Zachary Alexander "Zak" Bagans (born April 5, 1977) is an American paranormal investigator, actor, television personality, and author. He is the principal host of the Travel Channel series, Ghost Adventures.
Bagans was born on April 5, 1977, in Washington, D.C. He graduated Glenbard West High School in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, in 1995. Bagans attended the Motion Picture Institute in Michigan. Following graduation from MPI, he moved to Las Vegas, aspiring to film documentaries. After arriving in Las Vegas, he found work as a wedding disc jockey. A former skeptic, Bagans says that his passion for investigating the paranormal resulted from what he describes as "a face-to-face encounter with the spirit of a suicidal woman", in his former apartment building in Trenton, Michigan.
In 2004, Bagans teamed up with Nick Groff and Aaron Goodwin to produce a documentary-style film called Ghost Adventures. Nearly four years after the first season and the first episode aired in the U.S., where the crew stayed the night in the allegedly haunted Bobby Mackey's Music World and Bagans claimed to receive several mysterious scratch marks to his back, the series concluded it's 14th season in May 2017.