Local Ghost Tours Fighting Back

Since their inception, US Ghost Adventures (USGA), and its apparently ethically-challenged owner Lance Zaal, have allegedly made it a standard business practice to violate and infringe small, locally-owned Ghost Tour companies’ trademarks in order to create confusion among potential customers looking for the best local ghost tours. Accusations against USGA include actions such as creating local DBA’s (doing business as) which are similar to the successful local company’s names, as well as labeling their activities with the same names as the aforementioned companies’ trademarked  names or legally registered DBA’s. Further, they are accused of deceptive business practices beyond just the trademark infringements, such as claiming local company’s pre-existing Google Business pages as their own, and in the case of at least one company, 20 years of customer reviews son comments. Additionally, there is direct recorded proof of the company willfully redirecting USGA’s negative customer reviews to the Google reviews pages of their competitors, while directing all positive reviews to their own Google reviews page. Besides USGA, Lance Zaal and his company also own and operate several historic “haunted” houses as B&B’s, including the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, MA, Villisca Axe Murder House in Villisca, IA, and The Welty House in Gettysburg, PA. It only follows that yet again, USGA is being called to task and into multiple Federal courtrooms across America to answer for their actions as the Defendants in several jurisdictions in which small, local companies are filing lawsuits against them. Purportedly, Lance Zaal has stated that it is his goal to either drive the local company out of business, or force them to hire costly Patent & Trademark attorneys to bring expensive litigation against USGA. And, then settling the matter by grudgingly removing any offending violation before the matter can adjudicated and a ruling against USGA. But, not before forcing the small local businesses to dole out upwards of $10K to force the matter into court. Money which is hard to come by for a small company with limited revenue and resources to fight a corporate behemoth like USGA. Here are just two pending cases, certainly many more will be following: