Latest news with #ZakBagans
Eater
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Eater
Welcome to Weird, Wild, Wonderful Nevada
To many outsiders, Nevada is just the desert landmass that surrounds the glamorous, neon-drenched dreamscape of Las Vegas — a state whose name is mispronounced as often as it's misunderstood (it's Nev- add -uh). Others know Nevada to be ghost country, not just for its literal ghost towns, but for the apparitions rumored to haunt its century-old hotels and saloons. The state is, of course, the backdrop to Area 51 and (allegedly) classified extraterrestrial activity. It's the collective memory of mushroom clouds blossoming over the Mojave Desert. It's the rootin'-tootin' Wild West. These images all coalesce into the tapestry of a state unified by the weird, wild, and wonderful. All of this to say, Nevada isn't just drawn to the strange — it depends on it. Its history, infrastructure, and identity have been stitched together in secrecy and by speculation, which, in turn, have shaped the state's appetite for the uncanny, the campy, and the downright surreal. I've lived in the Battle Born State since I was 14. Zak Bagans's haunted museum sits just down the street from my house. The bar where my friends and I regularly celebrate birthdays glows with Atomic Age memorabilia. My weekend road trips include renegade art exhibits of upturned cars and spectral recreations of The Last Supper , often bookended by stops at alien-themed gas stations and beef jerky stands. Here, roadside restaurants and watering holes serve as waypoints and mythmakers, where strangers trade ghost stories over hotel bar counters, gather in a restaurant near Area 51 to compare unexplainable night sky sightings, and refuel with cherry-steeped beer from a remote brewery that alone can justify an hourslong drive. My previous road trips throughout the state have featured stops at attractions that are pointedly bizarre — like artist Ugo Rondinone's psychedelic Day-Glo monoliths that comprise Seven Magic Mountains. I've journeyed to many geologically surreal destinations: Take, for example, the soaring spires and person-wide slot canyons that rise from the pale siltstone and clay shale of Cathedral Gorge State Park. For the past decade, I have been telling my friends that next year is the year that I'll join them on a silica-coated dry lake bed managed by the Bureau of Land Management for Burning Man, where some 70,000 people erect a city of tents, temples, and flame-spewing octopuses every August leading up to Labor Day. 'The West has long been a mirage — the draw of exploration, ambition, and self-invention shimmering like water: imminently ahead but just out of reach.' Nevadans may be uniquely predisposed to look for things that are weird , says Michael Green, chair of UNLV's history department. Consider the boom-and-bust mining towns of early Nevada and the resulting transience that lends itself to ghost stories. There's Area 51 and the patchwork of lore regarding what secretly goes on beyond its gates, just 80 miles outside of Las Vegas. Even today, more than 80 percent of the state's land is federally owned. 'There is some degree of secrecy associated with federal land; there is also a degree of secrecy associated with the mob,' Green says. Between the 1940s and 1970s, the mob — more specifically, the American Mafia — exerted sweeping control over Las Vegas casinos: It built them, ran them, and controlled the flow of money both on and off the books. The mob's goings-on were generally limited to verbal agreements and handshake deals, with documents minimally used and even written in code. 'There are so many things that have been done behind the scenes, under the table, that we figured there has to be more to the story,' Green says. Nevada's preoccupation with the weird isn't just about secrets; it's also about the inherent wistfulness of the American Southwest. There's the nostalgia shaped by the open road, Route 66, and cowboy iconography — all shorthand within pop culture for individualism and escape. For longtime Nevadans, that nostalgia may be more textured, based on yearning for a slower pace or the do-it-yourself era of Las Vegas before corporate monoculture took over the Strip. More broadly, the West has long been a mirage — the draw of exploration, ambition, and self-invention shimmering like water: imminently ahead but just out of reach. In April, I traveled 479 miles to see the weirdest and wildest lore-steeped sites in Nevada. Flying 80 miles an hour down the 95 — past sun-hardened rock faces and thorny desert scrub — I blearily had visions of making the same trip by foot and on horseback. In Tonopah, Nevada, I read an epitaph for a pair of brothers buried in the cemetery next to the Clown Motel: two boys who grew up in Montenegro, traveled to the shores of the Adriatic Sea, then boarded a steamship to journey to the United States — only to be killed by a runaway mine cart 200 feet beneath the desert town. I stood in the shade of the Mission Revival-style railroad depot in Rhyolite, now a ghost town, where fortune-seekers arrived by train in 1907 with the promise of building a life in the state's biggest mining camp — only to board that same train just one year later when the town began to decline. I traced my fingers over the bullet holes in the walls of Pioneer Saloon in Goodsprings, Nevada, and sensed the presence of the miner who lost his life over a poker game gone wrong. This highway-honed wistfulness has become an integral part of Nevada's folklore. