If you're creepy and you know it, clap your hands!
Vol. 60: I'm in Las Vegas several times a year, and this spooky attraction opened in 2017, so I put it off too long. I knew I'd get over there eventually. If they had Keno machines I would have shown up their first week.
Terrifying Travels: Zak Bagans' Haunted Museum
You likely know of Zak Bagans from his Travel Channel ghost hunting series, which I'll tell you now, I've never seen. But I knew that eventually I'd get here because it has some of my favorite things: an old house with a reputation, ghost stories, and oddities. I went, and now I'm going to do my best to give you a detailed and honest version of what it's like, so there are nothing but spoilers ahead. Photos aren't allowed inside, so I've used internet pics that are the most accurate to what I saw.
I went on a Sunday morning with the best companion possible, my sister Julie. She's a single mom and she doesn't scare easily. She watches more horror movies than I do and tends to smile at inappropriate times, so she may be more worrisome than I am.
The outside doesn't look like your typical haunted house attraction, in fact, it blends into the somewhat rundown area on East Charleston. Park in the museum's lot and your car should be safe under their surveillance.
The guided tours are organized in groups of twelve, though we had thirteen. Tickets are not cheap, starting at $48 for general admission and $80 for the “RIP” ticket, which gets you into a few extra rooms. Either way, it's a 2 ½ hour tour. While we were there, they had three tours going at once, criss-crossing through the house. The guides are adept at keeping the groups passing without being in the same space at once.
The house is nearly 100 years old, ancient by local standards, and is 14,000 square feet, with about 12,000 feet of it being used for the tour. It was a family home for decades, and making it a real oddity for the Southwest, it has a basement.
Park in the back of the house and walk up to the back porch, not the front door. In the back is a table and employee to either confirm your reservation or see if there's room available if you don't have a booking. In our case, as I was twelve feet from the employee, a guy that I'll call “Little Pricky” yelled at me, “Do you have a reservation?” I approached and said that no, I didn't. “Why not?” Little Pricky snarled, then stared at me for a full ten seconds. “Do I need one?” I finally asked, mainly to break this stare down. “Uh, no. We have room for two in this next tour.” We were sent around to the front door, to the tiny lobby where we paid. It's dark and full of dolls, with two cashiers in old cage-style booths. This lobby and the outside of the building are the only two places you can photograph or film, you will be told to shut your phone off, so while I'm 99% sure that I have the rooms listed in the correct order, my note taking was done in the dark. I had a little notepad and felt like a 1940s reporter, though Julie was better at asking questions than me.
When your group has paid, you are instructed to raise your right hand and take an oath that says you know that you're entering a haunted building and you won't hold them liable for what happens to you. This was enough to spook a couple of the young women who had already paid for the RIP experience and looked like now they regretted it. We were lined up outside the front door and led to a side entrance, where we were met by a tall guide wearing a black suit and top hat. If The Haunted Mansion is your favorite ride, you know the excitement of walking into the darkness of this house.
We were first led into a small room filled floor to ceiling with creepy old dolls, creepy old mannequins, creepy old animatronics and creepy old photos. Most of the rooms throughout the house have a tv screen to allow Bagans himself to explain the artifacts, and it begins here. This room also contains, in a glass case, one of the few documents Satanist Anton La Fey ever signed. Our guide was pointing out several of the artifacts, then said, “Who can produce a one dollar bill the fastest?” Whipping out money is Julie's field of expertise and no one could beat her, so she had the honor of feeding her dollar into a Zak Bagans' fortune telling machine, which spit out a card with his photo on it. “Read it out!” our tour guide exclaimed, but the room was so dark that she couldn't and passed it to me to see if I had better luck. “When you board this, her spirit is still there...don't get starstruck! Say her name out loud with a polite message so she knows you mean well...” As this is a reference to the Titanic/Natalie Wood room that we won't know about until an hour into the future, the group was unimpressed, but it's a slick way to get an extra dollar out of some sucker. If you take the tour, just stand there with your hands in your pockets and whistle.
