Haunted House

You are reading Halloween Heart, a special section of my Substack, With Love From My Kitchen Table. I am so excited to share these Halloween-themed essays with you. I first started writing this essay in 2021, and have spent much time researching, editing, and creating a haunted little world for you to enter. If you’d like to support my writing, please consider a monthly or yearly paid subscription. If you don’t want to subscribe, but you’d like to buy me a pumpkin spice latte as thanks for my efforts, please visit my Buy Me A Coffee page. Thank you for reading, commenting on, and sharing my work.

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I often want to write an essay that twists and turns like the hallways and rooms of a haunted house. You round a corner: Scary clown holding a chainsaw that looks dangerously real. Rush past, squeeze your eyes closed, launch your arms in front of you to feel your way around the next corner, pop your eyes open and: The Bride of Frankenstein jolts up from her resting place in a coffin. You scream, you run past, you enter a hallway lit by what you know are LED electric candles, but they’re the kind that flicker and look real. You take a breath, you’re almost through, you can see the exit just ahead––

But no. The hallway turns into another hallway, the floor is slanted and you stagger down, down, down. You see another corner. What waits for you around the bend?

I taught high school English for five years and I swear that teaching ninth and tenth graders how to write essays for school made me a worse writer. When the students jumped from one paragraph to the next with no transition word, I made a comment in the margins: Need transition. And, I know, I know, there is a need for expository writing like this, writing that holds the reader’s hand as they move from the first paragraph about how the Friar demonstrates virtue turning to vice, to the next paragraph about the Nurse demonstrating virtue turning to vice, and I know, I know, that you have to learn the rules of writing in order to break them, but it’s all. So. Boring. I want a jump scare. I want a jump cut from a dark and creepy room to a meadow full of blinding light. I want to wonder where I am and what’s coming next. I want to feel the floor shift beneath my feet. I want to almost fall, but I want to catch myself, and immediately take another step, raise my chin, and ask the world: What’s next? What do you have for me? 

Is it so wrong that I want a little surprise?

Come, turn the corner with me. Though I can’t promise I’ll hold your hand.

The First Room

I clutched the tickets in my hand, my stomach feeling as though it were being squeezed just as tightly by some invisible, spectral giant. My cousins crowded around me, jostling forward in the line to the haunted house. It wasn’t really a house, it was a semi-truck trailer fashioned into a haunted house, but we were scared and excited just the same. We were at the Blue Earth County Fair in the small southern town of the same name, the place where my mother grew up in a large white farmhouse in the country, the place where she wore roller skates while working the drive-in during her teenaged summers and where an older man exposed himself to her while waiting for his Coke, the place that my father said smelled like death, thanks to the rendering plant at the edge of town where cow parts got ground into glue. But I loved going to Blue Earth. For me, Gram’s house was trains whistling past her farmhouse, kittens in the old chicken coop, molasses cookies, giant portraits of Jesus, trips to Walmart for peanut butter cups, and the Blue Earth County Fair.

The fair was exactly what you see in the movies: funnel cakes and carnival rides, prize pies and jam jars adorned with blue and red ribbons. We would always go see my cousins’ show horses and rabbits and then ride the ferris wheel. I wouldn’t go on many other rides––the creaks and groans of the old metal scared me. I’d heard stories of kids on the giant swings, laughing with joy until their chains snapped and they went flying across the midway. Plus, the sun-baked rides were always hot and I was always in shorts: Not a good mix. But then I saw the haunted house (trailer). I gathered my cousins around me. “We have to go, let’s go!” I pleaded. Most of my cousins were very religious, but they acquiesced and sacrificed their cherished midway tickets to accompany me into the dark.

Finally, it was our turn to enter the haunted house. A worker took our tickets and said: “If you get too scared, just bang on the walls and we’ll come get you out.”

This really got me going. “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, we’re gonna get so scared,” I said. I felt a strange mélange of glee and terror course through me. The butterflies in my stomach were knocking against each other in a crazy, frothy frenzy and all of a sudden I really had to pee. “Let’s go, let’s go!” I urged my cousins forward toward the semi trailer’s opening. We pushed against the narrow plywood door. It was spray painted black and outfitted with spring hinges so it would slam shut behind you.