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Nevada was in the thick of its mining boom, stories abounded of rich deposits gone lost. These narratives often took the form of an old prospector who emerged from the wilderness, unable to recall where he found the treasure, historian Ronald M. James writes in Monumental Lies: Early Nevada Folklore of the Wild West. Others involved 'a dog running off, leading its owner on an untrodden path, or a donkey kicking a rock that reveals the gleam of gold.' This trope is behind the apocryphal story of Jim Butler, the prospector whose accidental discovery of the Mizpah Ledge silver vein led to Tonopah's founding: One of his donkeys wandered off, and when he picked up a rock to throw at it, he was struck by the stone's unusual weight. If I wanted to better understand my state's fascination with the weird, I reasoned that I should follow Butler's path to what is now Tonopah, for a stay at the Mizpah Hotel. I want to be clear: I don't believe in ghosts. But that doesn't mean the idea of them doesn't scare me. So I passed on the opportunity to book the Mizpah Hotel's Lady in Red Suite — a room that had been the private quarters of a sex worker, known in thinly veiled misogynistic lore as the 'Lady in Red,' who was murdered by a jealous client more than a century ago and is rumored to wander the halls since. 'Visitors report seeing her. Some staff have seen her. She really likes to frequent the fifth floor,' says Chavonn Smith, the front desk manager of the Mizpah. 'She's not an angry ghost. But she does not like women very much.' Instead, I booked a room where my bed was an old-timey wooden wagon. Feigning bravery, I joined a ghost tour that began in the hotel's turn-of-the-century lobby — marked by burgundy patterned carpet, frosted-glass chandeliers, and Victorian camelback settees that seem made for collapsing onto should any of the basement's rumored inhabitants appear. Only when we reached the unfinished floor that once held the hotel's safe did our guide tell us the story of three enterprising miners who tunneled beneath the hotel and emerged through the bottom of the vault. After securing the hotel's riches, one of the miners turned on the others. The next morning, the hotel manager unlocked the safe to find the money gone — and two dead miners left in its place. Visitors still recount catching glimpses of the betrayed miners at the hotel bar, their heads translucent and capped with carbide lamp helmets. Sure, these tales are tall. But in Nevada, ghost stories are more than just marketing or tourism fodder. In Monumental Lies, James writes that from their earliest days, Nevadans have entertained the idea of ghosts. Long before mining towns spun tales of haunted saloons, Indigenous communities of the Great Basin — like the Paiute and Shoshone, and the Washoe near Lake Tahoe — shared stories of ghosts that warned of danger and spirits tied to sacred waters and ancestral places. As James notes, 'much was appropriated but then confused, while other traditions were imagined and projected onto the cultures of the American Indians' — a tangle that shaped the state's early folklore into a mix of belief, invention, and sometimes mockery of its earliest inhabitants. 'Tonopah has a population of about 2,000 people — 6,000 if you count the clowns.' What makes Nevada's ghost stories feel different — weirder, even — than those of other allegedly haunted states is how deeply they're rooted in its roads. In much the same way that cities like Tonopah, Goldfield, and Virginia City were built on the promise of silver, so too are they now buoyed by haunted tourism. 'For many today, a pivotal way to approach the past is by contemplating its spiritual residue,' writes James. Stories like those of the betrayed miners — tales of greed, ambition, and unresolved endings — are part of how Nevadans make sense of a landscape shaped by boomtowns, busts, and disappearances. In a place where so much has been hidden or lost, locals and travelers continue to try to conjure spirits that may or may not have reason to linger. Tonopah has a population of about 2,000 people — 6,000 if you count the clowns. The 33-room Clown Motel opened in 1985 with a modest personal collection of 150 clown statues. When former art director Hame Anand took over as the motel's CEO in 2019, he ran with the theme — adding thousands of clown murals, portraits, marionettes that probably come alive at night, masks that will almost certainly fuse to your face if you get too