The Bagans Chronicles

What Even Is This Place?

For all its glitz and glamour, the last time I was in Las Vegas in summer 2024, the most bang I got for my buck was a virtual reality ride at a mall. We had driven in from Arizona on the Sinisterhood Full Moon Energy tour, stopping briefly at a McDonald’s in Yuma where a woman with an AK-47-wielding cherub tattooed on her neck passed our order into the rented SUV. Once we arrived at our final tour stop of the trip, I went for a walk near our hotel and stumbled, as it is easy to do in Vegas, into a mall.

A storefront promised me a 3D virtual ride. I went in, seeing as how I am the equivalent of Tom Hanks in Big but it took me like 25 years to get here instead of one night. A young woman in her early 20s sat on a wooden bench two or three steps up from the ground. She wore a set of VR goggles and was unfastening them as I approached. I browsed the sign until she offered that I should choose Jungle Explorer, a slow “ride” through a virtual reality jungle.

I told the young employee my choice, but she paused, giving a sideways glance to the other woman.

“That one is a little family friendly,” she said.

“Okay then, knock my socks off,” I told her. She chose for me an experience called The Pendulum.

With the VR goggles on, I looked at my feet. In real life, I was a lady in sandals. In VR land, I was a man in some nut-hugger jeans and cowboy boots. In real life, I was by myself. In VR land, there were women on either side of me. One in fishnets and a leopard print mini dress, the other in a red halter top, jean shorts, and heels.

Uhhhh?

“What is the nature of the relationship between this fella and the ladies of the Pendulum?” I asked, unable to see if anyone was around in this reality to answer.

Nothing.

Meanwhile, my mind and body split. My eyes and brain – the me that perceives – was flipping up in the air, sandwich by a pair of foxy gals, while my mortal vessel sat stationary in a Nevada mall. Perceiving the height and motion without my body being subject to the same corollary laws of physics made me think: this is what dying must feel like. A separation of flesh and consciousness, sailing upward into a blue sky.

When I have imagined the afterlife previously, I had not included the cowboy boots or the dames in the leopard print, but I wasn’t opposed to any of that either.

In the end, $12 seemed like a fair price for the chance to touch the edge of my mortal coil.

Walking back through that mall, alive again, my mind and body reunited, I relished the Vegas-ness of it all. That place has a smell, and I LOVE it. It’s fried food and cleaner and artificial air, with a score composed of low-grade chatter and the clatter of spoons and the electronic ding of machines, topped with the lingering atmosphere of super chlorinated fountain water.

Of all the things to do in Sin City when we stopped through summer 2024, we had decided in advance to visit the Zak Bagans Haunted Museum. I had no idea that the Pendulum had already offered me both a better value and more cohesive storyline, but I would soon find out.

Groundwork

Originally built as a house for prominent Las Vegas banker Cyril S. Wengert in 1938, Bagans’ museum is about two miles from the Strip. Wengert moved to Vegas in 1907, just two years after the city’s founding. Before becoming a banker and real estate developer, he worked with his dad, an electrical engineer who supplied ice to train cars carrying perishable goods. They also provided ice for the booming town. I can think of no job higher pressure than ice delivery man in the desert.

Cyril was drafted in the first World War and served as an infantry soldier. Back home in his civilian life, he worked in the First National Bank before heading up to Seattle to take business classes. He returned to Las Vegas to work for the bank and married a schoolteacher from Iowa named Lottie in 1921. Gambling was illegal at the time, which put pressure on the local economy.

Wengert worked his way up through the bank to executive and later was even an incorporator of Nevada’s largest power provider. In 1923, Lottie gave birth to a son, Cyril Sebastian Jr., who they called Jimmie. The next year, she had a daughter named Marilyn. Two years later, they had a son named Ward, and in 1928, another named Robert.

The Wengerts and their four children were part of Las Vegas’s new upper crust. Their names appeared in the 1920s version of social media - the local newspaper’s Society Column. Their attendance at dinner parties, what games were played, which toddlers watched little Ward blow the three candles out on his birthday cake – all of it was documented with the detail of and level of interest of an influencer in a sports bra telling me about her matcha smoothie ingredients. Ink was spent describing their trips out of town and their second summer homes in the mountains to the paper’s paying customers.

