Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

The Sunday:

Ghost Hunting in Southern Nevada

Determined to make a connection with the afterlife, hundreds of locals are buying in

Ghost hunter Jeannine Robertson

L.E. Baskow

Ghost hunter Jeannine Robertson sets up a camera and laser pen in the darkness during a ghost-hunting expedition in North Las Vegas. The green light is used to detect movement if something passes by.

Ghost Hunter Jeannine Robertson

Ghost hunter Jeannine Robertson sets up a camera and light wand in the darkness in the upstairs hallway at the Vaughn's house on Friday, November 16, 2014. The green light is used to detect movement as a figure passes past it. Launch slideshow »

Ghost Hunting Gadgets

Ghost hunter Jeannine Robertson has several cases of detection equipment on Friday, November 16, 2014. Launch slideshow »

It’s approaching 10 on an October night, and Jeannine Robertson is standing outside the entrance of the abandoned Goldfield High School, about two and a half hours northwest of Las Vegas. The last time Robertson was here, her group of companions left the building screaming.

This time, she brought along just one friend. She prefers it that way.

“Big groups tend to be more skittish,” Robertson said.

Standing on the school’s broad stone steps, Robertson, a 40-something accountant for SPI Entertainment, snaps open an industrial plastic briefcase to reveal half a dozen gadgets nestled in foam compartments. Some, like the digital tape recorder she removes, are familiar; others look plucked from the set of a science fiction film.

“You have to turn on the recorder before you go in, because you don’t know when it’s going to pick stuff up,” Robertson explains.

That “stuff” could be moaning from a long-dead principal, footsteps of teachers or the spirit of a schoolgirl who was raped at the school before it closed in 1953. As the story goes, the girl’s father stormed onto campus the next day to kill her attacker, but the attacker killed the father instead. The girl’s ghost now is rumored to haunt the school, grieving for the tragedies that took place.

•••

Robertson is one of the hundreds of local ghost hunters and dozens of paranormal investigation groups that call Las Vegas home. Their members include accountants, lawyers, teachers and businesspeople. Together, they’re part of a growing community across the country and world in search of “the other side.”

“To me, it’s evidence that something else happens after we leave the physical world,” Robertson said.

She began exploring paranormal communication three years ago but started to really believe in ghosts a year later, after her father died.

“I wonder why it is that we can communicate with some people and not others,” she said. “I know there’s more out there, and I just want to know what it is.”

Robertson has unfinished business with Goldfield’s ghosts. She first visited the site about a year ago, but a friend got spooked after she believed she heard a voice mutter, “I did.” The sound sent the group running out of the building, and after hearing the voice again on a recording – this time with the more menacing message, “I did it” — they opted to cut their visit short.

Robertson herself isn’t so easily shaken.

“I was a single mother for 10 years,” she said. “Nothing can scare me.”

So she’s back a year later, intent on finding out who — or what — may have tried to communicate with her.

Entering the school, flashlight in hand, Robertson announces her presence to the darkness, her name echoing down a hallway. One of the first steps on a ghost hunt, she explains, is to introduce yourself and your intentions to any spirits that may be in the room and invite them to interact with you.

•••

For some people, ghost hunting is a hobby — an adventure and escape from day-to-day life, a way to broaden their social circle and a chance to mingle with like-minded people.

For others, like Zak Bagans, it’s a career. Bagans, a longtime Las Vegas resident, hosts the Travel Channel’s popular series “Ghost Adventures,” now entering its 11th season. He co-authored a New York Times best-seller about paranormal activities and unexplained phenomena, and has another book due out in February.

With a decade under his belt as a paranormal investigator, Bagans has helped elevate ghost hunting from relative obscurity into pop culture consciousness. Reality television shows, movies and websites are devoted to the subject. Companies profit from commercial ghost tours. Thousands of ghost-hunting videos have been uploaded to YouTube.