close, and one clown statue that I swear I saw wink at me. The whole thing is galling, baffling, deeply unsettling — and, naturally, a must-see tourist destination. The motel's property backs up to another supposedly haunted locale: the town's old cemetery. Here, century-old headstones are updated by the Central Nevada Historical Society to include causes of death. Wandering through the copse of wooden crosses and metal tombstones tells the story of small-town Nevada in the early 1900s — where the Marojevech brothers failed to halt a runaway mine cart in the Belmont Mine, where local hero Big Bill Murphy was killed rescuing others in a fire in 1911, and where the 'Tonopah plague' caused the deaths of 56 people in a four-month span in 1905. It's a ledger of early Nevada, an undercurrent of reality beneath the honky-tonk myth of the Wild West. Before hitting the road, I had lunch at Tonopah Brewing Co., where the walls are lined with awards for brewmaster Edward Nash's tart fruited sours. But the food here is a sleeper hit, far better than one may expect from a brewery in Middle of Nowhere, Nevada. A French dip sandwich piles tender roast beef onto a pretzel roll slathered with horseradish and flanked by a glimmering side of jus. Molten fried cheese curds beg to be dunked into their accompanying ranch dressing. A Nashville-style hot fried chicken sandwich gets topped with a stack of cooling pickles and coleslaw. It all paired well with a flight of beers — the Cherry 51 witbier, brewed with cherries, and the Honey Wheat ale stood out as my favorites. Driving back down to Las Vegas, I stopped in Goldfield (population: 231), with my sights set on the International Car Forest of the Last Church. Weird art in Nevada is hardly limited to the tech scion-curated display in Black Rock City. Dozens of junk cars, school buses, and ice cream trucks are half-buried like offerings, their hoods entombed in the hard earth, tail lights propped up like grave markers, chassis exposed like bodies after exhumation. These cars await wandering artists who will anoint them with spray paint. Is this a meditation on decay? A post-industrial necropolis? A bold indictment of consumerism's terminal velocity? Or — and stay with me here — is it just extremely funny to bury a minivan in the desert and hand out cans of Krylon like communion wafers? Art is subjective. Seeking more weird desert art, I ventured to Rhyolite (population: 0), a ghost town once so destined to be the largest mining operation in the state that a railroad was built in 1906 to connect it to Las Vegas. A Mission Revival depot soon followed, servicing the 50 freight cars that ran per day. But within months of its completion, more people were leaving Rhyolite than arriving, according to the Bureau of Land Management. Just downhill from the depot — and the crumbling remains of the bank and schoolhouse — lies the Goldwell Open Air Museum. Thirteen spectral figures, cloaked in gauzy white plaster, loom over the sand in a ghostly parody of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper . Rooftops peek out of the ground as if they're being swallowed by quicksand. A 25-foot woman made out of pink cinder blocks — with yellow brick accents to indicate both her blond locks and pubic hair — stares silently into the distance. Nevada's desert is part excavation site, part sandbox: a squared-off plot where some come to unearth buried histories, while others come to play — shaping odd monuments before the wind levels them flat. Nowhere is that tension more vivid than in Rhyolite, where past ambition and present-day absurdity share the same forsaken earth. Alongside its ghost stories and surrealist desert art, Nevada also deals its own brand of extraterrestrial weird. Driving south from Rhyolite into Las Vegas brought me to the Area 51 Alien Center in Amargosa Valley — a Brat -green gift shop/gas station/frozen yogurt cafe decorated in cardboard clip art aliens. It sells alien-face thongs; green-handed back scratchers; vials of soil allegedly sourced from Area 51; 'Interstellar Sandwiches,' including a triple-decker club and drippy 'Alien Burgers' with sauteed mushrooms; and, for $5, a turban-clad Alien Zoltar, who predicts that something lost will turn up very soon. This is the kitschy end of Nevada's alien fixation — part roadside spectacle, part intergalactic fever dream — joined by the E.T. Fresh Jerky bungalow in Lincoln County, the Outpost 51 Alien Museum in Boulder City, and the Alien Fresh Jerky compound just over the border in Baker, California, where a full-size UFO hotel is under construction. The next day, I drove up Route 375 — better known as the Extraterrestrial Highway. The official road marker bearing that name, perched atop two 12-foot-tall poles, had previously been stickered into illegibility. The highway winds past the legendary Black Mailbox, rumored to be a drop site for alien communications, and the arched, galvanized metal Alien Research Center fronted by a towering metal figure. (I'm pretty sure the latter