The next year was financially better, but personally rough. In the early ‘30s, casinos could be built again, and construction began on the Hoover Dam leading to a local boom. But Lottie spent a chunk of 1930 back home in Iowa, caring for her ailing mother. Then her oldest, Jimmie, required two surgeries in faraway Los Angeles. Four specialists could not stop the mastoiditis. A simple infection of the mastoid bone as a result of a common ear infection could kill a kid easy in the age before antibiotics. When Jimmie died in that Los Angeles hospital room on March 27, 1930, he was just three months shy of his 7th birthday.

Lottie became pregnant again that summer. She gave birth to a girl named Janet Sue on March 7, 1931, almost exactly a year after they’d lost their eldest son. Their happiness was short lived. When Janet Sue reached seven months old, she passed away, too. The couple then had one more daughter, Shirley, born in 1935.

Cyril continued rising in the ranks of his field, earning enough to start building the now-historic Tudor revival home in 1936 and complete it two years later. Newspaper articles and obituaries fill in the details of the rest of the Wengerts’ life there. Cyril was voted the president of the Nevada Bankers Association. He was at Rotary and Elks Clubs meetings and was a charter member of the American Legion.

A series of poems published by Monsignor Leo McFadden in the Reno Gazette-Journal give insight into life in the Wengert home before it became a mecca of the macabre. McFadden was a buddy of the Wengerts’ son, Robert and described memories like the family serving “a festive lunch” or the boys enjoying “an afternoon of frolics all made up by ourselves.” Cyril was a towering figure who could be reached by telephone if you asked the operator for one. Just the number one, a fitting spot for the man who helped usher in dial telephones across the state.

McFadden’s poems made frequent mention of the Wengerts, describing a club he started with Robert in 1944 as the town’s “only glitter in a tearful time.” The Wengert house seemed to be home base for the kids and their friends, with dozens of rooms filling its 11,000 square feet. Shirley, the youngest Wengert child, told cameras for Investigation Discovery in 2016, “Mother planned this house. Every room was hers.”

No room was more her own than the bedroom in which Lottie died on September 14, 1968. Three years after complications from a brain cyst surgery took Cyril, his wife succumbed to a heart attack in the home they built together.

Following Lottie’s death, the fate of the house is somewhat murky. The title transferred to Ward, their third child. A few locals commented online that it fell into disrepair and squatters moved in. By November 1972, a company called Charleston Associates Limited purchased the place and from then on, it served consistently as a law office until the State Bar of Nevada purchased it in 1997. The bar operated from there until 2015 when the organization sold it to none other than TV’s favorite ghost adventurer, one Zachary Alexander Bagans.

Zak Moves In

Bagans said in interviews that he was out for a drive, saw it, and something about it captured him. He worked with the historical society to get the mansion designated as a landmark then opened it for business in 2016. In anticipation of its ribbon cutting, he covered it on one of his many TV shows in an episode titled, “The Haunted Museum.”

“Recently, I just got the home listed on the city of Las Vegas historic preservation list,” Zak told surviving Wengert daughter, Shirley, in the 2016 episode of Ghost Adventures. Cameras followed as Zak walked the frail older woman through her family’s former home.

“I have dedicated this room to you and your family,” Zak said to her as they sat in a formal living room.

Shirley purred, “Oh, I love it.”

Zak continued, “So when people come here, I want to tell the story of your father and your mother.”

A noble endeavor, indeed, but when I visited in summer 2024, there was no obvious sign of the Wengerts or their story. I had to scour for the information myself in newspaper archives and online records.

Shirley moved into the house at age 5, with 2 brothers and 1 sister. By the time the house was completed, her parents had already lost both their eldest son, Jimmie, and their daughter, Janet Sue, in separate incidents just a year apart.

Once I dug around and found a reasonably normal family history it dawned on me why Zak lied to this old broad in her own living room: aside from Lottie’s heart attack in her bedroom, there weren’t any other deaths on site, certainly nothing gruesome enough for Zak to capitalize on.

When asked in the Ghost Adventures episode whether the place was haunted, Shirley said she believed she would see her parents again after they passed, but never did. She offered a lukewarm, “It very well could be, if you believe in that. And I always want to.”

Not content with a maybe, Zak sat her down in front of a mirror for a scrying session, a ritual where one attempts to make contact with the spirit world by staring intently into reflective glass. Cameras rolling, he asked her to speak aloud to her dead mother, Mrs. Lottie Wengert, using the ornate mirror mounted in the room. A surprisingly good sport, and perhaps truly wanting to believe herself, Shirley obliged.

She sat, faced the glass, and said, “Mother, I’m in your bedroom now. And I know you passed away here. We have a wonderful man that has bought the home. He means well. He is safe. He will make your memory and daddy’s a good one. Please give your blessing and your good will towards Zak. We wish him success.”