“Watch your fingers,” the worker said. 

I pulled my hands to my chest, afraid of getting my hands caught. My cousins forged ahead, the door snapping shut behind them. I tentatively went through the first door and ran into a cousin’s body. I squeezed close to her, jumping at the sound of the door slamming behind me. The room wasn’t a room. It was an extremely narrow hallway and it was pitch black. “Where’s the door? Where’s the next door?” I called to the cousins ahead of me.

“There are trick doors,” one of them said. “We have to push against the walls to try to find it.”

“What?” Panic set in. “Are we trapped in here? Is it going to be another one of those spring doors?” I heard my voice get louder, higher in pitch.

“Uh, yeah, probably,” one of my cousins said. 

“Oh my god, oh my god,” I started launching myself at the walls, trying to find the next door. I spun in a circle about myself. I couldn't get over the fact that my eyes were wide open but I couldn’t see anything, not even my hand in front of my face. As I was pushing against the wall next to me, I heard a persistent knock and felt the vibrations coming from the other side. I screamed. “I have to get out. I have to get out.” I started pounding on the walls, wailing. “Get me out, get me out! Get me out now!”

A worker opened the door to the outside that was directly behind me. 

I ran past her to the light, my cousins following. 

“You were the one who wanted to go in here,” one of my cousins said. They all looked at me, confused. “It wasn’t even scary yet,” another cousin said.

I took deep breaths of the fair-scented air and felt the tear streaks drying on my cheeks. “The springs,” I started. I tried again. “It was so small in there.” Then I shrugged. How could I explain that if we had entered the haunted house and seen the light up ghosts and carnival mirrors and actors in zombie makeup jumping out of coffins, I would have screamed in delight, I would have grabbed their hands and dragged them forward to see what lurked behind the next corner? But instead, I entered a suffocating plywood box with rusted-out, squeaky doors designed to snap your fingers. In this haunted trailer, the fear wasn’t spine-chilling and fun; it felt dangerous and real.

Hallway with Wavy Mirrors

I have been known to scream in other, fairly tame haunted houses. I have always struggled somewhat to distinguish the real from the imaginary. I’ve always been gullible. I spend much of my days in daydreams. Later, that same day at the fair, we passed a booth with old-timey writing painted across the top: Come see the REAL Headless Woman! Immediately, I knew exactly what the attraction would look like. I would part the velvet curtains and enter a dimly lit space. Within a glass case, a woman would rest, her hands folded atop her waist. She would wear a long, white Victorian-style dress. Long sleeves, a high collar on top of which––emptiness. Surely, there would be machines to keep her lungs and heart functioning, probably a feeding tube of sorts. Would they need to store her brain in a nearby capsule? Had she consented to all of this? How did she lose her head? Shouldn’t she be in a hospital? I clutched my aunt’s arm. “How can they do that?” 

“Do what?” 

“Keep a woman alive without a head? At the fair?”

She leaned in close and shook her head. “It’s not real,” she said.

“But the sign...They said. It’s real, it’s real,” I repeated. 

She patted my arm and we kept walking past the pool of rubber ducks and the stacks of bottles waiting to be knocked over with balls. 

“I don’t think that woman would have wanted to be shown like that,” I said, more to myself than anyone else. “But what can she do about it? What can anybody do about it now?”

 

Hallway of Cobwebs and Candles

That’s the thing about haunted houses and haunted attractions––there are so many thin lines that can be crossed at any moment. I have entered a demented carnival-themed haunted house, had a scary clown jump out at me, have let out a loud shriek in fear that then fizzled out into a fit of ab-tightening laughter. I’ve walked into the notoriously unsettling haunted house at the Minnesota State Fair, been so startled by a masked worker who grabbed my arm when all of the signs expressly said the workers would not touch you, that I turned in surprise and anger and threw a punch. I left that haunted house with my head high. I was proud and righteous, empowered. I’ve walked through wooded trails at a Halloween-themed campground and felt my entire young body shivering, first from fear and expectation, then from magical imagination coursing through me. What if I were a witch? What if, in a past life, I made potions and forged friendships with frogs and toads bejeweled with warts and mushrooms? What if I held magic within me?