is a gift shop, though it's never been open when I've passed through.) Follow the road and eventually you'll drive through the gates of Area 51. But about 25 miles before that, you'll arrive at the Little A'Le'Inn in Rachel, Nevada (population: 48). Little A'Le'Inn has become a haven for the alien-obsessed, but its namesake stems from a typo, not anything out of this universe. After buying the Rachel Bar and Grill in 1988, owner Connie West tells me that her parents intended to name the cafe the 'Little Ale'Inn' — a nod to the ales they served. But a printer's error on the sign — an errant apostrophe — turned it into a name that just happened to rhyme with 'alien,' West says, around the same time Las Vegas reporter George Knapp was breaking Bob Lazar's now-infamous claims about working on an extraterrestrial spacecraft near Area 51. For West, the name feels almost like fate. Before Matty Roberts' viral Facebook event, 'Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us,' thrust the Little A'Le'Inn into the national spotlight, the restaurant had already cultivated its own community — one made up of UFO chasers and roadtrippers, or, as West puts it, 'people who want to travel, to see places, to get off the pavement and the beaten path.' Visitors come with photographs of their own UFO sightings in hand. They mail West Polaroids and handwritten testimonials, many of which are taped on the restaurant's gallery walls. The photos make me think about the unwavering light I saw bobbing over Great Basin National Park last summer. If I had snapped a photo, would it have made West's wall? Beyond the displays of photos and Area 51 memorabilia is a smattering of mismatched tables and chairs, a bar where customers sign dollar bills to be suspended from the ceiling, and a gift shop filled with bumper stickers and shot glasses ('Believe,' one reads). Outside, the restaurant is bordered by alien statues. A light-up flying saucer was a parting gift from the Galaxy Quest home-video release party, which took place in Little A'Le'Inn's parking lot. A tow truck suspends a satellite dish-sized metal UFO — plastered with stickers from travelers who've passed through — donated by a friend of West's father, Joe Travis. West says that a visiting artist asked for permission to paint on a blank wall. The artist left a purple mural of dead-eyed aliens, some engaged with humans in an interspecies kiss, that glows under black light. Over 'Saucer Burgers' and buttery white bread grilled cheese sandwiches, customers who commute among the Southwest's national parks — Zion to Yosemite is a common trail — pick up easy conversation at Little A'Le'Inn, comparing stories of unexplainable sightings in the night sky. West says it's this sense of openness and shared experience that has allowed the restaurant to continue to thrive. 'We have a unique place where you're free to communicate with each other [without judgment],' she says. 'I think that's why we have been in business so long.' Over time, Little A'Le'Inn became a nexus for weird Nevada experiences. There's a warmth in the conversations that happen here, knitted among friends and strangers — of strange bright lights in the sky, of encounters in the barren stretches of Nevada's night, of government secrets they seek to uncover. 'I personally believe that if you look up and you look out, it's too vast,' West tells me. 'There are strange things in the sky, things I can't explain. Hopefully, there's something else besides us.' In the 1950s, patrons at Atomic Liquors in Downtown Las Vegas looked up and out, too. They would gather on the roof of the city's first freestanding bar with cocktails in hand and watch nuclear test explosions bloom on the horizon, as if they were fireworks instead of fallout. Back then, atomic tourism was part of the spectacle — proof of progress and power. Today, that bar leans into its strange past, its walls lined with Atomic Age paraphernalia and standees of Miss Atomic Bomb in her mushroom cloud swimsuit. It's kitschy, yes, but also quietly haunting — a reminder that Nevada's fascination with the unknown has revolved around the existential as much as the extraterrestrial. In Nevada, weird isn't an outlier, it's the vernacular. From atomic tourism to ghost hotels, alien sightings to art cars, and all the tall tales of the Wild West, the state doesn't just tolerate the bizarre: It builds around it, sells tickets to it, leaves the lights on for it. Maybe all the UFOs were just weather balloons. Maybe the ghosts were just creaks in the night. And maybe that clown never winked at me. The stories here are strange, and the sights often stranger. But they help make sense of a place long defined by what slips through fingers — silver, water, time, truth. 'From the earliest days, the West was wilder, harder hitting, harder drinking, harder ... everything ... than elsewhere. We know this to be true because legends confirm it,' writes James. Call it mythmaking or marketing, but out here, weird works. Sign up for our newsletter.