He will make your memory and daddy’s a good one.

Aw Shirley. I’m so sorry. I have some bad news.

As if on cue, Zak swooped in to prove her wrong, saying with a giggle, “Some of the rooms may be a little different –” he paused, “—because of my imagination.”

Shirley seemed confused, and their tour began.

The museum, he explained, was not quite finished as of the time of filming, due to all the paranormal disruptions. I would learn again and again about the many times the ghouls of the manor toyed with Mr. Bagans and how he narrowly escaped them each time. When taken altogether, I’d wager Zak Bagans is the most haunted man in history.

I’ll pepper his escapades throughout my coverage, but I was astonished again and again each time someone explained how Zak, working alone, was, for instance, body slammed by a ghost, thus leading to him not finishing something. I genuinely wonder how many times in a week that man is like, “So sorry I couldn’t make dinner last night. I was suplexed by a poltergeist.”

For his tour with Shirley, Zak started with a place he called The Puppet Room. Again, cameras rolling, he asked her, “You approve?”

All the woman could do was laugh and respond, “Oh ho ho,” as she looked around and gave a single “yes” through polite chuckles.

Shirley then got to have a singularly unique experience that can never and will never happen to any of the rest of us. Zak took her to what he called The Kevorkian Room.

He started out gentle, “Do you remember Dr. Jack Kevorkian?”

Shirley did. Perhaps she wished she could call him right then.

Together, they opened the door, and Zak prompted her, “What was the room in there?”

“It was my bedroom,” Shirley replied, demure.

They laughed as a voice from behind the camera said, “We changed your bedroom!”

Zak repeated, “We changed your bedroom around a little bit.” He wrung his hands, perhaps truly nervous or perhaps, as he so often is, putting on a bit of a show.

“Uh huh,” Shirley agreed, tentative.

“And, uh, I want you to see what is in your bedroom now.”

Then he turned toward the camera and covered his eyes all silly.

Behind the door was the room where, at some point in the distant past, Shirley perhaps laid on her bed, reading, studying, or writing in her diary. Maybe she played Elvis records and practiced making out on the back of her hand or stared into the mirror and taught herself how to put on lipstick.

Now the space was filled nearly end-to-end by an old, full-size Volkswagen van. Shirley laughed again.

“Oh, ho, ho. Oh my goodness sakes,” she said. “This must have a history.”

“This is Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s van,” Zak boasted.

Shirley replied, “Is that right?”

Not getting a reaction, Zak pressed her, “This is where he did some of the assisted suicides.”

Shirley, undeterred, said, “Oh well, God love him, he meant well.”

God love him. He meant well.

Somebody give Shirley her own show.

However she felt about it, the so-called Death Van is now parked where she used to sleep. You can’t go home, but you can buy a ticket to visit, I suppose.

There was an air of desperation in Zak’s prodding. His expectation dripped from my laptop screen.

He pressed further, “What is it like to know that Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s Volkswagen is in your bedroom?”

“I think it’s wonderful,” Shirley replied with a graceful smile.

Having seen it myself, Shirley, “wonderful” is not quite the world I would use.

Zak’s Irrefutable Evidence of Malicious Spirits

After Shirley’s family moved out, the place was occupied by squatters for awhile before the law firm took up residence there in 1972. To corroborate this bit of lore, Zak interviewed someone he described as an “influential figure,” Rachel Voskow, director of Heaven Can Wait Animal Society. Rachel’s connection is briefly glossed over but I’ll summarize: Zak bought the place. His mom and Rachel are friends. When Mother Bagans shared the news with her pal, Rachel recalled how she would sneak into the place as a kid in the 1970s. Mama told Zak. Rachel ends up on the show.

During her walkthrough of the place with Zak, Rachel told him she felt that someone was hanging onto her legs.

Zak filled in the blanks for her: “Like a little kid.”

Rachel agreed instantly, “Mmmhmm.”

A voiceover then used 6-year-old Jimmie Wengert’s mastoiditis death for tension, as Zak announced, “Before moving into this home, the Wengert family mourned the loss of James Wengert when he was only 8 years old.” Wrong. His name wasn’t James. He wasn’t even seven years old. He died in a hospital in another state six years before the house was even built, probably scared and definitely in pain.

