Utah is a haunting hot-spot for the paranormal investigators of Discovery's 'Ghost Adventures' 

• Discovery Channel
• Zak Bagans, second from left, and his team of Ghost Adventures investigators

Forgive the first-person intro, but allow me a moment to suggest an uncanny connection.

I made a press inquiry of Zak Bagans, through his Las Vegas attraction The Haunted Museum. The host of Ghost Adventures on Discovery is a busy man, sure, but a good six weeks had passed. Assuming that the chat wouldn't happen, I settled in to finally write the piece, sans Bagans.

Literally as I typed his name into what I assumed would be a story without a central interview, I looked down at my phone to see one Zachary Bagans on the line. Zoinks!

A true fan of Ghost Adventures would appreciate the moment. And in the spirit of transparency, I'm fully in that camp of diehard viewers.

On Ghost Adventures, little takes place without some extra meaning attached. I'm not quite sure how to process Bagans being summoned through the telephone from his production studio while I was typing his name several states away, other than this: He was meant to call at that moment. As a true Ghost head, I'm not going to question things too much, preferring to jump to metaphysical conclusions.

Bagans' public life is a pretty complicated affair, with multiple shows (not just multiple episodes of one show) in various stages of production at any time, along with his ongoing work at the museum.

Starting out our conversation, in fact, he reinforced the idea that hosting Ghost Adventures and its subsidiary programs is more than a full-time job and that "(you) have no idea" how to accurately assess the amount of hours he puts into his growing paranormal research media empire, which frequently features cases and stories from Utah and the broader Intermountain West.

The story, in many respects, begins in 2008, when Bagans created a pilot episode for a cable show that would soon set the standard for ghost-hunting reality television (of which there are more than a few, housed across many platforms; check your preferred web search engine for confirmation).

Eventually Ghost Adventures found something of a secondary home in Utah. And episodes like one featuring the Tintic Mining District are indicative of the state's saturation within GA.

"That one was really interesting," Bagans says. "How we discovered that lady and that guy living in the houses up there, practicing their dark occult practices, ending up invited into a ceremony. That was one time when there was a spiritual battle between us and them," Bagans said. "All of our spiritual guides and guards went to battle with whatever dark beings were attached to them. Amidst the ceremony, my spiritual guides started talking, letting them know I was protected. Which stunned the lady who was a practitioner of dark magic."

To put it mildly, Zac Bagans has an interesting job.

Who You Gonna Call?

The Travel Channel brought Ghost Adventures to life in October of 2008, when the seasonally appropriate series aired for the first time.

To look back at the earliest episodes of the show, you see the guerrilla filmmaking style of the three principal members of both cast and crew: paranormal investigators Zak Bagans and Nick Groff, with AV tech Aaron Goodwin.

Relying on a vérité style, the three would visit places of reputed hauntings, sealing themselves into overnight "lockdowns" inside some of America's most notorious supernatural hotspots. The intro credits were keen to mention that no big crew was on hand, just three buds and the best video and audio equipment they could afford at the time.

The trio sold viewers on the fact that this was raw and unscripted reality television. And for a good, long while, the formula remained largely in this style. But after the 10th season saw the departure of Groff, the show changed in ways both subtle and overt.

Goodwin's title changed to investigator, and two additional crew members (AV techs Billy Tolley and Jay Wasley) were blended into the show, with a definite sense that there were also other, unseen crew members working behind the scenes to bring an increasingly expensive, stylized and highly edited show into being. In more recent years, fans have even seen some of the supplementary crew in on-screen roles, though the core four of Bagans, Goodwin, Tolley and Wasley are the omnipresent members of every show.

The 27th season of Ghost Adventures debuts this month on Oct. 11, with well over 270 episodes having now aired. (The easiest way to binge is through Max, née HBO, which has the entire series streaming on-demand.) Another 50-plus special episodes and offshoot shows have aired, too, with recent seasons adding twists: returns to formerly visited haunts and visits to the houses of the famous; a spinoff series called House Calls that sends the investigators into the homes of terrified viewers; and Screaming Room, a behind-the-scenes conversation between the four about particularly memorable episodes.

But what in the name of all that's unholy does any of this have to do with Utah? Well...

Utah provides an amazing range of investigation backdrops for the GA team, involving some of the crew's bread-and-butter locations: abandoned mines; boom-to-bust railroad towns; haunted attractions like SLC's Fear Factory and Tooele's Asylum 49; ghostly venues like the Saltair; even the occasional, nationally known site, like the Ted Bundy Ritual House episode of the short-run spinoff series called Serial Killer Spirits.

Those episodes are part of a noticeable shift in the geographic center of Bagans' work as his various projects have progressed. While early shows took place all over the country, subsequent seasons increasingly focused on the West.

Part of this is likely explained by the fact that Bagans owns and operates an attraction in Las Vegas, though Bagans suggests that the core four members of the team are each "spiritually connected" to the region.

"This is the biggest reason that so many locations are filmed there," Bagans continued. "It's that we feel a natural, organic, spiritual connection to the West. So many people from there are calling us for help, literally calling out to us. We don't have to leave the West, and we feel as though when we stay within those areas, we have this strong connection to our locations. Some that we've visited in those areas are Level 10 intense."

Ghosted

In order to crack these cases, they rely on an increasingly large series of devices, which they've exhibited in the so-far 16 regular episodes of Ghost Adventures that were set in Utah. Wikipedia, bless it, does a great job of citing some of the key tools and techniques of their investigations, noting that Bagans and crew, "use a variety of equipment, including digital thermometers, electromagnetic field (EMF) meters, handheld digital video cameras, audio recorders, the Ovilus device, point of view cameras, and infrared night-vision cameras in an effort to capture evidence of ghosts."

The entry also notes how GA team members will sometimes place what they call "trigger" objects, or will shout verbal taunts to draw out their spirit subjects.

Of course, the cast and crew are key elements here, too, and Bagans feels that Utah locations—ranging from Ogden to Santaquin to Logan Canyon to Magna—have offered some of the more intense experiences that they've enjoyed in their long television journey. Heck, one of the episodes, entitled "Industrial District of the Damned," takes place within a half-dozen blocks of City Weekly's downtown offices.

In that installment, set inside a warehouse-turned-photo-studio, the Ghost Adventures team captured the image of a strange face in a mirror. "We tried to debunk that, and we couldn't," Bagans recalled. "That was a very, very compelling piece of evidence that really sticks out."

Bagans said his team's investigations in Utah have been among the most "highly active" sites they've encountered. And more exploration of the Beehive State is coming.

"I don't know what it is about Utah, but it's home to some of the darkest ones we've ever done," he said. "There's a location there that we're currently trying to set up for an investigation."

Local paranormal investigators Bennett Rayne and Vincent Lords—who run a media and live event group called Paranosis—have been seen in several of the Utah episodes. But Bagans bristled a bit when asked about their roles in the Utah-set collection of GA episodes, simply saying "they have assisted us in finding many great locations in Utah, and we are very thankful for their assistance in that."

The GA linchpin seemed irked by the suggestion that he was taking a back seat in the Ghost-verse, like with a question about House Calls, a spinoff series that typically follows members of the team heading out to collect information and offer comfort to the supernaturally afflicted while Bagans remains in Vegas. Bagans—whose presence on the show is all-encompassing—has a lessened screen presence on that spinoff series, which allows the rest of his crew (including the rock star director of photography and investigative bad-ass Lauren Murphy) a chance to shine.

Working on multiple shows at once, Bagans says, means that the franchise will always be bringing more to the networks, as "the viewers can't get enough" content, as it is.

Utah and Ghost Adventures are not going to break up anytime soon, and Bagans says "that anyone in Utah aware of a site should contact us through our social media."

And with that, our brief, strangely intense call ended. And I ran around the house as if possessed.