Daily Mail
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
The chilling truth about the most haunted item in the WORLD that 'cursed' Post Malone
The Dybbuk box - also known as 'the world's most haunted object' - is said to have cursed beloved singer Post Malone back in 2018. The chilling artifact is currently kept under lock and key at a haunted museum in Las Vegas run by Ghost Adventures' paranormal investigator Zak Bagans. It appears on the surface to be nothing more than a vintage wine cabinet but inside it is said to hold a dybbuk - an evil spirit that can invade and possess a living person, per US Ghost Adventures. The object has become so recognizable that it even inspired the popular 2012 horror film The Possession. During the Ghost Adventurers' New York ComicCon panel, Bagans described Malone's visit to the museum in June 2018. The ghost hunter said that during the spooky tour, he and the singer, now 29, decided to go into the room with the box before removing the protective case. 'It is a very powerful item,' Bagans, 48, said, per People. 'I didn't want to open it, I just wanted to take the case off. 'To make a long story short, we began hearing things.' The pair soon began hearing what sounded like a 'little girl's voice' and Bagan said Malone initially sprinted down the stairs to get away from the exhibit. But eventually, upon returning to the room, Bagans said that still 'something wasn't right.' 'I remember putting my hand on the box and at that exact moment, Post put his hand on my shoulder,' Bagans recalled. 'At that moment, it was like something came through the box and into him, and I began shaking, I began trembling. 'This is kind of embarrassing, I began crying, I began screaming, and this is when he got me out of the room forcefully.' In the aftermath, Malone claimed to see a dark shadowy figure lingering outside. And, the next day, the singer allegedly sent Bagan an eerie photo of a massive bruise on his arm. 'Mind you, Post is a person we've investigated with, he's a great debunker - very, very smart,' Bagans said. In Jewish Folklore, a dybbuk is a disembodied human spirit - due to past sins - that wanders restlessly until it can feel safe again in the body of a human person. The word 'dybbuk' came from the Hebrew root 'davek,' which means to cling or to cleave. The box initially appeared in 2003 when Kevin Mannis, an antique store owner, bought a vintage wine box from a 103-year-old Holocaust survivor on eBay, per US Ghost Adventures. After a string of suspicious hauntings, the box was placed back on the site and bought by a man named Jason Haxton. He eventually also felt the horrors of the box and buried it in Missouri before sharing it on Bagan's show.
Daily Mail
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Playboy star claims ex cheated on her with SEVEN women
Playboy star Holly Madison accused her ex-boyfriend Zak Bagans of infidelity with at least seven women, amid their recent split. Madison, 45, who rose to fame as one of Hugh Hefner's girlfriends and a main cast member on The Girls Next Door series, shared a number of Instagram Stories claiming the Ghost Adventures star, 48, cheated on her. Taking to her social media over the weekend with a photo of a swimming pool, she wrote, 'It's a perfect day for me and not my ex who I just found out was cheating on me with at least three other girls.' 'Never too late to find out! Lol,' the star — who had an on/off again romance with Zak — added. She later updated her followers, writing, 'Wait. The count is now up to four girls. And they all have major receipts.' 'Let's see what this number gets up to by the end of the day. Feel free to place bets I'll keep you posted,' she wrote. She later returned with a new tally, writing, 'It's up to five girls now!' In yet another post, Holly wrote: 'The number is up to 7 women with receipts now, for those keeping track.' In the following post, she shared an image of Costco, writing, 'Some people were cheating in bulk.' She didn't specify how she learned about Bagans' alleged infidelity. In a TikTok video posted on May 10, the former Girls Next Door star further discussed the cheating allegations against her ex, filming herself while lying on a bed. 'My fantasy "I'm bored" scenario would be all the girls my most recent ex cheated with just filling me in. I need the lore,' she wrote over the clip. YouTube content creator Trisha Paytas commented, 'I couldn't imagine cheating on literally the perfect woman.' Madison replied, 'Thank you Trish.' After dating since 2019, their relationship ended earlier this year. She confirmed their split on her podcast in March. 'Zak and I broke up for good, for good. I know we've been very off and on,' she revealed on her podcast. 'Yeah, it was very off and on for the course of the like five-and-a-half years we were together. We were very off and on for the past year, very much.' 'So we broke up and I mean unfollowed on social media, which we've never unfollowed each other before through all the breakups.' The pair previously reconciled in 2023 amid their on/off again relationship. Holly and Zak first sparked a romance after Holly visited Zak's Haunted Museum in Las Vegas in May 2019 although they had known each other for years before that. Holly and Zak have kept their relationship private, rarely being photographed together. Earlier this month Holly opened up about life as one of Hefner's girlfriends, and what she did and didn't like about it when they were behind closed doors. The former The Girls Next Door star dished on her sex life with the Playboy founder and revealed she wasn't crazy about group bedroom activities. 