The following is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of the New York Times Best Seller. You can purchase your own copy of Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of The Ghost Adventures Crew here. 

Anger

I hate bullies. It’s a personal thing, but bullies are next to pond scum on the worthless scale as far as I’m concerned. Just about everyone has experienced confrontation and schoolyard fights growing up. It’s what youths do and is pretty much a rite of teenage passage, but getting over it is also a necessary step in the process of maturing. Unfortunately there are some people who never forego their aggressive ways and walk through life daring anyone to knock the chip off their shoulder. Even in death they prey on the weak the same way they did in life.

I’ve encountered spirits who bully other spirits and take pleasure in intimidating the living. This happens frequently in the dark holes that we toss the worst of humanity into like prisons, penitentiaries, and reformatories where the meanest of the mean spent their days. Often emotionally unstable, we sequester them with their own kind behind mammoth stone walls so we don’t have to gaze upon life’s castaways and only think about them when a Johnny Cash song catches our ear. We do this for the public good, but also because seeing them reminds us of our own fallibility.

I’ve investigated a lot of places where disturbed people once lived and died, but at the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel in Death Valley Junction, California I encountered a spirit who made Caligula seem like a Saint. The employees of the hotel called him The Boss Man and our fixer (a local paranormal investigator) said he liked to taunt people, push them, feel them, scratch them, and do generally malevolent things, even to the hotel staff. He was the type who rose up to a challenge-the bigger and more aggressive the human, the more active he was. Some people would scare away from this, but I go in the opposite direction and get excited for a confrontation. He’s nothing more than a bully and has to be dealt with accordingly.

“Take my energy. I welcome it,” I told him during the daytime walkthrough. I needed to coax him out, a tactic that agitated our fixer and made her concerned for my well being. I didn’t care though. If everyone continues to take a soft approach to spirits like The Boss Man, then they just continue to torment the living. I can’t stomach that and set about taking the fight to him instead of waiting for him to come to me. It’s risky of course, but in death as in life, being a victim gets you nowhere. Every year thousands of people have violent paranormal experiences with aggressive spirits and walk away from it scared or confused. They need to know they’re not alone and that someone is on their side. I was eager to confront The Boss Man, but I would have to wait several long hours until the sun went down and the conditions were right. 

Hold that thought.