. Psychics all over the world claim that the seventh portal or gateway to Hell is located in the basement of this building because of its geographic ley lines.
Zak meets with the modern-day owner of the Goldfield Hotel property that contacted them, Edgar "Red" Roberts, who has agreed to be the one to padlock them inside the hotel for the night and then release them from the property later in the next morning. Roberts shows the two around the deserted property, where he shows that among the reasons this is considered one of the top ten spookiest places in the world are doors that lead to nowhere. It will be a full moon on the night of their investigation, which is likely to be a boon to them in that it may cause more spirits to manifest. Roberts shows them one particular second-floor hallway, where he describes there are alleged sightings of the ghost of a gunslinger that partially shows itself around the left corner at the end of the hallway and then sinks back.
The Goldfield Hotel was the subject of a 2001 documentary named "Scariest Places on Earth". Zak finds a Goldfield area local who knows of the hotel's hauntings as well as one incident that happened during filming: a camera operator had her camera lift out of her hands by an invisible force, leaving marks on her arms and leaving her with emotional trauma. The local is personally most disconcerted about the orbs that appear in the hotel in photographs and other venues; he has a son that was killed in an unrelated accident, and at the sites of both the accident and the monument, similar orbs can be seen in photographs in those areas. Zak and Nick find other Goldfield locals with credible information, including one old individual that gives off a strange and awkward presence. In the past, he had taken various officials through hotels, including a camera nut that would end up becoming the governor of the state later, and that official reported his camera wouldn't work in Room 109 in particular.
Roberts brings the two men to the residence of the elderly Virginia Ridgeway, who was a caretaker of the Goldfield Hotel sixty years ago. Over the seventeen years, she had been custodian, she had experienced countless episodes of paranormal activity, including hearing voices, seeing apparitions, and experiencing poltergeists. They come to Ridgeway's house and notify her of Zak and Nick's planned lockdown in the hotel, and she approves of their audacity and gets dressed so that she can help tour them around the Goldfield Hotel. She tells that the last paying guest at the hotel was in World War II.
At Room 109, everyone notes particularly strong cold chills, and Ridgeway explains that she has had psychics from all over the world come in here, and they have always reported the same thing without Ridgeway telling them about the room's history in advance; long ago, before the room was remodeled, there was a pipe leading down one section of the wall connecting to a radiator, to which a woman named Elizabeth had once been chained. In a different room with windows, in response to there being so much paranormal disturbance, Ridgeway had brought two of her friends to perform a ritual in an attempt to get rid of the ghosts - the sort of procession where one uses sea salt and holy water to draw a pentagram on the ground - and while standing near a wall, she was picked up under the arms by an invisible force and slammed against that wall roughly an amazing five feet off the ground.
Continuing her tour, Ridgeway brings them down to the basement level. Connecting this basement level is an underground tunnel that leads under and across the street outside the Goldfield Hotel to a small, nondescript building a fair distance away from the property. This was a house of prostitution, and in the past, the men who were the only ones allowed down in the basement of the hotel - men using the showers, as well as the managers of a barbershop situated down there - would use this tunnel to go to the house of prostitution and then come back to their unwitting wives in the hotel itself. Previously, Ridgeway had brought two other men who were paranormal investigators to the basement tunnel during the night, all three of the flashlights held by Ridgeway and the two investigators went dead, and they were left in the cold, pitch darkness of the tunnel without even so much as a match. Ridgeway had to have the two men hold onto her as they retraced their way through the darkness back to the hotel basement and then the hotel's front entrance on its first floor. Ridgeway offered to go to the nearby Glory Hole to purchase some new batteries so that they could resume their investigation, but the two investigators turned her down, left Goldfield Hotel, and never returned.