Zak sent Rachel to the basement with a recording device, hoping to catch electronic voice phenomena, or EVP. Some paranormal investigators believe it is possible to capture spiritual energy in ways that our ears cannot detect using electronic recording devices. Rachel milled about the basement, talking aloud, trying to elicit a response from Shirley’s dead brother.

Later, they played back an audio recording of Rachel’s time in the basement. It supposedly captured a ghost’s voice that the team concluded right was not only a ghost, it was a ghost clearly saying, “I need help.”

When I played back the audio from the moment and compared it to their version of the EVP audio, I noticed an anomaly in the original. Without getting into the weeds, the waveforms don’t line up. They indicate edits were made. I’d be guessing if I tried to tell you why. I can only say that they happened.

Is pointing this out a bit like shouting at the magician that he didn’t REALLY saw a woman in half? Maybe. But hundreds of people a year make a pilgrimage to his museum as if it is some sort of paranormal mecca, so you tell me.

The group concluded it was definitely a cry for help, and Rachel added, “It’s that little boy, I think!”

I noticed Zak didn’t bring up dead Jimmie Wengert to his living sister on her tour. He didn’t mention Janet Sue, the other dead child of the Wengert family. But once out of ear shot of the woman whose legacy he swore to uphold, he threw around her dead brother’s carcass like punctuation, agreeing right away that, oh yeah, it was Jimmie.

Rachel described sneaking in as a teen at least once. This experience made her an expert resource in Zak’s eyes. She recalled the basement as being filled with light, since she snuck in during the day. Down there, she recalled seeing a pentagram inside a circle with “things” inside the circle. She also saw a substance that she said, with the utmost assurance, she was “positive” was blood. Zak nodded woefully.

“Satanic rituals,” he concluded with no other evidence. Not since Mike Warnke has anyone been so sure as Zak that they’ve discovered a connection to the Dark Lord.

Rachel was not the only eyewitness to nefariousness in those historic walls. After a law firm spent the better part of three decades in the former Wengert home, the Bar bought it in 1997. Erika Manasco, an accountant who formerly worked with the Bar, agreed to tour the mansion with Zak and spill the beans on some of the scarier aspects of her old gig.

“The basement itself would give you this sense or this aura of negative energy, like it was not a safe place to go,” she told Zak. “And oftentimes, we would go together down there as groups, so you would see multiple people going in at once because a lot of us would refuse to go down there by ourselves. See how cold it was?”

Immediately, Zak connected the bad work vibes and chillier basement climate with Satanic rituals.

While working there, Erika recalled feeling a negative energy and even brought it home. She claimed her husband would tell her to leave work at work. (I got the same complaints while working in big law, so maybe Zak can investigate that next.) She read up on energy and told Zak that, for protection, she poured salt in the back office where she worked to keep whatever negative energy out.

Listen, I’m not here to rat anybody out, especially not since this gal said it all on the TV with the cameras rolling, but ….uh….. did anybody at the State Bar of Nevada know their accountant was back in the back office upturning containers of Morton’s all over the tile?

If not, they did after this episode.

Apropos of nothing, she began to shake and told Zak, “I’m freezing.” All those bad experiences and she didn’t throw a shaker in her purse for just such an occasion.

Erika appeared to be panicking in earnest and asked to sit down as she started to cry. I felt for her. She seemed upset for real. Either she was (1) really getting got by a ghost, (2) having a PTSD-like reaction from being at her old job, or (3) playing it up for the cameras.

If it was door number one, Zak really didn’t investigate much further. If it was door number two, hard relate. But if it was door number three, I gotta ask: ma’am, why? You gave them your whole first and last name! They put it up on screen and showed your face!!

It could also be option number 4: reacting as any of us would after being cramped in musty ass close quarters with Zak Bagans.

After their interview concluded, Zak put a text he received from her on-screen. Erika wrote (sic): “After I left I started to breathe a little heavy again while driving down LV BLVD, my legs and feet and hands were trembling and they are completely numb. I feel like there’s boulders on my shoulders. They hurt, I’m pulled over in a parking lot down the street trying to catch my breath.”

Erika’s amygdala, her brain’s fear center, detected a perceived threat: in this case, the emotional or energetic distress she had tied to the building. Her adrenal glands released adrenaline and cortisol, speeding up her heart and increasing her respiratory rate. Her heavy breathing was hyperventilation, which can make her feel lightheaded or detached. Rather than explain any of this to her or the audience, Zak used her text as proof that a demon was in the building.