'Well, it's a very different story between when we were just by ourselves than with everybody else in the room,' she said on the In Your Dreams Podcast with Owen Thiele. 'Everybody else in the room, no. That was disgusting. I hated it. I made it very known I hated it,' she declared. However their one-on-one time was different. 'if it was just me and him, it was a lot more normal than you would think.' Regarding the 50-year age different between the Hefner and his bevy of beautiful girlfriends, the reality star said, 'I think everybody has this real horror story of how gross an old man's body must be.' 'I feel like there was a time when I couldn't post anything without some dumbass in the comments like, "Oh, old balls," or something like that and look, maybe some people's balls do get old and nasty, but I've never seen such a thing.' Madison was Hefner's 'number one girlfriend' on TGND from 2001 until she left in 2008. Hefner died in 2017 at age 91. Madison has been able to turn her time at the mansion into a viable career that helps her support herself and her two children with jobs hosting The Playboy Murders and Lethally Blonde. Her parents, obviously know about her time with Hefner, but her children, Forest, about nine, and Rainbow, about six, don't. She shares her kids with ex-husband Pasquale Rotella. 'They don't know anything about it. They're very sheltered. They go to a very sheltered school. Their dad hates all that stuff, so he doesn't talk about it, but also kids that age have no idea what that is,' she explained.
New York Times
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘WrestleMania 41,' Plus 8 Things to Watch on TV this Week
Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that air or stream this week, April 14-20. Details and times are subject to change. They're baaaaaack. The next installment of 'Ghost Adventures' is here. In a hair-raising two-hour special, paranormal investigators Zak Bagans, Aaron Goodwin, Jay Wasley and Billy Tolley confront mysterious occurrences and possibly supernatural entities lurking within the walls of the suburban house where the 1982 cult-classic film 'Poltergeist' was filmed. Wednesday at 10 p.m. on Discovery and streaming Thursday on Discovery+ and Max. Adapted from the original British comedy and now in its fourth season, 'Ghosts' follows a young couple after they inherit a dilapidated estate — but they soon discover there's much more than just mice and mold hiding in the shadows. With a few trapped souls in their midst, the couple finds that running a bread-and-breakfast is more complicated than they'd originally thought. Thursday on CBS. This next show introduces a different kind of haunted house into the mix: a sterile suburban home with white walls and no personality. Through clever renovations, house flippers and skilled designers — Jonathan Knight, a member of the boy band New Kids on the Block and host of HGTV's 'Farmhouse Fixer,' among them — resurrect a set of drab, identical homes as they compete for bragging rights and the highest appraisal on 'Rock the Block.' The sixth season premieres Monday on HGTV at 9 p.m. and streaming Tuesday on Discovery+ and Max. Field trips and life lessons. Quinta Brunson's heartwarming Emmy-winning ABC sitcom 'Abbott Elementary' will conclude its fourth season this week with a class trip to the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia, Pa. (The report cards are in: The show has already been renewed for a fifth.) Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. on ABC and streaming Thursday on Hulu. Who better to go searching for unidentified flying objects than a snobbish TV host and a reserved extraterrestrial enthusiast? Set in the 1980s, 'Project UFO' is a new limited series from Poland inspired by an alleged close encounter — with an alluring 'The X-Files' meets 'Stranger Things' kind of flare. (Though it shares the same name, this series is not to be confused with 'Project U.F.O.' from 1978.) Wednesday on Netflix. Aerospace innovation, a dark past and the American dream. 'Government Cheese' stars David Oyelowo as Hampton Chambers, a family man running from the expectations of others in a complex, yet slightly quirky, rendition of sunny suburban Los Angeles in the late-1960s. Wednesday on Apple TV+. Idealized but far from idyllic. While some may find his methods questionable, Nathan Fielder's 'The Rehearsal' tries to, well, rehearse various scenarios with various outcomes through elaborate simulations. Fielder brings back the show for a second season, along with a new set of hypotheses and closed courses to explore the complexities of life. Practice makes perfect, as they say. Sunday at 10:30 p.m. on HBO. 'The Carters: Hurts to Love You' reveals the private lives of the Carter family as they confront the profound, devastating impacts of fame. Centered around the singer Aaron Carter (who unexpectedly died in 2022 at 34) and Nick Carter, Aaron's older brother and a member of the Backstreet Boys, this intimate, two-part documentary shares their story through the eyes of Aaron's twin, Angel Carter Conrad. Streaming Tuesday on Paramount+. Finish him! Rivals, rebels and metallic spandex — are you not entertained? 'WrestleMania 41' is set to take control of Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas for two days of nonstop mayhem, with the most anticipated matchup expected to be between John Cena, a 16-time world champion, and Cody Rhodes, the current prevailing championship belt-holder. Can Cena add one more title to his name before he says his final farewell and retires from the ring? Streaming live Saturday and Sunday at 7 p.m. on Peacock.
