Recently I took a team of people with me to the Amargosa Hotel in Death Valley Junction in California so we could investigate the paranormal activity that reportedly goes on there. I had been to the Amargosa Hotel previously, in 2006, when I was filming with the Criss Angel Mind Freak show, but the difference between that experience and the one I just had was worlds apart. In a word, this experience was more intense, by far!
What follows is the entire story of our investigation, broken down into a 5 part series that will post Monday through Friday this week. On the last day I’ll post the video log of our adventure.
Meeting Maury
In early 2010, I received a call from a woman named Maury Mootz who told me she was a paranormal investigator and paranormal coordinator for the Amargosa Hotel. She had found me on the internet because I had been out to Amargosa before when the Criss Angel show asked me to walk around the Amargosa and be filmed for their episode entitled Celebrity Séance. She wanted to talk to me about my experiences out there. We chatted for a bit on the phone and decided to get together to talk about it.
We met at Starbucks in June 2010 for a chat about what I experienced there. Maury was very familiar with the history of Amargosa and had been out there doing investigations with various groups for a while, so when I mentioned some of the spirits that I encountered out there, she was able to confirm my accuracy for me. I mentioned that I’d love to take my own team out there and do a proper investigation because when I went for the Criss Angel show we didn’t get to spend much time in any one place, nor did we have time to do a proper investigation. Instead we were walked quickly through the hotel, spending no more than 5-10 minutes in any one room. It wasn’t enough time to make a lot of contact with the energies there. Plus, at the time I filmed for them, I was a very new and inexperienced medium. I’ve been curious about how things would go now that I’m more experienced.
Maury invited me to bring a team to Amargosa with her and do a more in-depth investigation. I was super excited! The only problem was that we’d have to wait until the weather cooled down. Death Valley temperatures can reach the 120’s and higher in the summer, so we targeted October as a good month to give it a go.
Deciding to Go
The only thing holding me back a little was some trepidation about encountering the one negative energy I had initially detected at Amargosa 4 years prior. I didn’t know a whole lot about him, but I knew he was a low vibrational being who had done some horrible things while he was alive. As a pretty high vibrational person, I wasn’t sure I wanted to open up to such an energy. When I discussed my plan to investigate the Amargosa with some other intuitive friends of mine, they all thought I was crazy to open myself up to communicating with an energy that foul. But I really wanted the opportunity to try my hand again so I pushed aside my fears and decided it would be fun, interesting, and safe.
On June 18, however, I was visited in the middle of the night by the entity at Amargosa and spent 20 minutes fighting with it astrally as it tried to pull me out of my body for what nefarious purpose I can only imagine. I was very upset to have encountered him as I had thought he was confined to Amargosa. I called Maury to discuss what happened and was shocked to discover she had been attacked on the same night as me. She also confirmed that he can travel when there is an energetic connection, which we had apparently established. I didn’t like the idea that he “knew” about me and knew I was coming to see him. But I wasn’t deterred in my plans and decided we were going in.
I met with Maury again in September 2010 to start making plans. I asked her again if she felt it was safe for me to go out to Amargosa and engage with the energies there. She said, “A few months ago I would have said yes. Now I’m not so sure.” She proceeded to tell me about an experience she had where she was taken over and influenced by the entity at Amargosa. In all her time there that had never happened to her before. She also said the activity there was picking up and other psychics were having some pretty horrible and intense experiences and leaving in the middle of the night. I was nervous, but still determined. I decided I knew enough psychic self defense to prevent anything like that from happening to me. I was wrong, as you will soon find out.
Assembling my team
I thought long and hard about what kind of people I wanted to take with me on the investigation. Maury is a psychic and also an investigator, but she decided that during my investigation she would not open herself up and instead stay very grounded so she could make sure the rest of us were psychically safe. Maury was in charge of our investigation and our psychic security. She had all the cameras, EMFs, audio recorders, and other paraphernalia we’d need to properly conduct an investigation.
I was going to be the primary intuitive on the investigation, ready and willing to open myself up to communicate and interact with the energies at the hotel and try to channel as much information as I could for Maury to confirm. As a medium, I’ve interacted with many deceased energies and I knew exactly how to open myself up.
I also wanted to bring someone who was not open, someone who was a skeptic and not easily influenced by paranormal energy. I needed an alpha male, someone who could easily stand against the Amargosa entity and not cower. And I needed a physically strong person with tactical experience to handle our physical security. I immediately thought of my friend, Dana Richardson, who is all of these things. I told him what I had planned, told him he’d be skulking around a haunted hotel in the middle of the night and making sure none of us were injured, possessed, or killed and he was in before I finished asking him. He’s a good friend. 😉
I also asked my friend, Pam Shinkle, to come with me for moral support and back up. Pam has a really strong energy (she’s sort of an alpha female) and she can be super intimidating when she needs to be. I knew her friendship, loyalty, and support would come in handy if anything happened to me. She is a super smart woman as well, and I trusted her to keep an eye on me if bad things went down. She also agreed immediately to go out there and support me.
I asked two other guy friends to come along. One was a super skeptic with a really scientific mind, but he lived in another state and couldn’t get the time off work. The other guy was involved in emergency management and was also somewhat intuitive and I thought he’d be great to have around in case of emergency, but he was also out of town and couldn’t come with us. I wanted one more person to go with me but had run out of obvious options. And I wanted a back-up intuitive who could help confirm what I was picking up. I didn’t want to rely on Maury as she had decided to stay closed.
As the day approached I still didn’t have another intuitive who I felt comfortable bringing with me. It’s not safe to bring just anyone and tell them to open up. They need experience with psychic self defense and controlling and managing their intuition in order to safely engage with energies this strong.
I was talking to my friend, Matty Blumenthal, who is strongly intuitive but largely untrained. He was one of the people telling me I was nuts to go out there given what had already happened to me. Then I found out he was going to be in town around the time we were doing our investigation and I invited him to come. Logically this was the wrong move entirely. Matty knew little of psychic self defense and it was wrong of me to ask him, but intuitively I was getting a strong urge to bring him along. I wasn’t sure why my guides were so insistent that I bring him, but I trusted them. Bringing Matty along turned out to be a really smart move. That one decision probably saved two lives.
Erin and I had discussed her Amargosa adventures during the few months leading up to the trip. I had concluded based on what she had told me that only a truly insane person would go out of his or her way to get involved in this situation. I told her this no less than 1,418 times. As I consider myself reasonably crazy, and eager to make the transition to full-blown straitjacket lunacy, I made sure to seize the opportunity when she invited me to tag along. Like her, I knew my going was an Eiffel Tower-sized mistake from any sort of objective standpoint. I also shared her intuitive sense that my choice to participate would somehow turn out to be a good move, and I really wanted to test myself intuitively. Little did I know what I was in for. — Matty
Whole Series:
Amargosa Investigation – Part 1
Amargosa Investigation – Part 2
Amargosa Investigation – Part 3
Amargosa Investigation – Part 4
Amargosa Investigation – Part 5
The Team
Dana Richardson, Pam Shinkle, and Erin Pavlina
Matty Blumenthal