The majority of us were invited to look around while the four RIPs were taken into a side room for just a few minutes. When the whole group traveled down the corridor to the next room, we could all see that the RIPs had been taken into a Houdini séance room filled with blue light and a spooky recorded voice.
Next was the Odd Fellows Room, which is named for the secret fraternal society, and looks like a tiny chapel. Inside were two child sized skeletons and shelves lines with human skulls. We were told that all the remains are real. We were scooted out fairly quickly while the RIPs were instructed to exit through a very small black door that led to a mystery room. One RIP refused and remained with the group, and as we passed we saw that the extra room was filled floor to ceiling with old dolls. I lost track of the number of times we were told that the particular item we were about to see caused visitors to faint or fall down, and these claims are often backed up with video footage of a guests needing assistance. I don't fault them for ramping up the tension, it's a haunted house, and I'm sure many of their guests are hoping to be overcome with horror.
We entered the Ed Gein Room, outfitted with wooden planks to resemble an old barn. While thunderstorms boom, Bagans explains that the big cooking cauldron in the center of the room, and the shovel mounted above out heads, did indeed belong to Gein, the inspiration for Norman Bates. I was thinking about how well done this room was, in both creep factor and old Midwest farm feels, when I noticed the display case on the wall. There's a huge section of human skin.
We were led out to the landing, with another screen, where Bagans shared texts that went back and forth between him and porn star Jenna Jameson. Jameson had actually lived in this house with her family in the 70s when she and her brother were children. She told Bagans not to buy the property, saying that she had witnessed Satanic rituals in the basement. At this point, the RIPs were invited to descent down the staircase to the basement, site of known Satanic meetings, and the lair of a serial killer called “The Butcher”. This was the point of the most hesitation for some of the RIPs and I don't blame them. We'd been told that the basement contained The Butcher's photos.
The rest of the group was directed to “The Bela Lugosi Room”, a tiny curtained alcove that contains a mirror belonging to the actor. A young man in our group asked Julie who Lugosi was and she pointed to a painting of the Dracula actor. I was about to launch into a moment of cruel yet deserved taunting, but the man shot out of the room like he was on fire and chasing him in a house such as this would have caused trauma.
It was around this time that Julie leaned in to whisper that Bagans wasn't going to let his guests forget for one minute that he owns the place. His image and name are everywhere, from placards to videos to any ticket or card the guest receives.
The RIPs rejoined us and were oddly quiet about having spent time in a Satanic serial killer basement.
We were ushered into the Bunny Ranch Room, containing the bed on which red-faced Dennis Hof died in 2018, which was also the bed on which basketball player Lamar Odom was found unconscious in 2015. Everything in the room was Hof's. In a house dedicated to the disturbing, turning a pimp's bedroom into an attraction was the most questionable to me, but to each their peach.
We were next led into a tight little room that looked like an old-timey hospital office, tiled, with a metal desk, sink, and a bookcase filled with medical books. This is the room where once a month the museum staff hangs out, blasting The Sisters of Mercy and dyeing their hair black. Sometimes there are chips and salsa.*
There's a side door and a guest was invited to open it, which brought us to “Dr. Death” Jack Kevorkian's actual VW bus, containing his suicide machine and a rotty corpse hooked up to it. And a screen with Bagans telling us about the doctor.
Next was the Prison Room, which is divided in half by prison bars. In the front, you'll find Bagans on a screen describing the collection: photos, letters and original artwork by John Wayne Gacy and Charles Manson, Robert Rameriz mementos, and a case of items that belonged to Ted Bundy, including the rape kit found on him at the time of one of his arrests. There are a set of Manson's dentures, and, yikes, a portrait of Manson done in blood with his cremated ashes painted into the eyes. Julie said, “Manson, huh? Bet he had some stories.”
We were ushered into the study, a dark book-lined room with a 1920s record playing on the Victrola. This is the Al Capone room. We were standing on Capone's area rug and looking at an original photo of Capone and his young son. It was around this time that Julie leaned in to me and whispered that the name “Lake Titicaca” has always cracked her up.
