Ghost Adventures: The Untold Truth Of Zak Bagans

You don't have to believe in ghosts to be a "Ghost Adventures" fan. The Travel Channel series takes you to places you won't find in a Lonely Planet guidebook — it's got morbid history, fun camerawork, cool scenery, lots of belly laughs, and it's scary, like horror-movie scary, complete with ominous mood lighting and jump scares. Also, it's forever entertaining to watch Zak make Aaron go sit alone in a dark, dilapidated room in some terrifying, terrifying abandoned mansion, prison, hospital, or whatever.

"Ghost Adventures" was the brainchild of Zak Bagans, who is Hollywood handsome, wears only black, and does voice-overs that sound like Rod Sterling at half speed. The show is just one of many paranormal investigation shows you can find on cable television — even the Osbournes have one — but "Ghost Adventures" is different because Zak is different. This guy lives and breathes the paranormal, which frankly would be kind of a drag if it meant you had to be forever haunted by some ghost or another and could never get away from it, but Zak does seem to thrive on all the attention, both from the living and from the dead. He even owns a Haunted Museum and a Demon House, the latter of which is just an empty lot now because he had it demolished two years after he bought it. Zak is a big personality and though we love the other guys on the "Ghost Adventures" team, well, it wouldn't be what it is without Zak Bagans.

Zak Bagans describes the "face-to-face" encounter from those old opening credits in detail in the first pages of his autobiography, "Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew." According to the story, he was living in Trenton, Michigan, in an apartment building where there was a "presence of something that was not inviting."

During the summer of 2002, Zak says he was awoken seven nights in a row by a ghostly woman's voice screaming "Zachary!" On the last night, the ghost pinned him face-down on the bed. When he was finally able to sit up, he was staring her right in the face.

To his credit, this definitely does seem a bit more literally "face to face" than the story about the demon mouse or the phantom house or the girl with the Ouija board, and he does say it was this experience that "opened [his mind] to the paranormal." In the book, he also writes that he was "indifferent on the topic of ghosts" until that particular moment, which is not exactly the same thing as saying "I never believed in ghosts until ..." So it does sort of seem like he changed his story a little, you know, for dramatic effect. But probably no one is really buying that Zak Bagans was ever the non-believer he said he was back in the early days of "Ghost Adventures."

Zak Bagans was drawn into paranormal filmmaking before he even left film school. In fact, the very first episode of "Ghost Adventures" was not an episode at all but a feature-length documentary, and it was a project for his film studies degree.

In Zak's autobiography "Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew," he writes about teaming up with Nick Groff and Aaron Goodwin as students to shoot a film about ghost hunting in the haunted mining towns of Nevada. To make the film, they visited a creepy hotel in Tonopah and another creepy hotel in Virginia City. They filmed a mist, and a ghost threw a brick at them in the basement. When they got home, they cobbled the footage together and submitted it to the New York International Film and Video Festival. They won best documentary.

That was pretty much how it started. Zak does not have a story of struggling to make it, of not being taken seriously, of working at Netflix or as an assistant location manager before finally getting his big break. Nope, Zak kind of became a star just as he was finishing his education. Now, no one is saying that you have to struggle in order to make great art ... also no one is saying that "Ghost Adventures" is great art ... but luck definitely played a part in Zak's success. Or something supernatural? Nah.

We've all heard about the epic brand battles like Coca Cola vs. Pepsi, Burger King vs. McDonalds, Amazon vs. Barnes and Noble (who are we kidding, Amazon vs. everyone), so no one is really surprised to hear that "Ghost Adventures" vs. "Ghost Hunters" is also a thing.

According to Mass Live, the feud began when "Ghost Hunters" said things about "Ghost Adventures" and one of their investigations of the uber-haunted Bobby Mackey's Music World, you know, on a "Ghost Hunters" show in front of everyone. Zak Bagans doesn't watch "Ghost Hunters," or maybe he does secretly, but he wasn't watching that night. A bunch of his fans were, though, and in this world of everything-ends-up-on-Twitter-in-like-five-seconds he found out about the comments almost as soon as they aired.

What were the comments? Something along the lines of "'Ghost Adventures' exaggerated their investigation of Bobby Mackey's." Evidently, Zak was playing poker when he heard the news and he had to abandon his game to incite a virtual fistfight (that is, not in person and not an actual fistfight) with the "Ghost Hunters" people. The incident ended with some major "Ghost Hunters" back-peddling ("noooo we were talking about Bobby Mackey's, not about you!") but Zak did not forget. A few years later, he used Twitter to say this about "Ghost Hunters": "Ive never had more issues with people talking s**t than ppl from Ghost Hunters Intl... Failed TV Show and these wannabes wanna talk s**t LMFAO." That's classy, Zak.

Zak Bagans actually invented mask wearing. It's true! Long before the pandemic forced all of us to mask up, Zak was already doing it. In fact, Zak is so famous for his mask wearing that he sometimes gives signed respirators to his fans. The rest of his team, though, is typically unmasked (at least pre-pandemic), which probably contributes to the confusion.

The reason why Zak masked up before masking up was a thing is really not super mysterious, even though it's one of the most common questions people ask about him. In fact, "Zak Baggans mask" gets like 40,000 results if you search it on Google, so it's clearly something people are still scratching their heads about. After months and months of COVID it should be an easy answer to guess — masks protect you from particulates, and old, musty, abandoned places are full of particulates. Dust, mold, asbestos, you don't want that stuff in your lungs even if you don't have asthma, and according to Distractify, Zak has asthma. The other guys on the "Ghost Adventures" team aren't similarly afflicted and don't wear respirators because, you know, they don't really want to. Kind of a familiar refrain, isn't it?

Unsurprisingly, Zak is also a big proponent of pandemic mask-wearing, too. In the summer of 2020 he used Twitter to share his opinion: "Just wear a damn mask!!! Take it from someone who has been wearing them for the last 12 years!"

Pick your documentary-style paranormal series, and there's always going to be someone saying it's all fake. And the cool thing about paranormal science is, it's not science, so there really isn't any way to definitively prove that ghosts exist, or that they don't exist, or that "Ghost Adventures" is fake. For that last question, only the show's producers and stars really know the truth. While it is almost certainly true that the "Ghost Adventures" crew exaggerates stuff – c'mon, guys, not every out-of-focus insect is a light anomaly — the real question is, do they really think ghosts are real, and do they think they're capturing actual evidence, or have they been faking it all for 22 seasons?

Zak Bagans does live pretty much the same life off-camera as on camera. He owns a huge collection of paranormal memorabilia, cursed dolls, and other bizarre things that he makes available for public viewing at his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. And according to Ozzy Mora, who worked with Zak on an episode of "Ghost Adventures," his mannerisms and apparent enthusiasm for what he's doing suggest that he is a true believer.

It's certainly possible that Zak is a great actor who remains in character on and off screen and that deep down inside he's aware it's all a big ruse, and if anyone ever found out his career would be over. But if that's true, well, it's some pretty convincing acting. Nicely done, Zak.