For Twin Cities ghost-tour operator, trips to help Ukraine are about leaving imprint on others

For his day job, Lance Zaal owns and runs Twin City Ghosts, which gives walking ghost tours of St. Paul, visiting mansions and the sites of seedy old brothels. He loves the history involved in the stories his guides tell of people generations later.

Those stories have made Zaal, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq, think more about his own legacy — and inspired him to his more dangerous volunteer work: helping Ukrainians in their war against Russian invasion.

"I want to be remembered, too, and not just for my business stuff — I want to be remembered as somebody who stood up for American values and principles," Zaal said. "I feel like I'm serving my country again."

Zaal has visited Ukraine four times since the war began, spending nearly three months on the ground and some $200,000 of his own money. He's trained soldiers and civilians in marksmanship, urban combat, building and manning defensive positions — and he's delivered supplies including trip wires, night vision cameras, secure communications equipment and fire-resistant jumpsuits.

It was, perhaps, a natural progression for the kid who enlisted in the military right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a naive high schooler raised to be a patriot. During two tours in Iraq, he experienced the pain of having several comrades and superiors die in a war he soon began to question.

More recently, Zaal had been paying close attention to Ukraine for longer than most Americans because a business school friend was from Crimea, the Ukrainian region occupied by Russia since 2014. His friend asked him to help train Ukrainians. Shortly after Russia's invasion — and shortly after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the formation of a foreign legion, which quickly gained some 20,000 fighters from 52 countries — Zaal flew there, not to fight but to help.

"Ukraine felt like it was the one war that mattered more than Iraq and Afghanistan, more strategically important," Zaal said. "I didn't feel I could ignore this. I wanted to make my positive mark."

Zaal never liked pulpy "Ghost Hunters"-style ghost stories — "weird things moving on camera" is how he terms the popular reality show. Zaal liked people's stories. First he launched an app for self-guided ghost tours, then he started physical tours. Zaal hopes his tours hit at life's big questions: "Is there life after death?" "What is there to these unexplained things?"

"I hope people walk away thinking about their own legacy, about their mortality as a person, about how to leave their mark in the world," he said.

Ultimately, that's why Zaal decided to risk his life helping a country he'd never visited.

When Putin invaded Ukraine, Zaal weighed his options. He had military experience. He had a successful, remote business with more than 120 employees in 60 cities, and he had the freedom to travel. And his friend from Crimea, now living in Kyiv, was pleading for help.

Zaal's first trip was training basics to civilians who'd joined Ukraine's reserve forces: first aid, moving as a team, clearing rooms, leadership. He finished the month of training with platoon-sized laser tag and paintball. Each successive trip has been different as the war changed: to Kharkiv, to the Donbas, to Zaporizhzhia.

"When the war started Lance contacted me on day 1," Matveichenko said via email. "He volunteered to come and train us in basic infantry tactics and combat medicine. Besides training he brought supplies that were so hard to get those days: plate carriers, tourniquets and he even brought a helmet for myself."

Zaal saw destroyed buildings and broken lives, a country where about a quarter of the population has fled while tens of thousands have been killed. He's not deluded about one person's impact. But he hopes it's something.