Zak and Nick's tour lead them up a set of stairwells up a floor, during which Ridgeway explains that more often than not, people exploring this property on psychic tours and going down these stairs would be pushed down the stairs by an invisible force - Ridgeway herself had once been pushed from behind her right shoulder. Their tour concludes as they pass by one room Ridgeway calls the "psychic room", alleging it to be effectively a gateway to other worlds, and Ridgeway also instructs them to watch for a smoke while on their investigation. After hearing all these stories from Ridgeway as a credible ex-employee who has spent 17 years working here, even Zak and Nick find themselves starting to doubt whether they want to be locked inside.
It is now nightfall, but Ridgeway still leads Zak and Nick through the hotel. Bringing them to the basement-level area that she describes as the coldest and darkest room in the whole hotel, Virginia addresses Elizabeth while Nick holds a digital recorder. When Ridgeway asks "can you talk to me?", the digital recorder captures an EVP that clearly responds "No" in a long, drawn-out breathy whisper when the audio is enhanced. Not knowing what has been captured, Ridgeway herself tells Zak and Nick that they may have gotten something on their sound equipment that they will need to enhance.
Zak, Nick, and Ridgeway sit together in a circle around a candle in one particular dark part of the hotel and conduct a seance in an attempt to communicate with the spirits. When Zak asks for a spirit's name, Ridgeway mumbles the name "Bobby"; she had no idea that in that instance, she was temporarily possessed. Soon, their seance is interrupted by a brief clattering noise that emanates from the second floor.
It comes time for both Red Roberts and Virginia Ridgeway to leave for the night, and Roberts padlocks the front entrance of the hotel so that Zak and Nick begin their lockdown. Their plan is to investigate all three floors of the hotel, as well as the basement level, and Zak takes digital photographs everywhere while Nick follows behind with his digital recorder.
They first stop in Room 109, the one where the prostitute Elizabeth met her fate; it is said that the original builder of the Goldfield Hotel in 1908, George Wingfield, got Elizabeth pregnant in the 1930's. Wingfield had chained Elizabeth to the radiator in Room 109 and left her with food and water up until she gave birth, and upon this, Wingfield reportedly threw the baby down the mine shaft at the north end of the hotel basement and left Elizabeth to starve to death. While in the room, the pair think they hear something from the outside in the hall, and Zak comes out and takes a digital photograph in the hall. He captures an image of a very large, defined, and perfectly round gray orb at a doorway, partially behind the door frame about twenty feet from them. As they follow the hallway, Zak attempts to address Elizabeth gently, then addresses Wingfield harshly. However, they have yet to feel any strange presence - but as Zak explains to the recorder Nick is holding what sensations they would feel if there were a paranormal presence in the vicinity, Nick's recorder captures an orb flying within the doorframe near Zak. Similar orbs would be caught throughout the investigation.
Zak and Nick return to Room 109, where Zak sits down against a wall to attempt to communicate with Elizabeth. While Zak's right hand is raised up to his chin, Nick's camera captures a very clear orb that floats alongside Zak's arm, following its contours exactly, and it disappears once it passes his right elbow. Zak would recall feeling an icy feeling at this instant, and would later believe this is the ghost of Elizabeth touching his arm. While in the room, Zak and Nick think they hear slight footsteps in the hallway outside.
Their investigation eventually leads them to the hallways of the second floor. As they go through one hallway, they suddenly stop because they both think they heard some sort of noise emanating from both in front of them and behind them. While on their way to the stairway to the third floor, they stop because they think they hear it again. Looking at the end of the hallway they came out from, Nick thinks he saw something at the bottom right corner, and Zak asks for whoever's there. After watching for a while, they decide to head up to the third floor to investigate its hallways. Zak and Nick describe these hallways as carrying an unnerving sensation that can't be heard or seen by anyone watching their footage, as though people were watching them from the open windows and doorways of the many rooms they pass by.
When they look down the hallway that Red Roberts described as inhabited by the ghost of a gunslinger, both Zak and Nick suddenly think they have seen a shadowy movement at the end of the hallway, sinking back into the left corner. After briefly investigating that end of the hallway and asking if someone is there only to find a barricaded stairwell beyond the left corner, they rewind and review Nick's camera footage to see if the unexplained movement has been caught. They find that the recorder has clearly captured a shadowy human-like figure partially showing itself from the left corner of the hallway, and then they are both amazed to see that the recorder has captured it visibly moving back into the left corner out of view. This could be the ghost of the gunslinger Roberts and Ridgeway had described to them hours before.
Zak and Nick then move their investigation to the basement of the hotel, and Nick relates that he feels an odd heavy feeling as though they were walking through water; the hypothesis is that spirits have the ability to manifest by using up a living person's internal energy, which causes the person to end up feeling drained or lethargic. While investigating down there, they first both think they hear something strange and try to investigate where it is coming from. After a while, they are both startled by the loud sound of something metallic falling nearby which is recorded, and soon they continue to hear and seemingly follow the slight odd noises they heard from before. The two men continue to become increasingly unnerved when another metallic thud is heard in the premises. Heading toward the room where they had heard the noise, Zak addresses the potential paranormal culprit, saying they have no fear of it despite it making noises by throwing things. After another couple of metallic taps are heard, they head into a particular room at the end of the basement, a room that Roberts and Ridgeway had described earlier.
Both men's digital recorders are focused on the final room in the basement level, where once again something infamous would be captured: the moment Zak asks "Is that you making all that noise?", a lone brick on the ground breaks every law of gravity by violently flying into the air all on its own and being hurled into an opposite wall with high velocity, and then a large board resting on a wall to the left is pushed over to the right by an invisible force to fall onto the ground flat on its face, making loud impact noises. The two men are terrified enough that they run back down the basement hall screaming. For the next couple of minutes, while holding his still-recording camera, Nick silently wanders around in a shocked daze state, even as Zak yells out Nick's name repeatedly in the background. Immediately after the fifth time Zak calls for Nick, an EVP is caught on Nick's camera, and then after several more times, a couple vocalizations from what sounds like a little girl are clearly heard and recorded, before another loud thud is heard that makes Zak shriek again.
Zak narrates that they ran from something they had been trying to capture for months because there are limits beyond a person's cognitive control that a person cannot withstand no matter how brave they are. Zak finds Nick confused and in a state of shock, and they go to the front door to try to get out of the building. But the door had been padlocked as had been previously agreed, so the two men go to the second floor and jump through the second-floor fire escape to escape the Goldfield Hotel. In the morning, Red Roberts would unlock the padlocks to the hotel only to find that the two investigators were no longer there.
Zak and Nick bring their shocking footage once again to Slim Ritchie so that he can professionally analyze it using editing software designed to work with infrared and night-vision footage. Ritchie determines from both the trajectory and the spinning motion of the brick that takes flight that there was no way it was launched or pulled by any man-made means, and there is no attached string visible in the video footage. Another thing about the footage Ritchie discovers upon cleaning it up is that after the large board from the left falls on the ground, there is another small board at the right corner of the room that briefly takes flight in the opposite direction along the far wall. Victor H.S. Kwong, professor in the Department of Physics for the University of Nevada Las Vegas, reviews the brick footage and says that it would be impossible to pull a brick of that size and weight with such velocity without using a thick string that would surely have reflected the light from the investigators' cameras and therefore be very clearly visible.
Zak and Nick's own review of their footage concerning what happened after the flying brick incident leads them to discover the EVP heard after the fifth time Zak calls for Nick's name, and they figure this is a spirit standing right in front of his face screaming his name. The video analyst shows that this disembodied voice carries its own frequency. The strange female voice that was then heard by both men and captured before the loud bang is something they are unable to decipher what it could possibly be saying.
Zak and Nick then bring their footage over to Virginia Ridgeway in her house, because Ridgeway, as someone who has lived practically her whole life within 100 yards of the spiritual gateway that is the Goldfield Hotel and has had paranormal experiences for decades, would likely know a lot about what the men experienced.