From there we went into a tight L-shaped corridor lined with dead celebrity stuff. Sharon Tate's wedding minidress, Brandon Lee's Crow duster, Patrick Swayze's tooth. The clothes that were cut off Truman Capote upon his last visit to the hospital, and the many, many prescription pill bottles that may have landed him there. The next room contains a Ghostbusters ghost trap that, Bagans tells us, he paid $250,000 to acquire. We enter another, even smaller room. This is the James Dean Room, and Bagans tells the story of Dean's infamous Spyder race car, and that he paid $380,000 for the trans-axle of this cursed car, which was then revealed to us, hung on the wall like a crucifix near a photo of the car wreck that took Dean's life. Part of Bagan's video includes a clip of Alec Guinness discussing meeting Dean the night the young actor bought the car. Our guide asked the group, “Does anyone know who Alec Guinness was?” Well, I piped up with, “He was an English actor who was in Star-” With little encouragement, I would have added that Guinness also authored a couple of remarkably entertaining memoirs in his advanced age, but I got no encouragement at all to show-off, because when I got to the word “star”, our guide was rolling his eyes at me. “Well, yeah,” he said, clearly stopping himself from adding “dipshit” on the end there. Another guest said, “Obi-Wan Kenobe” and our guide said, “There ya go.” Okay. Well, at least I know who Bela Lugosi was.
We were taken into a short, narrow room filled with taxidermied animals and wax heads. The guide seemed ambivalent about this stuff, sort of 'well, this is here', when suddenly the whole back wall was ripped open, causing many of the guests, even Julie, to scream. I didn't, I'm cool, but it's a fun jump scare. The wall-ripper was a new guide who would take us through another part of the tour.
We were ushered into a 1930s circus themed room to meet an actual freakshow performer, John Shaw. He greeted us by ramming an electric drill up his nose, then picked a frightened woman from our group, telling her to choose any part of him and he would stick fish hooks through it. Howdy-do! She was suitably horrified, but being pressed, she said, “Ears?” And he said that was boring. “I'm gonna stick them through my eyelids!” Which he did, connecting a metal pail to the fish hook chains and ordering the woman to pour a mug full of water into the pail, which he then swung around by his eyelids. I had never seen this before and I still haven't because I covered my eyes and waited for it to be over. Shaw turned out to be a friendly, fun guy who invited questions about anything we saw in the museum. He invited the RIPs to explore the wooden circus carriage to our right while he told us about his career and all the places it's taken him. At this point, Julie, still trying to absorb the prices Bagans has paid for some items, decided to stop whispering her disbelief at me and asked Shaw, “How much is Zak Bagans worth?” She's nothing short of intrusive and it's fun. But Shaw answered right away with, “Sixty million. It's public record, so I can tell you.”
Our guide took us through a series of switchback corridors lined with life-sized clowns of the Twisty sort, and one jumped at Julie as payback for her earlier question, no doubt. We were led to a cave-like room that contained a rabbi's shawl while the RIPs were taken away for probably five minutes. It was the longest separation of our group and I missed them. When they rejoined us a video of Bagans came on, this time showing grainy security footage of Bagans and Post Malone in the Dybbuk Box room, with Bagans explaining that he and Malone were hanging out alone in the room one night, as two multimillionaires would, when they sensed evil. Malone is shown grabbing Bagans' elbow and leading him out, then telling Joe Rogan about all the bad luck he's had since encountering the box. I'll just note that Bagans name drops celebrities the way I scoop ice cream: more is better. The back of the room opened to another room, and this is where Bagans' most famous item is kept.
The Dybbuk Box is a wooden Hebrew wine box, in a glass case in the center of the room. Etched in the glass on all sides is Hebrew that I imagine are containment spells. This, along with a few other items in the museum, are introduced by the guides as a “see at your own risk, if you can't handle it, skip it” warning. I paid fifty bucks, I'm going to see everything I can for as long as I can. But we're told to keep the line moving so I saw the box for ten seconds.