Perhaps this is why I love haunted attractions: within the space of a few minutes, I can experience a whole host of emotions, and I never know what’s coming next. Fear, hilarity, excitement, and nerves. Confusion, sadness, surprise, and solidarity with the people screaming next to me. In short: it’s a rush. I don’t do rides or roller coasters. I don’t do drugs and I barely drink. I do haunted houses.

 

Back to the Entrance?

I’m not alone in my love for haunted attractions. Over twelve million Americans pay to gain entry to haunted houses (including haunted semi trailers), hayrides, corn mazes, and theme parks, giving the haunt industry billions of dollars. Why all of these people seek out frights varies. Some, like me, love to be scared. Others want to prove to themselves that they can do it. Others are dragged in by their friends (or bossy scaredy-cat cousins) and the time spent in the haunted houses is simply a footnote to a fun-filled day at a carnival or fair.

Trap Door

So many thin lines. Like cobwebs. Like the lines between life and death––strands snipped by the furies. Even when I research haunted houses––attractions chock full of witches and ghouls and spiderwebs and skeletons––things I love––all I have to do is click one wrong article, or read one paragraph more, and my stomach drops. A line’s been crossed. It isn’t fun anymore.

Basement with Chains

There is one haunted experience that wants to blur the line between safety and danger so much that a change.org petition has garnered over 170,000 signatures, the authorities are frequently called on by people who live near the grounds, and anyone who wants to test themselves and go through this experience must sign a forty-page waiver riddled with typos and misspellings that some argue make it moot. McKamey Manor calls itself an “extreme haunt,” a “survival horror” experience. It boasts having never had one person finish the four to eight hours-long experience where some of the possible risks include being tattooed, being waterboarded, eating or drinking unknown substances, being drugged, having your fingernails removed or teeth pulled. Many, particularly those who live near the locations in Tennessee and in Alabama, question if the activities that go on are even legal, but no matter how many times concerns are brought to the authorities, possible charges are dismissed: everything is voluntary and there is no cost of admittance, except for a suggested donation of dog food for McKamey’s pets. Many believe that the fact that there is no cost of admittance is the loophole through which McKamey can operate his torturous experience. In all of the online comments I read, people say they are disturbed by the gleeful joy McKamey exhibits as he films those going through his extreme haunt. Up until a few years ago, a safe word could not be employed. Even now, some people who have undergone this experience say that they screamed the safe word over and over before McKamey’s employees stopped what they were doing.

 

Hallway with Light at the End, Other Haunted House-goers Whispering Around You 

What makes haunted attractions fun, what gives people a rush instead of traumatizing them, is the fact that no matter how scared they are, they know that they are within the bounds of something imaginary. As a Reddit user named tenkai wrote in response to a man’s troubled post about McKamey Manor: “If people want to go through that experience then more power to them. They can do what they want. But I have a big problem with McKamey Manor being labeled a ‘haunted attraction.’ I am not trying to be pedantic but to me, a haunted attraction has an element of fantasy and the illusion of danger. We all know that the vampire in the corner is not a real vampire.” Scientists who research fear sum it up similarly. Because scare-seekers know they are in a haunted house, they can experience the rush triggered by a release of adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine sometimes brought on by a flight or fright experience, all while knowing that they’re safe. The mental safety net is key. 

For me, McKamey Manor takes the haunted attraction and brings it too far into the dark. I want to be able to see my hands in front of my face, even if the light is so dim all I can see is a blurry, shapeshifting outline threatening to disappear before my eyes. Even if it’s dark, I still want to know my hand is there. I would never go through the terrors of McKamey Manor, but there is no doubt that others would. 24,000 people are currently on a waitlist to test themselves to the limits of horror.

