For Christmas this year, my mom's side of the family decided to get together in Las Vegas and take in some of the sights. One place we visited was "Zak Bagans The Haunted Museum," and the resulting tour was such a strange experience that I feel compelled to break it down and share why I disliked it so much.Zak Bagans is a paranormal investigator and television personality, known for his Travel Channel show Ghost Adventures. I have never viewed any of his works, and knew almost nothing about him before the tour through his museum. I was expecting something cheesy, maybe a few jump scares or creepy stories about 'haunted' items; some real-life equivalent of those fake paranormal and alien investigation shows I watched on the History Channel when I was a kid. What I got instead was a gross amalgamation of campy movie aesthetics and real-life horror. Real-life tragedy is exploited to lean credibility to otherwise mundane 'supernatural' memorabilia.
The Haunted Museum, as a physical location, is the place where Zak Bagans puts all the weird shit he's found on his ghosting adventures. It is, in one sense, the modern equivalent of a cabinet of curiosities. The tour through the house consists of following a series of guides from room to room as they explain the history of some of the objects on display. The house itself is introduced, briefly, as a supposedly haunted location. This is the reason Zak Bagans bought the place.
The objects in his collection fall generally into two types: haunted artifacts, and true-crime memorabilia. They are arranged in the rooms according to theme. The first few rooms are fairly benign: there's a creepy doll room, a movie-prop room, a room with gambling paraphernalia and a rigged roulette table once owned by a mobster. At this point the whole thing was quaint. Each cramped room was dim except for red or yellow back lights, the air was filled with incense and smoke to evoke the mood of a seance, and the guides talked up a few of the objects on display before shuffling us along to the next one. It was amusing, but harmless, until we got to the Ed Gein room.
