A COMMON EVIL

A review of Zak Bagan's Haunted Museum

From the long waivers the hosts make you sign upon entering, to the cheap Home Depot flickering light bulbs that light your way from room to room, Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum relies upon corny tricks that haven’t been novel since they were devised by B-Horror filmmakers half a century ago. Still, these are the kinds of cheap thrills one expects from a Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, along with possessed dolls and objects from notorious haunted locations including a chair so unlucky it will, like, kill you if you sit in it. However, it turns out there must not be enough haunted objects in the world to quench Bagans’ bogey-lust, for very quickly Zak Bagans needlessly sprawling museum goes from haunted to strictly morbid.

Less than an hour into our guided tour, we were led into a room dedicated to the filthy mattress upon which Lamar Odom nearly died and famous pimp Dennis Hoff completely die, then to another room containing the van in which Dr. Kevorkian helped assist dozens of terminally ill people commit suicide. There was mention of a brothel-haunting demon in the room with the mattress, but nothing outre whatsoever mentioned in the room with the van. It was simply a bizarre memorial that couldn’t have been any more out of place or distasteful. Zak Bagans seems a very confused curator indeed, equating death with ghosts. Even considering Bagans’ traditional, simple view of ghosts—the souls of the dead walking the material plane–this made no sense at all. All ghosts are dead but not all dead are ghosts. My family and I had bought our high-priced tickets ($48 at the time of writing, $79 for R.I.P. access) to experience the pseudo-supernatural, not to look at a bunch of gross, macabre mementos.

The Haunted Museum was already severely trying my ability to stomach bad taste when our goth guide led us into the Murderabilia room. On display here were genuine foot scrapings and clown paintings from various serial killers. There was a huge section dedicated to the terrible art of  Charles Manson, graciously given to the owner Zak Bagans by Manson’s grandson. Manson’s filthy night gown was on display too, framed in glass alongside his bone fragments, dentures, and ashes. This intense fascination with perverted serial killers has become so common as to be socially acceptable, though that makes it no less weird, no less perverted in and of itself. And I was already on the verge of leaving the Haunted Museum when the experience became strangely personal. As the tour guide gestured to a pair of brown crocheted underwear inside a display case, she said the name Samantha Bachynski, a woman I know through my investigative journalism. Samantha was sentenced to four life terms for helping her boyfriend murder a couple in Michigan. She was 20 and he was 27 at the time, and she said she feared for her and her family's life if she didn’t go along with his plan. She is almost 40 now and she may never be free. I know her for her art. She has MS and still manages to crochet beautiful objects and clothes. I know her white wedding dress that she made because she won’t ever be married or have kids, a life that she dreamed might once be possible. Does the work of a woman who was coerced as a confused youth into one horrific act belong alongside the work of merciless child-killers. I bet she’d be very upset if she knew of the lame place that the gift she’d made for a friend or family member has ended up. Since her incarceration she’s completely turned her life around. She may even get out of prison. If she does, she will come to this museum and snatch her underwear out of the display case and reclaim her story for herself. 

I couldn’t help but tell our young, punk tour guide about Samantha. She was clearly taken aback, as if it was the first time anyone had ever tried to engage her in genuine conversation about all the bullshit script she regurgitated day in and day out. It was then that I decided to actually leave the museum. When I burst from the museum’s exit doors, the stark Mojave light felt especially cleansing. For just as the Haunted Museum’s waiver warned, I had encountered evil there.

In his shows and movies, Zak Bagans presents himself as a homespun spiritual warrior obsessed with Good and Evil. Of course, he casts himself as a force for Good. But why? What makes Zak Good? Is it the way he enters decrepit buildings and yells at the spirits he imagines there? Is it the way he collects and haphazardly displays objects related to the worst moments of people’s lives for personal profit? I can’t think of a single theology that would define these acts as Good, except for maybe Satanism, and even that’s a stretch. Sure, Zak does little prayers on his ghost hunts and claims to be a Christian, but like so many modern Christians he seems to hold far more reverence for Mamon than he does Jesus Christ.  A ghoul of the highest degree, and a world class capitalist, Bagans harnesses the pain, sorrow and horror of human tragedy for his own gain. Yes, it’s true, evil does lurk within Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum. Zak himself.