VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: More Evidence that Zak Bagans is Full of Sh**

• Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum in downtown Las Vegas claims to house a satanic six-string guitar
• The accursed acoustic axe is claimed to have caused the death of its 13-year-old owner by electrocution
• Once again, it appears that Bagans didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story 

What better way to usher in Halloween than by unmasking yet another of the dozens of factually bankrupt artifacts on display at Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum in downtown Las Vegas?

The Satanic Six String

A guitar obtained by Bagans received national attention in March 2021. That’s when Newsweek repeated a Bagans claim — that the guitar killed a teen — without even fact-checking it with a Magic 8-Ball.

According to Bagans, the Satan-worshipping 13-year-old died at the hands of the guitar in 1979 — specifically on Halloween, because of course he did.

Bagans purchased the “Satanic Six String” from a mysterious seller named “Merribaker” on the online music marketplace Reverb.com. The 2021 listing claimed that the death of the guitar’s first victim “has never been solved, but the calamitous kid was found laying on his bed with THIS GUITAR draped across him, apparently electrocuted, even though this is an acoustic guitar!”

The boy’s mother, grief-stricken, supposedly passed the cursed axe to Merribaker, who reported it playing “eerie, dissonant chords” all by itself, vanishing from closets and reappearing on beds, and levitating out of a garbage can where he had tried, unsuccessfully of course, to discard it.

This is the point in the story where your friend, whom you told where the campfire would be, emerges from the forest with a claw and several tick bites.

Adding even more credibility to this story than you thought it could possibly contain, Bagans said he paid $666 for the guitar. (Mwa-ha-ha!)

Graveyard of Credibility

When Skeptical Inquirer reporter Kenny Biddle tracked down the mysterious Merribaker in May 2021, he found him to be a very real, and surprisingly honest, professional musician named Eddie Merribaker.

Biddle was curious, and rightly so, about why no mention can be found, in any searchable newspaper database, of a mysterious Halloween 1979 death by electrocution of a Satan-worshipping teenage boy by his own guitar.

That’s exactly the type of story that the New York Post would have run front page during that era of heavy metal paranoia.

So he asked Merribaker what provenance he furnished Bagans with that impressed him so much.

Merribaker replied with the following three statements:

1. “I never offered any proof about the validity of the story.”
2. “He never requested any proof.”
3. “Had he asked for proof, I would not have been able to offer a single shred of evidence pertaining to the alleged haunted nature of the guitar (for reasons I’m sure are obvious).”

Dead Wrong

And just like the Haunted Museum’s infamous “Dybbuk Box” — touted by Bagans as “the world’s most haunted object” but really just an ordinary wine cabinet purchased at a garage sale by a horror screenwriter — the “Satanic Six Sting” collapses under the weight of basic fact-checking.

(That screenwriter, Kevin Mannis, admitted fabricating an eBay description for the Dybbuk Box that was so chilling, it landed him a job consulting on “The Possession,” a 2012 horror film by Sam Raimi.)

Though Bagans claims that it’s genuinely haunted objects he curates, it’s really just ghost fiction. He needs a constant stream of it flowing to keep his sham museum, and career, printing money.

In Bagans’ self-written, self-directed, and self-produced 2018 documentary, “Demon House,” a title card describes him as “one of the world’s leading researchers on ghosts and demonology.”

That’s a mighty impressive achievement for someone who has never performed any research whatsoever.

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