“People aren’t quiet about their experiences with ghosts anymore,” Bagans said. “They used to be, but now it has become kind of a cool thing.”

References to conjuring and communicating with spirits are as ancient as the Bible. But investigating the paranormal didn’t take root until the rise of Spiritualism in the 19th century, when organizations such as London’s Ghost Club and the Society for Psychical Research were founded to investigate paranormal events. Spiritualists practice a system of religious belief based on communication with the dead.

Paranormal interaction gained more popularity in the late 20th century, thanks to hobbyist groups such as Chicago’s Ghost Tracker’s Club and the work of Ed and Lorraine Warren, prominent paranormal investigators. The couple claimed to have investigated more than 10,000 hauntings, including several high-profile cases that formed the basis of such movies as “The Amityville Horror” (1979) and “The Conjuring” (2013).

In recent years, interest in ghost hunting has skyrocketed among the mainstream, in large part because of technological advancements and the increased availability and affordability of such equipment as full-spectrum cameras, white-noise scanners and high-quality sound amplifiers, along with the rise of digital media and the Internet.

“People are much more easily exposed to it now,” Bagans said. “The Internet has become a breeding ground for the paranormal and being able to share evidence. I mean, there are ghost-hunting apps for your iPhone.”

•••

Accessibility has allowed casual enthusiasts like Robertson to build a collection of what she estimates to be about $1,000 worth of equipment. She admits she still is figuring out how to use it all, but for her, that’s part of the fun.

With a night-vision camera set up on the ground level of Goldfield High School, Robertson and her friend explore the second floor. They ask questions — Are you here with us? Is this where you went to school? — hoping a paranormal presence might respond.

They wait an hour. Nothing happens.

•••

For all the renewed interest surrounding the paranormal, and however real an experience may seem to a believer, no scientific evidence exists to prove the existence of ghosts. While devotees insist certain experiences can’t be explained by science, skeptics say otherwise.

“What people think is a paranormal experience often has to do with the power of expectation and confirmation bias,” said Michael Shermer, a columnist for Scientific American and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine. “If you go to any old house, you’re going to see shadows and hear creaks. When that stuff happens in a regular room in a house, you don’t think about it. But if you anticipate it being haunted, you’re going to notice those effects and interpret them as something ghostly. Houses and buildings are full of electricity, wiring, pipes, moving, creaking walls, and all that. So it’s not surprising to hear that people pick up these signals on their devices.”

Still, Shermer admits there’s no harm in enjoying the occasional ghost hunt.

“Everyone needs a hobby,” he said. “On the other hand, anything that promotes the idea that the supernatural and paranormal are fact reduces critical thinking. In a democracy, we need an educated populace to vote and think intelligently and critically. If you believe in ghosts, what else do you believe? That said, I understand why people want to believe their evidence: It means there’s a place to go after we die.”

•••

Back at Goldfield High School, Robertson carefully replaces her devices in their case and concedes to a fruitless night. Nothing seen, nothing heard. No sign of the eerie voice so clear a year earlier.

Driving back to the hotel a few minutes later, her friend tells her to pull over. Connecting the recorder to an amplifier, she replays a length of recording that initially seemed unnoteworthy. This time, Robertson found it unmistakable. A female voice whispers, “His name’s Paul.”

Robertson laughs, delighted with the unexpected find.

Shermer and other skeptics likely would attribute the voice to the women’s minds assigning supernatural meaning to ordinary noises. But to Robertson, it’s real. It means a night well spent, a new development in an ongoing adventure and perhaps a connection to life beyond the one we know.

“It’s a thrill, just to be able to leave your 9-to-5 and almost transport back into time,” Bagans said. “When you ghost hunt, you kind of time travel, you get that residue of the past.”

Follow Andrea Domanick on Twitter at @AndreaDomanick and fan her on Facebook at Facebook.com/AndreaDomanick.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story included the wrong workplace for Jeannine Robertson. She works at SPI Entertainment. | (December 4, 2014)

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