What responsibility does he have to explain to her that the onset of this memory activated her sympathetic nervous system, putting her into fight-or-flight, and caused this litany of symptoms? None? Or are we fine that his conclusion was that a demon had attached itself to her and, you better watch out, because it can attach to ANYBODY who comes through this museum (and pays $85 to do so)?

Between the time they filmed this episode when I arrived, Zak seemed to struggle getting his bearings about what the “museum” should actually look like and feature. The Wengert family room he promised Shirley seemed to go. A 2019 review by Deena ElGenaidi in Hyperallergic, an online magazine, detailed her visit and referenced several little people hired by Zak to pop out and scare visitors. We didn’t encounter that, but even without the distasteful throwback to circus “freak shows,” the description of that aspect as “uncomfortable and offensive in many ways” sort of applied to everything we saw by the time we rolled up in 2024.

Step Right Up

After you park at the haunted museum, they make you wait outside up against a wall with TVs playing Zak Bagans’ various shows. If you weren’t tipped off by the wall-to-wall ads for the array of Baganserie, let me go ahead and give you a heads up: this is all set up to sell stuff to you. The museum is a tax-deductible way to bring in revenue on the weird shit he buys and also to promote things and sell his shows and make you believe in the Zak Bagans brand. I don’t know why it took me physically going there to figure that out, but let me save you the plane ticket and the price of admission.

And hey, as a collector of odd things myself, I respect the grift. Maybe I can buy a creepy old mansion some day and fill it with my own collection. Going item-by-item in Zak’s “museum,” I have learned the threshold for “artifact” is so low, it’s in hell. I think I have a shot.

The museum only lets in a maximum of ten people in each tour at a time. We arrived with six in our party: my best friend and Sinisterhood co-host, Christie; our husbands, Paris and Tommy; and two other family members. They grouped us with a family of four we didn’t know.

The vibes were high in our crew that day. We’d had lunch together and gone on a little walk to look at street art afterward. We were driving through the glittering streets of Vegas in our rented Ford Expedition, singing 90s country songs at full volume. It would’ve taken something powerfully dark, a vibes vacuum if you will, to disrupt us.

We found it.

After waiting out front for about fifteen minutes, they herded us inside the small lobby area. The front area is small, with a bench to the right of the entrance and an old-fashioned ticket booth straight ahead when you enter.

In the open standing area, there are shelves from waist high to the ceiling. The shelves are covered with photos of visitors, both famous and not. I noted a photo of Zak beside Matthew Gray Gubler who plays Dr. Spencer Reid on TV’s Criminal Minds. There’s another photo of just Nicholas Cage alone. A silver plaque on the frame simply reads the actor’s name. Either he visited on a day when Bagans wasn’t there or he refused to be photographed with him.

There I saw the first of several printed signs that we’d encounter throughout the hours we were held there. The signs featured still images of security footage. Above the photos, descriptions of allegedly paranormal interactions with guests read like voice overs from Ghost Adventures.

The first one I saw in the lobby made my asshole twitch on behalf of the woman: “On May 7, 2021, a young woman from Minnesota was waiting for her tour to launch in this exact spot when she felt pain on her neck. She then noticed a handprint bruise on her neck and began to vomit.”

The absolute left turn at the end cracked me up. I am sorry the gal had to erp, but I am even sorrier that the incident is commemorated with a sign. Who knows? Maybe she okayed it and loves that her legacy is cemented in the waiting area. I certainly wanted to throw up several times while in that building, but if I had, I wouldn’t want a historical marker erected in its place.

As we stood there, I chatted with one of the several tour guides we would encounter that day. Because she looked like the comedian Nicole Sullivan from that old show MadTV, I will call her Nicole (not her real name). Nicole was entertaining the family grouped with us, and I joined in. The mom, dad, and two sons were there to celebrate the older boy’s 18th birthday. All of them Bagans loyalists, they admitted to watching all of his shows.

While we exchanged small talk, I admired the Original Bimbo Three Ring Circus machine in the lobby. It’s a vintage animatronic arcade machine that features a clown marionette named Bimbo standing in front of curtains behind glass. When you drop a coin in, Bimbo comes to life. Music plays, and the marionette starts dancing, it’s arms and legs rising and lowering.

Bimbo dances right underneath a realistic plaster mask of John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer responsible for the murders of at least thirty-three teenage boys and young men from 1972 to 1978 in the Chicago metropolitan area. Gacy often performed at children’s hospitals and charity events dressed as Pogo the Clown. In news coverage at the time, pictures of him dressed as Pogo appeared beside headlines describing his carnage. The mask is menacing, looking down over the lobby with an ashen, round face, its mouth twisted up into a foreboding half-grin.