The next room is so tight that we're single file. Walking around a wall, there's a pile of ugly dolls, then we're looking at the infamous evil Peggy doll. About the size of a two year-old, with a crop of blonde hair and a 60s look to her pink lips. We were instructed to say “hello” upon standing in front of Peggy, and “goodbye” when leaving, because Peggy has a permanently pissy outlook. I didn't, but from how quickly we were pushed through the room, who could blame me. There was a little altar in the back of the room where we were encouraged to leave a gift for Peggy, and what d'ya know, along with beaded jewelry, lots of people were leaving money.
We were then sent, single file, around the severed, mummified head of a Swedish man who had been executed in the 1800s.
Then, into a room containing “The Devil's Rocking Chair” from the home of a boy who had been administered to by Ed and Lorraine Warren. I really couldn't follow the story, but there were pictures of a boy who looked like he was vomiting.
The next room is bright and clean, looking like the inside of a ship cabin, and is a combination of the Titanic and Natalie Wood pieces, Wood having drowned while sailing aboard The Splendor. There's a silver mirror that belonged to the Titanic's captain, and a table from Wood's yacht.
Then on to two small rooms dedicated to a woman named Lee Sober Shapiro, a paranormal investigator who built machines for communicating with the spirits and filled her living room with them. There are Polaroid photos Shapiro took of herself just before her death. They show a frightened woman, one that was likely unhinged.
“The Demon House” of Gary, Indiana display is the unfinished basement area belonging to a family that experienced high levels of unexplained activity, including their little boy walking up walls.
There are a few items of note that I can't place now. One was Robert the Doll, which I spotted in the corner of a filled case as we were shuffling through to another room, the other was the infamous “Crying Boy” painting, in a case near the end of the tour.
From here we were lined up inside two sets of velvet ropes to wait until two other groups were led through the room, then we were directed to a maze of black walls filled with work by a surrealist artist. This led to the gift shop, a wonderland of Bagans' face. You can purchase his books, photos, t-shirts, mugs, jewelry or museum labeled water.
We were being picked up by The Giant. He had been instructed by an employee to park in the back parking lot when he'd dropped us off earlier, and he went to the same spot to wait for us, where he had his own encounter with Little Pricky. I mention this only so you know that you're entering his chicken yard.
Is the tour worth $50? Yes, I'd say it is. It's two and a half hours of non-stop entertainment. I wasn't wondering what time it was or how long we'd been there because the hours flew by. You'll see things you didn't know existed, and things that will absolutely creep you out. It's well-organized, the guides are knowledgeable and the place is stuffed with spooky items. Go see it at least once. It's a perfect Halloween choice, but going outside of October will ensure you have a more quiet visit.
*This may never happen, but let me have it.
Zak Bagans' The Haunted Museum
600 nE. Charleston Blvd.
Las Vegas
702 444-0744
https://thehauntedmuseum.com/
It Puts the Tea On Its Skin
While you're in Vegas, drop by the Halloween Emporium and Haunted Tea Room for your horror tees, Ouija board and candy corn scented candles. Seriously, where else would you find this stuff? Book a ticket if you'll be there the night of August 12th, because that's the Silence of the Lambs Tea Party, featuring Buffalo Bill's Skin Detox Tea, to drink and apply to your face as a mask. The movie will be playing and the store will be closed to the public, which means you'll get to shop without people wondering what the weirdo with the face covered in leaves is up to.
4555 S. Ft Apache Rd #106
Las Vegas, NV. 89147
(725)205-0112
https://halloween-emporium.com/
Next week: My paid subscribers have a lot to look forward to, as you're getting two postings in a row. Next Tuesday, we'll look at aliens in film while sipping a delightful Canadian cocktail. And fingers crossed we survive a literal Dark Day in history (*hack, hack, expire).
Then, your July Extra Creepy Post will show up a few days later. It's all about Autumn products and will likely trigger your inner hoarder. If you aren't in my Creepy Club of paid subscribers, just hit that button. You'll get all the Autumn Lives Here posts, and a shout-out from me.
My glorious goriest free subscribers can expect a new post on 7/25. You'll just die from all the fun!
What a great article! I wouldn't have the guts to walk through it (especially for $45), but Jennifer's descriptive observations make it seem as if I was right there.
Thank you! The museum is definitely not your average tourist attraction.