I will watch any ghost related tv show there is. Any one of them. I love reenactments, I love night vision cameras, I love the completely bonkers people that tell their own eyewitness ghost stories. They’re great. One has managed to outshine them all, though.

It’s, like [(Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction + Scariest Places on Earth)xCamp Value] + [(Dead Famous + Haunted History)xIntense Narration] + [{MTV's Fear + VH1's Celebrity Paranormal) to the power of Scared Frat Boy] – Ghost Hunters’ Expensive Equipment + The Complete Bullshit of Most Haunted = Ghost Adventures:

Yeah, Zak, seriously.
Ghost Adventures started its second season this weekend and, since Sally and I have been on a little bit of a horror kick lately (we’re (still) watching Harper’s Island, and True Blood starts tonight), we decided that we had to watch it. Of course, we ended up taping an episode from last season, but we’d never seen it before, so we watched it anyway.

Just in case you’ve managed to miss out, Ghost Adventures is made up of three guys: Zak Bagans, the leader, and his geeky friends Aaron and Nick. They get locked into a reputedly haunted location overnight and film themselves and each other jumping at every sound, getting lost, and angrily shushing each other.

Here’s what you need to know about Zak: he wears raver pants, he brushes his hair forward from the sides, and he once described the tombstones in a cemetery as being able to talk to him and tell him that the cemetery had been home to “a lot of death, a lot of darkness.” While our Dad generally will watch any kind of ghost show with Sally and me, he just can’t stand this one. He flipped past the premiere the other night and told us later that, in the fifteen seconds he had it on, Zak got “upset and agitated” when an eyewitness told him that there were ghosts in the fort they were planning on investigating later that night. So, Zak is kind of the best person that’s even been on tv.
In the episode we watched last night, they were investigating the Idaho State Penitentiary in Boise. Zak was very helpful to point out that this prison, unlike other prisons, housed criminals who were either reformed or not reformed, and also were sometimes executed for their crimes. Here’s a quick list of why this show is amazing.

1. Zak’s friends (from before the show began, presumably) Aaron and Nick are constantly getting the snippy treatment from him. I don’t know what his problem is with them since they’re all equally bad at being calm during their ghost hunts. He also constantly shushes and grabs at their cameras (which they’re holding in pitch blackness, by the way). He’s sort of a maniac.

After deciding to hole himself up alone on death row to try to make contact with a ghost in there, Aaron and Nick ask Zak where they should go and investigate next. Zak dismissively tells them to just go set up some more cameras somewhere. And they do. Very sadly.

2. Zak is “scared” of snakes. Zak wanders into a hill that “supposedly” has lots of snakes.

He continues to pointlessly climb higher into these “snake-infested” hills for a segment that goes absolutely nowhere and has nothing at all to do with the prison. As he gets up onto a pointlessly high part of the hill, he starts to see snakes. More! and MORE snakes! Everywhere! As far as the eye can see! Very large, very sluggish, and very different species of snakes, gently placed in convenient locations for Zak to point at and cower from. He then decides to “conquer” his “fear” of snakes and pick one up, excitedly wondering why he’s doing this! Probably because the guy at the pet store who lent them to you said that they were already defanged. Thanks for the advice, though, about not picking up wild snakes! I’m glad to see Zak’s following it, too.

3. I have no idea what they’re looking at either.

4. In every episode, Zak is told a story that he decides to go off and investigate further. Tonight’s story was about a murderer named Raymond Snowden who killed a girl in town and was put to death in the prison. Zak decides to follow the trail of where Snowden was the night of the murder.

He very proudly proclaims that they have finally found the cigar shop outside of which the murder weapon was found, and jabs his finger repeatedly at this newspaper clipping pasted up in the shop as evidence that his long research journey has paid off, because this is the place! His research, by the way, consisted of being told the name of the cigar shop, and probably the turn by turn directions on his car’s gps.

5. These goofuses have a lot of trouble with tape.

6. My brother Matt came up with this term for what happens when you do something embarrassing. He says you’re going through stages. You know, when you trip or spill something on yourself or say something you didn’t mean to say, and then you start acting real crazy, trying to make it seem like you’re just bein’ crazy and you meant to act the fool, and then it doesn’t work and you start trying to deflect the attention onto someone else and you put your arm around someone and you start talking really loudly about a completely different subject and then you pointedly make reference to the embarrassing thing you did and act like it’s no big deal, and the whole time, people are just kind of looking at you, like, stop going through stages, psycho, you farted in public and we all heard you but you’re the one that won’t stop bringing it up, and then you get angry and end up yelling at someone and stomping away? Those are stages. Zak goes through stages in every episode.

In this one, he heard “voices” in the garden right after they were locked in and went tearing off towards them. He then totally ate it when he ran right into a roped off area and, as Aaron and Nick laughed at him, Zak asked them what he tripped on, got really quiet, tried to laugh it off, talked loudly about how he heard voices and now they don’t hear them anymore, angrily pushed the stake he knocked over back into the ground and walked back inside.

7. Aaron, who’s considered an “equipment tech” and not an investigator, overreacts to every single noise, cool breeze, and “creepy” feeling he gets. After being told a story about an inmate being gang raped to death in the showers (to which Zak replied, “…he was… gang raped… to death… RIGHT HERE IN THE SHOWERS? HE WAS KILLED IN THE SHOWERS? IS THIS WHERE IT HAPPENED?”), he sends Aaron in there by himself to see if he can communicate with any spirits.

Aaron tells them to use him as a way to communicate, and then instantly says he feels sick and for them to stop using him as a way to communicate. Then, in an effort to not ever make mention of the fact that the murder was committed through gang rape, he says the following:
“They say there was a very, very, very bad murder in here, done by many, many men. I’m sorry that you died in here. I think that was a wrong thing for them to done [sic]. I really think when you go out, you need to go out… not in a shower and not naked.”
How about not being GANG RAPED TO DEATH?

8. This was evidence captured by some kind of shady “feedback interference” method, the explanation of which didn’t make much sense to me (and I’d like to point out by the way that the main word in the name of my high school was “technology”, so it’s not like I think computer-speak is gibberish or anything), so I’m not going to try to explain it here.

Zak said it was a ghost man wearing a hood, perhaps the very hood they put over prisoners’ heads when they hung them, perhaps the very prisoner who Zak had been trying to contact just minutes earlier. It looks suspiciously like Zak’s body to me, though.

See?

SEE?

9. All ghost hunting shows provoke spirits when they’re trying to communicate with them, by insulting them or making fun of their houses or telling them their little brother paid a buck to see their underwear at the dance last night. Zak does something more hardcore, though. He provocates.

Provocating, from what I’ve gathered after a few episodes of this show, is more like a mother admonishing an annoying child than someone trying to cut to the quick. “Now, Raymond, I came all the way over here and I want you to talk.” “I’m gonna leave now. I want you to get back in your cell.”

10. They got an evp, by the way. You know, a “ghost” voice captured on tape. You can listen to it here. Can you understand the voices? Well, this woman sure can.

She’s an evp expert from Reno, Nevada, and her expert analysis (which involved putting her ear close to the desktop speakers on her computer as the raw audio played, and pointing a lot with her giant french-tipped nails), revealed that two male voices can be heard having the following conversation: “Not my life.” “I’m okay.”

She also figured out that that means the two guys were talking to each other about how bummed they were to still be hanging around in the prison where they died.

Just in case you missed it the first time, THIS is the noise she’s listening to that brought her to the conclusion that two men are saying, “Not my life,” and “I’m okay.”

So, yeah, new season! Zak will be just be sleeping against this door waiting for you to tune in, so make sure you check it out!