Nicole announced she had only been working there a few months but assured me that other guides had been working there much longer. I asked if she had experienced anything paranormal. She said it was her practice to avoid areas where incidents may happen, like the basement.

Still, things had happened to her.

“There’s always little things,” she said, like the time she went home after her shift and found scratches all over her body. You know, little things!

Other tour guides had it worse, Nicole told us. The most active areas, she warned, were the areas between Jack Kevorkian’s room and the basement. Dr. Death, she offered when saying Kevorkian’s name. The mom in the other group was puzzled, apparently unfamiliar with his work.

“Don’t worry, girl,” Nicole assured her. “We’ll talk all about it.”

Turns out the other family in our group was also from Texas. Over eerie piped-in music, Nicole let us all know the weather in Vegas was actually nice for the season, after an “extremely hot” summer. We had all opted for the special “RIP Tour” that offered access to “exclusive areas” as well as a commemorative lanyard and a t-shirt. Marketed as a real deal for just $35 on top of the $50 ticket price.

For whatever reason, we were made to wait several minutes before starting the tour. To kill time, Nicole pitched The Haunted Museum, the full television series on the place, co-produced by horror director Eli Roth, that spotlights various objects in the collection.

She then asked us if we had done any research in advance or picked out any objects we wanted to see. Our group stayed silent.

The family of Zak Bagan enthusiasts, on the other hand, did have a list. The dad had even visited the museum before in 2020. (HE CAME BACK?!)

“Ahh, yes, COVID,” Nicole recalled. She then mocked the social distancing measures, pointing at the tile saying, “They’d have you stand here, and here, and here, I guess because COVID doesn’t go there.”

Perched on those same the tiles was a sign warning visitors to turn off our cell phones lest they disturb the spirits.

The man brought up a car he’d seen out back.

“That little Chevy?” Nicole asked.

“Yeah, that murderer’s car. Who was it?” the man asked.

“Ummm, he’s from Mississippi. I can never remember his name!” Nicole said.

Then she paused, thinking, before blurting out, “John Vincent Gillis from Louisiana.”

It was Sean Vincent Gillis from Louisiana and that was, indeed, his infamous white Chevrolet Cavalier. Among his eight victims, the car was central in the murder of Hardee Schmidt, a mother of three. Gillis followed Hardee as she was out jogging one morning in 1999. The daughter of a prominent judge in Baton Rouge and married to a lawyer, Hardee was 52-years-old when he first spotted her. In later interrogations, Gillis admitted he was more than infatuated with her, saying, “One could probably say I was stalking her.”

He waited until she was out for a run alone around 5:30 AM on Sunday, May 30, 1999, a few weeks after he’d started watching her. He had mapped her schedule and knew she’d head out of the back of her subdivision and toward a relatively deserted road. On the quiet stretch, it was just Hardee and Gillis following in his little Chevy. Gillis took aim and hit her with the car.

He told officers, “She flipped over, and as she was getting up, I was out of the car and on top of her.”

Hardee complained, “Oh my back,” as Gillis told her, “Lady, your back is the least of your problems.”

You’re out for a run. You see a white Chevy Cavalier driving slow and think, Uh oh. Next thing you know, you’re in a ditch. The driver is out and standing over you. He places thick plastic wire around your neck and forces you into a car that will, 25 years later, be on display at a Las Vegas attraction 1,653 miles away from where you’re being dragged to your ultimate demise.

Riding in the car toward the park off Highland Road, Hardee may have expected that she would be raped. She was. After Gillis forcibly removed her clothes, Hardee Schmidt was raped in the backseat of that little Chevy. The one parked in the parking lot throughout that “extremely hot” Las Vegas summer.

Hardee may have also known she was about to be killed, and she was.

Nicole offered more details, telling us cheerfully, “Yeah, he raped and murdered a girl in the back seat. You can still see the blood in the seat. Then he put her in the trunk.”

He did just as Nicole had described. The girl he raped and murdered in the little Chevy’s backseat was a 52-year-old woman named Hardee. She had three children, and he left her nude corpse in the car for a day and a half while it sat parked at his house in the Louisiana summer sun before driving to a bayou where he dumped her. She was found two days later.

Nicole added some behind-the-scenes color commentary for us waiting customers: “When it hit that 120-degree heat,” she said referring to the car in which Hardee Schmidt took her last battered and raped breaths, “We didn’t know if it was the Porta-Potty or if it was the trunk of that car because it smelled like death.”

