by: Kristen Anderson

Whether you’re a fan or not, you’re probably aware of Zak Bagans as a phenomenon. He’s a bombastic paranormal investigator with a hit TV show, Ghost Adventures, going into its nineteenth season this week. He’s a boastful PT Barnum-esque collector of haunted objects and oddities with an eponymous Haunted Museum in Las Vegas where he displays them. He’s known for a “Come at me, bro!” energy toward most ghosts, for attempting to yell them into proving their existence.

And I think he’s a sweetheart.

I’m not being ironic. I think Zak Bagans seems like a hell of a nice guy and that the broad strokes some people tend to paint him with brush by some really wonderful and charming attributes. If you look past his bravado, you find someone with an affable nature, emotional maturity, and a childlike enthusiasm. It’s a mix I find compelling, and it makes me want to stand up for him when people are dumping on him. He’s not perfect, he might have some personality aspects that people may describe as, forgive me, douchey, but people contain multitudes.

I acknowledge that yes, Bagans definitely does scream weird things at ghosts. Sample quote:

“I think you’re nothing but a bunch of evil cowards, that’s all you guys are!”

But there’s a method to his madness beyond just TV showmanship. He says he deliberately uses provocation as a tactic to elicit an emotional response from spirits that could result in capturing important evidence. He also makes the distinction that he’s only antagonistic to ghosts who taunt or do harm to the living, and that he would never be harsh with the ghosts of children or the innocent.

You know what? If we’re to “play ball” and operate from a place where ghosts are real and that we can communicate with them, I can understand this method even if I may not love it. He yells but he has a credo, a Boy Scouts’ pledge of sorts for a scout who earns bedazzled crosses rather than badges. There are entire episodes sans-smack-talk when they’re investigating a spot with ghosts who aren’t malicious

In contrast to his aggressive attitude towards mean ghosts, it’s worth noting that he’s extremely friendly to the eyewitnesses he speaks with at the haunted locations before going into lockdown. He puts them at ease by using their name and joking with them, nodding and validating and giving credence to their personal stories of hauntings that other people might have blown off, before parting ways with a fist bump when it’s time to get locked in to investigate said location.

Also? This guy is extremely scared. One of the most charming and surprising elements of Ghost Adventures, to me, is just how often it turns into a contest to display how scared Bagans and his co-stars get, shoving their arms in each other’s faces to show off their goosebumps and talking over each other about how scared they are. One could argue that this might be a weird flex, adding an element of one-upmanship to being scared, but I still find the admittance of fear in the first place a charming way to negate some of the drama. Wouldn’t you expect a tough guy to act like he’s not afraid of any of this stuff? Well not Zak Bagans. He sees your stereotype and he smashes it, like a ghost bro should.

But fear isn’t the only emotion Bagans feels. Sometimes he names other emotions as when he experiences them—and herein lies my point: He names them. He doesn’t identify with them. He says things like “I feel rage,” not, “I’m full of rage,” because Zak Bagans has emotional intelligence and has maybe read some helpful books or done therapy. Separating yourself from your emotions is a really useful tool and one he uses the same way as he does an EMF meter or SLS camera.

A good scientist is an objective scientist.

The flip side of the fear and emotions he experiences as a self-proclaimed empath is just good old human excitement, which flies in the face of a lot of stoic tough-guy posturing. On the recent Ghost Adventures Halloween special Horror at Joe Exotic Zoo, Bagans and the crew capture what they believe to be proof of a ghost materializing right where they ask it to—directly after they ask. It’s a cool thing to see, but even cooler is when they start jumping up and down and hugging each other in excitement.

To me, moments like these are more convincing than anything else you could do to prove that ghosts exist because it shows how real the cast members think ghosts are. It’s lovely to see people who are passionate about what they do, and even those who criticize Bagans concede that he isn’t doing this job for the cash grab—he’s truly passionate about the paranormal. He’s getting to live out his childhood dreams, he hunts ghosts for a living and has a house full of haunted artifacts. It’s like if I got to grow up and actually become a cat astronaut—it would rule. To see someone get stoked about totally nailing something they love is a nice thing! Tough guys are usually hung up on above-it-all displays of apathy, but Bagans is willing to let it all hang out. It’s endearing.

But it’s when I came to know Bagans outside the show through his social media that my affection truly bloomed. He comes off as unpretentious and goofy—a guy who’s obsessed with his dog, Gracie, and takes videos of his friends hanging out. A recent favorite Instagram story showed him recording castmate Bill Tolley taking a chomp out of a Honeycrisp apple, repeating the words “Honeycrisp” a few times like it was just fun to say, and then remarking that it hurts his teeth if he bites into one like that and noting he likes plums because “they’re a lot softer.”

This Halloween, he tweeted:

Let me ask you, when’s the last time you thought about “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat?” Does this sound like a tough guy who deserves to be taken down a peg? No, this is just a nice guy you know putting “happy place” over a pic of a golf range and telling dad jokes.

I’m also intrigued by his relationship with girlfriend Holly Madison, and how he keeps it mostly under wraps. You might think he would be showing off his hot Playmate girlfriend whenever he could, but actually, there’s very little of their relationship on display online. They were first reported to be dating in June of 2019, but there are no pictures of them together.

If, theoretically, one were to be obsessed with knowing more about Zak Bagans’ personal life, one could possibly head to the comments section of either his or Holly Madison’s Instagram posts to look for comments from the other and find cute, couple-y fire emojis or comments that make so little sense that they must be an inside joke. (One might then smile and go back to writing their pro-Bagans manifesto). Despite the temptations that clicks, likes, and internet-breaking might have for celebrities, the way Bagans uses privacy to protect his relationship strikes me as sweet.

My tone is joke-y because Zak Bagans a fun public figure and it’s insane to analyze him this closely, but the truth is that I’m a fan and have a real affection for him—and part of that is because he seems to be in on the joke. He strikes me as someone who knows who he is and doesn’t apologize for it. It takes confidence to have people joke about the way you are and remain that way, which isn’t to say he hasn’t evolved over the twelve years he’s been on our screens, but still.

He projects a certain hard-edged image, but he doesn’t mind letting us peek behind the veil to see that he’s really a softie at heart. Just like ghosts between worlds, Zak Bagans is multi-dimensional.