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Ghost Adventures' Aaron Goodwin's Wife Arrested After Alleged Murder-For-Hire Plot
'Ghost Adventures' fans were shocked on Tuesday, March 11, when they learned that reality star 's wife was arrested for allegedly plotting to have him killed. On March 6, his wife, , was arrested for soliciting to commit murder and conspiring to commit murder, according to Nevada inmate records. On March 6, Victoria, 32, was arrested for soliciting to commit murder and conspiring to commit murder, according to Nevada inmate records in Clark County. She is being held on $100K bail and is expected to make her first court appearance on Tuesday, March 11, when the news of her arrest started making headlines. The news was first reported by TMZ, who stated that police found messages from her phone to an inmate in a Florida prison. These text messages laid the groundwork for the alleged murder-for-hire plot, with one of the alleged text messages reportedly reading: 'Am I a bad person? Because I chose to end his existence. Not divorce.' The first episode of the paranormal reality show started airing on October 17, 2008. On the show, paranormal investigator Zak Bagans leads his team of co-investigators to investigate haunted locations across the U.S. Billy Tolley and Aaron Goodwin were present from the beginning, while Nick Groff left the show in 2014 and Jay Wasley joined in 2009. As of 2025, there were 25 seasons released, as well as 274 episodes. There are also an additional 53 specials that featured everything from Joe Exotic's 'Tiger King' zoo to celebrity appearances from stars like Loretta Lynn to Post Malone. According to TMZ, Victoria gave the Florida inmate details about his location and filming times in California, where he and the crew are currently working on the next season. Law enforcement officials reportedly told the outlet that she had set aside $11,515 to pay the alleged hitman and seemed to be under the belief that he had carried out the task. In one alleged text message, she asked, 'He's asleep right now in the hotel room … I need to know what's going on. Can I get an update. Was it done?' This alleged murder-for-hire plot seemingly occurred back in October, but fortunately, it looks like Aaron is still very much alive. It is unclear what went wrong in the alleged plot against his life, but police say that there were specific messages about a $2,500 upfront payment. It is unclear if she did pay that sum at this time. Although the alleged plot against the 'Ghost Adventures' reality star's life happened in October, it was not discovered until corrections officers found the inmate's contraband phone at the Florida prison and discovered the text messages. When questioned, Victoria denied that she wanted to have her husband killed and said that she had been fantasizing about living a life without her husband. She also reportedly told police that she did not remember sending those text messages. When they questioned her about sending money to the Florida inmate, Victoria apparently told them that she thought that the money was being used for cell phones and admitted that she and Aaron had been going through marital trouble at the time. The face of 'Ghost Adventures,' Zak Bagans, told TMZ that it is an 'emotional time' for Aaron and that he and the team are trying to give him all of the love and support he needs as the crew finishes up the next season of the reality show that has been running for close to two decades. Goodwin also spoke to the outlet, confirming that he had married Victoria in August 2022 at the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland after their marital plans had been delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. He said that he thought he was in a 'happy marriage' and was both 'devastated' and 'blindsided' by the turn of events. Victoria is currently being held on $100K bail and is in police custody. Her first court appearance is on Tuesday, March 11.