I bet it did. It smelled like Hardee’s death. One official told reporters at the time Hardee was found, “All I can say right now is that she went through hell.”

A hell that wouldn’t end, it seemed. In every article I found, she was described as “daughter of…,” “wife of…,” “mother of…,” “victim of…,” and now, the first time I learned about her, she’s introduced only as “a girl” who’d been raped and murdered in the backseat of a little Chevy, now parked rotting in the lot of a rich man’s playground.

“How did Zak Bagans come to own that?” I asked of the Chevy.

“If you knew Zak…” Nicole started.

No thanks, I thought.

“I just mean, do you call up the government…?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Zak runs in circles. There’s a guy in the sideshow. He knows a lot of people that collect all that stuff. He’s friends with Jonathan Davis of Korn, and he collects the same stuff as well. So, you know, word of mouth, too.”

Nightmare blunt rotation, I thought.

She continued, “Sometimes auctions come up, and they say, ‘Does Zak want to bid on this because it belonged to this person?’ And, you know, also his general manager has connections, too. He keeps his eyes, and he gets emails from auction houses saying… ‘Does Zak want to bid on this?’”

I suppose you get a reputation for have a certain taste, enough cash, and folks on your team with the right sensibilities, and anything is possible.

Nicole continued, “For instance, not that long ago, Sharon Tate’s front door to her home where they wrote PIG in her blood, went up for sale. And I was like Oh. My. God.”

This was an oh my god of giddiness to the best of my interpretation. Bit different than the oh my god you or I might let out.

Nicole seemed to offer an explanation, “‘Cause we have her wedding dress. And, uh, we have a brick from her home where she was murdered. And, uh uhm,” she paused.

Gotta catch ‘em all, I thought.

Nicole filled us in: “I asked Zak when I saw him, and to make a long story short, he goes, ‘I didn’t buy that door.’ I was like ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Well, I didn’t want to spend $125,000 on it.’ He goes, ‘I didn’t want to go that high.’ And I was like okay. Well you know what, it’s him.”

She was on a roll or else I would have asked her whether he gave an exact number he thought was fair for a detached door that had been painted in the blood of a famous pregnant murder victim. A hundred grand even?

Nicole elaborated on the museum’s Tate connection: “And, plus Sharon Tate’s sister was really upset that that was going up for sale. The band, Nine Inch Nails, that’s how it came about… because, uh, the band lived there for awhile and they actually did a record in that home. They recorded an album in that home, and the lead singer, after they left, took the front door and replaced it.”

Her voice went up, a mischievous tone, “He knew what he was doing.” She punctuated it with a tongue click.

I got home and fact checked. Trent Reznor rented the house on Cielo Drive, knowing its history, and recorded The Downward Spiral in a studio he built on site, while living there for 18 months. He chose the place specifically because it was where, among other events, Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, was stabbed sixteen times by Manson Family member, 21-year-old, Susan Atkins. Sharon and her baby, who was posthumously named Paul Richard Polanski, were drained of their blood, officially dying from massive hemmorage due to the stab wounds.

With the contents of Sharon and little Paul’s veins now soaking into the floor, Susan used some of it to paint the word PIG in on the front door. Just twenty-five years later, Reznor named the studio he built on site “Le Pig” after the message. Once the album was done and the band moved out, Reznor took the door. The house was leveled and replaced by Full House creator Jeff Franklin’s new build.

Whatever happened to predictability, indeed.

Per the auction site, Reznor used the door in his New Orleans recording studio (edgy!!) When he left the Big Easy in 2004, he left the door behind, attached to the building.

Yet another reminder: there is no sentimentality in murderabilia collecting.

A doctor bought the place and rescued the door from the trash due to its significance, though the original PIG written in Sharon’s blood had long been painted over. A man named Chris bought the door from the doctor in 2017 before auctioning it off in 2023, to someone other than Zak Bagans.

“So, you know, maybe it’s good, you know,” Nicole told us in the lobby. “We have Sharon Tate’s wedding dress. We don’t want to upset her sister…. I saw a documentary not too long ago, with her sister in it. It still upsets her about her sister.”

Yeah, having your sister and unborn nephew murdered is definitely upsetting. I don’t know whether there is a word strong enough for what you feel when people trade in the remnants of your loved ones’ demise for literal decades. If it were me, I’d probably feel a little homicidal, irony notwithstanding.

A short pause and the man from Texas jumped in, changing subjects.

“We were in Waco last week,” he said.