- Clip 1: Seance: The first clip is of the seance the two men had with Ridgeway in the hotel, and Ridgeway is astounded to hear that she had apparently said "Bobby" as though she had been possessed. As for the noise that interrupted the seance, Ridgeway figures the spirits were probably upset that they were filming down there.
- Clip 2: Voice captured in room 109: Ridgeway is astounded to hear that when she asked the spirit of Elizabeth if she could talk to her, a ghostly whisper breathes "No" in response. Ridgeway relates that just a few months beforehand when she and some other investigators were in that room and she was trying to get Elizabeth to talk to them, she had heard the spirit say the word "talk".
- Clip 3: Spirit Orb: Ridgeway remarks that the photograph of the orb partially behind a doorframe is a very large orb and must be a spirit looking out at them from behind the door frame. Ridgeway figures, however, that due to its height off the ground, it is not the ghost of Elizabeth, who was not very tall in real life.
- Clip 4: Floating Orb: Orbs have been recorded throughout the investigation.
- Clip 5: Room 109 Orb: Upon seeing the clip of the ghostly orb that seems to stroke Zak's right arm, Ridgeway relates that she has felt a presence in that room several times that was less frightening and more loving. She figures the ghost of Elizabeth haunting that room is lonely and was gently stroking Zak's arm.
- Clip 6: Apparition: Upon seeing the clip of the shadowy apparition figure at the end of the hall alleged to be the haunt of a gunslinger, Ridgeway says that she had seen that same apparition down that same hall before, one time accompanied by four other people. One of these people, a trained officer of the law, grabbed his gun and went down the hall, thinking it was possibly a burglar in the building, but there was no one to be found.
- Clip 7: Poltergeist: The shocking footage of the brick being thrown prompts Ridgeway to explain that the previous Saturday, she had brought a pair of couples up to the fourth floor. In one room, an invisible force picked up and hurled a heavy bowl with a hole in the middle at the head of one of the women, going just past her right ear and barely hitting her. Had it hit her, she would have been hit hard. The woman would keep the bowl as a souvenir. In contrast to that incident, however, Ridgeway believes that the poltergeist Zak and Nick encountered in the basement had no intention of harming them, but rather was putting on a display merely to convey "get out of my space".
Virginia is so struck by the poltergeist footage that she calls over a fellow Goldfield local to watch it with her. Jim Paulis is the former president of the Chamber of Commerce, and also of the Goldfield Historical Society. Zak wonders if showing him this would reaffirm to him that the people who originally occupied the Goldfield Hotel during the 1900's Gold Rush still occupy the hotel; upon seeing the flying brick, Paulis is practically given a heart attack and agrees that they're definitely in there. He's most unsettled over the fact that the entities down there had driven them off in such a manner, as though the entities wanted to keep the two men away from getting too close to something.
Zak's concluding narration is that they may have answered the question, "How close is too close", and that seeing is believing. There are more lost answers of life after death trapped within the Goldfield Hotel than can be imagined.Evidence[]
- Apparition: A faint mist forms in front of the door and knocks three times.
Notes[]
- The documentary film received several awards, including the 2006 Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival (NYIIFVF).
- Ghost Adventures: The Beginning is the "television version" of the documentary. It features an opening and closing dialogue from Zak, but also removes other clips, notably the ending footage of the Constantino's capturing EVP with a local news station.
- Ghost Adventures: The Beginning is also the only 2006 Made for TV Film for Ghost Adventures.
- The Mizpah Hotel is briefly seen early on during scenery footage. It is a nighttime shot and the sign is seen when lightning flashes.
See also[]
- "Washoe Club/Chollar Mine"
- "Goldfield, NV"
- "Mizpah Hotel"
- "Return to Virginia City"
- "Goldfield Hotel: Redemption"
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