My Adventures at Zak Bagan's Haunted Museum

Chapter 4-The Gambling Room/Painting Gallery

Chapter 4 The Gambling Room/Paintings Gallery

I walked into a room with the rest of the group, leading of course. Because I'm brave that way. The group filed into the room and waited for the tour guide to come in last. We circled around an old roulette table that took up most of the room. Around the walls were a lot of old west artifacts. I read over the details about stones that were sold from Jesse James's mother from his gravesite. I loved the macabre touches to the collection, all connected by the old west history in this room.

The tour guide started to talk to us about the haunted rigged roulette table. It had a gramophone that had its heavy horn speaker lifted and dropped onto the table. There was a iPad set next to it, displaying the security video of an empty room and the speaker pulled out and falling onto the table. I remember seeing it on Twitter, which happened a lot with the security videos that showed evidence. I remembered the part in the waiver saying that we'd agreed to be photographed while touring and the video or pictures could be used for publicity and used on any website. I wondered if anything strange would be worthy enough to be used like that on our tour.

I looked around at the old slot machines showing the history of the location of the house, Las Vegas. After some time to look around at more of the objects, we were lead from the Gambling Room into the next room down the hall. We turned into a door to the right, and entered the Paintings Gallery.

This room was full of haunted paintings, and the infamous Bela Lugosi mirror. The mirror was used for scrying by Bela and it was hung in the room during a murder that occurred in the same house later after Bela died. The tour guide also described the other items in the room which included a painting called The Crying Boy. This painting, originally from England, was from a series of paintings that is rumored to start fires when hung in a house. Many of these paintings survived house fires when most of all the other belongings were destroyed. This particular painting seemed to call to me, and I had a long stare down with the eyes of the boy. People had felt deep sadness when looking at it, but I didn't really feel anything.

But it was time to line up and gaze into Bela Lugosi's mirror. You could opt out if you wished, but I wanted try out everything in the museum. A line formed, and the guide drew away the black silk curtain that hid the mirror. We all took turns looking into the mirror. When I stepped up for my turn, I immediately started to feel a dizzy and whoozy feeling. I looked at it for as long as I could stand, and then had to look away because I thought I would lose my balance. I walked away, trying to shake off the feelings of spinning in my head. It only lasted a few seconds, but was intense.

The tour guide asked if I was okay, and I shook my head. "I just got really dizzy."

"That's what the mirror is known for," mentioned the guide.

"Yeah, but I didn't expect it to really happen to me."

If that was just the mirror, I was wondering how the other things in the museum were going to affect me. I braced myself for the next room, as the tour guide motioned for us to follow her out the door. 

(Update Note: The Bela Lugosi mirror has been moved to the basement. The gallery room has been turned into the Dennis Hof bedroom. It's the bed the notorious brothel owner died in. I've left this description to show how Zak is always changing and morphing the museum with new exhibits, and that this experience is now pretty much historical. I'll be adding the basement experience later in the story since you weren't allowed to go down there until the VIP tour and Flashlight Tours that started in 2020.

Also to update here, as of my tour of Dec. 2022, the gambling room off the oddities room has been turned into the Houdini Seance room. So, though this description of this area was true up to about a year ago, if you go there in 2023 on, it will be the Houdini Seance room. And you can only go in if you are RIP. )