In Which Jaybird Goes To A Haunted House

“Hey, Jaybird. Do you want to go to a Haunted House on Saturday?”
“You mean a real haunted house?”
“No. The kind with actors.”
“Oh. Sure.”

I’ve never been to one before, you see. Maybe when I was, like, 10 or something and I’m sure that it was specifically titrated to be appropriate for kids who were 10.

Went over to his house on the Friday prior after work and we talked about the coming weekend. I asked his wife “you coming?” and she said “He asked me that too and I told him that I would rather be in a basement with five screaming children than go to ‘the scariest haunted house in Colorado Springs.'”

“That’s information that I did not have.”

We get to The Fear Complex. Snow started coming down. We ponied up the extra $10 for the VIP tickets and got in a *MUCH* shorter line. There were, like, 100 people in the “Regular” line and there were, like, 15 in the VIP. One of the workers got all of our attention and gave a little speech.

“Guys! There are *NO* *WEAPONS* in there. If you have a pen knife or something like that, leave it in your car or leave it here with me. Our workers WILL NOT TOUCH YOU. There is no food, no drink in there! If you have a bottle of gatorade, finish it now! THERE IS NO PHOTOGRAPHY IN THERE. DO NOT TAKE PICTURES. No running! Do you have any questions! HAVE A GOOD TIME!”

It sunk in for me.
“These guys are carnies”, I said to my bud.
“Yeah. Carnivals and Ren Faires during the summer, Haunted Houses in the fall.”

Any apprehension I had melted away. To be replaced by new apprehensions.

“I guess I thought that this was run by theater kids.”

They picked a group from the front of each line and alternated. Group sizes were about 4-6. My group was four people. Got up to the front of the line and the carnies started working us and then one of them got the signal, pointed a dismembered arm at me, and said “YOU GUYS ARE NEXT! THROUGH THE DOOR AND UP THE STAIRS!”

The first couple of rooms went with the medical motif. Welcome to the asylum!

First impressions. It was very dark. This stuff looks goofy as heck in full light, I guess. Put it in quarter light, with a strobe light somewhere, a black light somewhere else, and some weird 2-watt sickly green bulb lighting everything? Ew. Gross.

There are a *LOT* of mannequins around. Like maybe 3 times as many mannequins as there are actors. The mannequins are all wearing halloween masks themed to whatever room you’re in… so the medical section had mannequins with covid masks or “crazy doctor” masks, the evil zoo section had animal masks, and so on so you could have the experience of OH MY GOSH THAT’S NOT A MANNEQUIN fairly regularly.

Folks in costume would jump out and bang their hands against metal or slam a door or just shriek. Usually when they were behind you but, sometimes, they’d jump out at you from the front.

Well, not me and my bud. We kinda looked like bouncers at an event. (Maribou got told by her students semi-regularly that “he seems really scary”. “He’s pretty irritating sometimes, I guess”, she’d tell them.) There was no apprehension about jumping out at the other two in our group, though.

I received several compliments on my beard. One of the doctors in the medical school section said that he wanted to keep my beard as a specimen. His assistant said that he merely wanted to rip my beard off. (Later on, in the Evil Circus, I was nicknamed “Santa” by one of the Evil Clowns who pressed the point and wanted to know if she was on my “naughty list”.)

Sound design, sound design, sound design. Each section of the house was exceptionally loud but it wasn’t music or anything like that. Wind blowing, construction noises, distant screams… you couldn’t have a normal conversation. Not by a long shot. You could have short shouty ones but that’s it.

A whole lot of hairpin turns and sharp corners and blind switchbacks. There was a *LOT* of efficient use of space. Some rooms were only 15 feet from one doorway to the other, but you crossed the room zigging and zagging three times to get there.

They messed with the floor, too. Some rooms were just normally carpeted, others had sheet metal for you to walk on, still others had floor grates, and yet others felt like you were walking on anti-fatigue mats. You never felt 100% sure of your footing and so you had to look down at your feet as you walked through the Haunted Mines just so the guy in the Evil Miner get-up could yell *BOO* at you when you glanced down at your shoes.

Some rooms had a bunch of stuff dangling from the ceiling or pushing out against you (like the Evil Greenhouse room) so you’d brush against a bunch of stuff as you walked through. It was creepy to have these weird light touches from various plastic things as you were walking and, just as you would brush it out of your way… BOO!

They also did this trick where they’d have this loooooong hallway and they’d show you something at the far end that was brightly lit and so you’d fixate on that… allowing a carny to jump out from behind a screen halfway through and slam his hand on some metal thing on the wall.

We kinda wanted to do a leisurely saunter through the place but we got passed by one group entirely and another group kept nipping at our heels.

At the end, there was a gift shop.

And then we walked through the door where a couple of carnies told us to have a nice night.

I’m too old for this sort of thing.