Our Valley is home to millions of souls. Most have physical forms, but according to paranormal investigator Zak Bagans—star of the Discovery Channel hit Ghost Adventures and the eponymous proprietor of Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum in Downtown—a good number of them don’t. He took a quick break from filming his show, now in its 25th season, to talk about Vegas’ haunted spaces.
Until you opened your museum, it didn’t occur to me that there could be hauntings in Vegas. I thought the city was too young for it. Does a city’s age make a difference?
No. Wherever you have death, wherever you have energy, wherever you have people’s emotions, you know you’re going to have a residual haunting; you’re going to have a trapped spirit, a trapped soul. There’s a lot more history that Vegas has; it just doesn’t look like that on the surface. I love my hometown, but it’s very sad and very tragic that we destroy a lot of our historic hotels and casinos.
Have you had the chance to investigate some of those historic properties?
It’s very hard to gain access to these hotels to investigate. My targets are the Flamingo, Circus Circus, the former Bally’s, places like that. But they don’t want hauntings attached [to their hotels]. They just want gamblers and gambling and that’s it. [But] when we do investigations on hauntings, it’s more than just going around getting evidence. We also like to present the history of these places, like we did at the Riviera—we did the Riviera twice—and Binion’s Horseshoe, and I just love unraveling the mysteries of the history.
I was talking to a friend of mine this morning about the Haunted Museum—we just celebrated our sixth year—and why it’s been so successful. It’s because it’s a niche in Vegas: You can step back in time in an old 1930s mansion. You’re not just there for the paranormal, to have a thrill, but to immerse yourself in the history of Vegas, [in] a historical structure with old artifacts. … We have so many people that come here and experience it and say it’s the highlight of their trip.
Aside from the museum, have you found other haunted spaces in Vegas outside of the tourist corridors?
One place I’ll tell your readers to go to, which is a thrill, is over at Lake Mead in those old, abandoned railway tunnels. We did a two-hour special on Lake Mead, with all these bodies coming up, [and] we started hearing about these abandoned railway tunnels. They used these tunnels to transport stuff in the making of the Hoover Dam, and a lot of men died in the tunnels due to carbon monoxide from the railway cars. We talked to a Ph.D. who said that because the Hoover Dam looks similar to Satan’s throne, she believes that those tunnels were attracting some dark occultists, as well.
So, when we investigated … During the day, you’re fine, but something happens at night that opens up Lake Mead to something otherworldly, and we documented evidence of it. We captured a dark shape that had a luminescent light on it in one of the tunnels. We captured a disembodied phantom screaming coming from there, and some really strange sounds of rocks hitting together. It’s a terrifying place. If anybody out there is adventurous enough to hit those tunnels at night, that would be a real big thrill-seek.
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