People often don’t know what to make of the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures. That’s easy enough to understand. Over the years, the show has been accused of manufacturing some evidence and embellishing other things to make it seem a lot more like evidence to the viewers at home than it actually was. It might not be such a big deal of these types of accusations had happened only once or maybe even twice, but they have come up again and again, leaving a lot of people wondering how much they can really believe when they watch the show. Nevertheless, the series has always proven to be a popular one for the network and it is still popular today. That being said, there are a lot of things about it that have changed over the years, and not all of them are for the better.
For starters, the show was much more about exploring the paranormal when it first started. According to the show’s leader, Zak Bagans, everything got its start because he himself had a paranormal encounter years earlier. He said it was something that plagued him from that moment on and he wanted to learn as much about the paranormal as possible. Eventually, he formed a team and the group got funding from the network to set out around the country, investigating claims of the paranormal as they went.
At first, the show did seem like an honest attempt to find evidence of the paranormal. The whole team consisted of just a handful of people, namely Bagans himself, along with Nick Groff and Aaron Goodwin. They didn’t have anyone else with them during those early years, not even a camera crew. As a matter of fact, they would frequently hold cameras for each other so that everything could be filmed without bringing in a lot of extra people that could possibly contaminate the scene. During this time, the team all seemed to be humble enough and they mirrored a true desire to know more about things and gain proof of the paranormal. There are actually some pretty good episodes from these earlier seasons, but if you want to find them, make sure that you look in seasons one and two. There are a few that seem to follow this method in season three, but when you start getting past that, things begin to change rather drastically.
As the seasons went on, the first thing that changed was the very mindset of Zak Bagans himself. Perhaps it was at the urging of the producers or maybe it was all his own doing, but his entire demeanor changed. He began to get very aggressive when they were on a site, not just in calling out spirits but in the way he talked to his teammates. He definitely saw himself as the leader of the pack and he would demand that everyone else on the team do things that he was not willing to do himself. If they protested, he would become angry and in some cases, he simply threw a fit as if he were a child.
This was also around the same time that things started changing with regard to the way the investigations were handled. It seemed like every time they went to a location, they came back with all of this footage, as well as tons of EVPs. Their investigations had a tendency to garner a lot more “evidence” than investigations of the exact same locations by other teams. There was really never an episode where you didn’t hear or see something on the screen. It didn’t take long for those who don’t readily believe everything they see on television to begin questioning whether or not the evidence was real. In short, there was just far too much of it.
Shortly thereafter, Nick Groff left the show. He was fairly quiet about everything that caused him to make that decision, but eventually it came out that producers had wanted him to falsify evidence for the television audience. He refused and chose to walk away from the show instead. He ultimately went on to pursue his own endeavors and has since been featured on television shows of his own.
Ghost Adventures is still on but it doesn’t have the same fan base that it used to. Granted, it still does well in the ratings but many of the people who started out as dedicated viewers have chosen to move on as well. The episodes that air today are much darker and in almost every one of those episodes, it seems like there is at least some part of it that has been staged to a point where it is no longer believable, even for those who are open-minded enough to believe in the paranormal.
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