“Where exactly?” Nicole asked.

“At the compound,” he replied. The Compound, Nicole. Obviously. These people aren’t spending their weekends at Chip and Joanna’s silos.

Turns out, the dad hadn’t changed the subject at all, adding, “That’s why we were kind of excited about getting to see the car.”

“Yeah, Zak sold that,” Nicole said and made a groaning sound in apology.

I had no idea what car they were talking about until searching later. Zak bought cult leader David Koresh’s 1968 Camaro from a classic car dealer in Arizona for $61,995 in 2018. He listed it in 2023 on ClassicCars.com with a hell of a description:

“It’s a tragic moment in American history, and one that most people would prefer to forget. But one that is kept alive, amongst the motoring fraternity through this car: a 1968 Chevrolet Camaro.”

I…uh… my mouth is agape at “motoring fraternity.” Let’s read on.

“It was this very car that was actually parked out in front of the Texas compound, during that fateful 51-day siege. Some believe that Koresh was planning to use it as his getaway car. The car that was once owned by David Koresh is one of the first-generation F-body cars. It’s has the SS model emblems with the front air dam, cowl induction hood, full-width ducktail spoiler and 9” rear end.”

All the features of a first-generation F-body car AND it was going to be a getaway car for one of the most infamous and destructive cult leaders in U.S. history.

But wait, there’s more — whoever took this one home got something extra. The description quotes an FBI special agent’s claim that Koresh idolized this car and did some of his own customization on it in a workshop at the compound. The listing points out a major feature: the words “DAVIDES 427 GO GOD” inscribed on the mighty 500 brake horsepower, 427 cubic inch V8 power block under the hood.

When Armageddon’s Relic - yes, that is the nickname someone gave it - went up for sale, TMZ published Zak’s reason, writing, “He tells us he has decided to list it with Vegas Auto Gallery because it’s time to rotate his spooky artifacts on display.”

We were still in the lobby, waiting to see what was in the rotation now that Armageddon’s Relic had moved on. The mom called out to me.

“Since you guys are from Texas, have you been down to the …” she trailed off, for whatever reason eschewing the formality of its title - THE Compound.

Instead, she offered a meek, “David Koresh’s…?”

“We have not,” Christie said. “We are in Dallas.”

“It’s not too far,” the woman replied, adjusting her jean shorts. As if the gas money or time on the road was what kept us from heading down.

The dad added, “We’re west of Dallas. We ended up going down. It’s worth it.” Geographically, they would have to travel even further than us.

“And they just want a $10 donation,” he threw in. A bargain.

“And it’s a memorial?” I asked. “To honor the victims?”

“Yeah, they rebuilt the church portion,” the man said.

So yes?

His wife ran her hands along the star tattoos that covered the upper parts of her thighs.

“The only thing that’s there that you could see is the swimming pool. It’s just so eerie being there,” she said.

During the 1993 siege at Waco, 86 people died overall, but 25 of those were victims of the bunker fire that erupted during the melee. Nearly all women and children, the two dozen souls suffocated, huddled together in an underground room built beneath the compound’s kitchen and chapel areas. Autopsies indicated many died from smoke inhalation, suffocation, or fire-related causes.

The dad jumped back in, “The church is like, right next to, underneath the ground, where they have the concrete bunker, where a lot of the women and children passed away. It’s still there.”

It’s still there. You can see it. Go. Just $10 and a quick drive from Dallas.

“Oh my gosh,” I said as the piped-in organ music filled the lobby.

“Alright, guys,” Nicole called out over us. It was time to launch the tour. She rattled off the usual rules: no video, photography, food, or drink. No mention of social distancing, of course, but this was 2024. They did ask us several times to turn our phones off as they might interact with the “artifacts.”

Over the next two-and-a-half hours, we saw horrors beyond our wildest imaginations. And I want to take you along.

Before you enter, I’ll make you aware: there are grotesqueries you may not believe. When you pay $85 to go to the museum, all they give you is the surface. In this series, tentatively titled The Bagans Chronicles, I aim to magnify every story I can. On site, deaths were tossed off like fun facts on an episode of Pop-Up Video. As fast as I could, I took notes. And I took A LOT of notes. Follow along if you dare. Not everything I publish on Heather vs. the World will be this, but this will be published alongside other stuff in this feed.

So step right up and let’s go. Like the woman at the mall, I’ll aim to knock your socks off, but admittedly I cannot offer as life-changing an experience as The Pendulum. But you won’t have to fly to Vegas, either.

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