Trick Wall

Before researching haunted attractions, I didn’t know that McKamey Manor existed. I also didn’t know that a crossover between haunted houses and evangelical churches and colleges existed. While I was in graduate school at Hollins University, my then-boyfriend, now-husband and I would often drive from Roanoke to Lynchburg in order to go to the J.Crew Factory Outlet store. Everytime we went, we drove past old-timey gas stations, scrubby blue mountains, and a college campus with a giant, manicured LU mowed on the side of a mountain. Liberty University, founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr. in 1971, is a highly conservative, evangelical Christian college. Each year, the college puts on a haunted attraction that they call SCAREMARE. The purpose? To show people what could happen to you after death. Unless, that is, you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, which is something you get the chance to do after you’ve been thoroughly scared by the student-run haunted attraction on LU’s campus. SCAREMARE has been a fixture at Liberty for nearly fifty years. I read an article in Liberty’s student-run college newspaper Liberty Champion that states that “1500 people [give] their lives to Christ every year” after undergoing the dual experience of being scared and evangelized. On the official SCAREMARE website, under its mission it says: “Ironically, this House of Death points to the Way of Life!” When I watch a well-produced trailer for SCAREMARE with student actors screaming and running from clowns and a bloody butcher with a pig mask, I can’t help but think that it looks like fun, even if the rationale behind the haunted attraction truly scares me. So much of what is inside a haunted house is scary because of its otherworldliness––ghosts and ghouls, zombies and monsters. These things don’t scare me half as much as many very real things that happen in this world every day. What scares me is the fact that Jerry Falwell Jr. was the Liberty University president until 2020; that after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that killed Heather Heyer and that President Trump failed to renounce, Falwell Jr. said that Trump “didn’t have a racist bone in his body”; that Falwell Jr. has been openly anti-LGBTQ and anti-Muslim; that he promoted conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus; and that all of this was somehow acceptable to the college’s officials. It wasn’t until Falwell Jr. became mired in sexually scandalous controversies that he was forced to resign. Back on the Champion website, I hesitate and then click on “Opinions.” A few of the headlines I read: “Renewable Energy Failed During the Unprecedented Storm [in Texas],” “Americans Should Avoid Getting the Covid-19 Vaccine,” “Guns Save Lives and Should Not be Taken Away,” and “Derek Chauvin Did Not Receive a Fair Trial.” I also see more hopeful headlines like the one that states every American should receive the Covid-19 vaccine, but most of the headlines through which I scroll give me a chill (I have recently learned that the errant shakes that shiver down our spines are sometimes due to anxiety). Of course, the opinions shared here are representative of many people in this country, not just some of the students at Liberty University––I just happened to fall into a haunted house rabbit hole and, unlike Alice, who awakes from a dream in the end, I have landed in a very real corner of the internet. 

I am struck by the different ways I experience fear––first from the fun promo video about SCAREMARE, and second from my research into Liberty University and some of the widely held beliefs among the evangelical community, both at the college and beyond. In both scenarios I experience fear, but the second one is much more frightening to me because it is of this world. It is concrete. There is no waking from a scary dream. There is no safety net. Just a world full of human interactions with very real consequences.

Room full of Zombies, Monsters, Witches, and Ghouls doing the “Monster Mash”

Despite the fact that I was an English major, despite the fact that I am now a published author, in college I never once wrote an academic paper for an English class that was graded above a B+. It was the best I could do, it seemed. No matter how many office hours I went to, no matter how many hours I spent in the library, or drafts I wrote and read outloud to myself, red pen in hand, I could never cross that line into A territory. I had a kind professor who called me in once to discuss a paper I’d written for her class. In it, I’d discussed gaps in research I found in scholars’ published work. I had only been trying to spice up my writing a little––“what the author fails to point out...” “in a glaring omission…”––but my professor gently explained that I needn’t tear apart another’s scholarship. “They have worked quite hard on it, and there’s no way to fit every last thing into their article.”  

Now, I am so grateful to have received that advice. It certainly makes me take a wider view of peoples’ pieces of writing, and of people themselves. 

But. But there is also a part of me that wants to write something that includes everything, even though I know it’s impossible. I want scholarship and research, I want daydreams and long-winded imaginings, I want stories and legends, I want humor and wonder and pain. I want it all. I want it all at once. 

My mother and I once visited my grandparents in Florida. They waited outside on a park bench in the sun while my mother and I ventured into a shadow-soaked haunted house. It was the best haunted house I’ve ever been in. One room was decorated like a haunted hotel, another was a foggy graveyard and I swore––I swore––we were outside under the moonlight even as I knew that sunlight lurked beyond the walls. Another room was a mad scientist’s lab and yet another was a never ending series of hallways, its walls adorned with crooked portraits and flickering candles. My heart was racing, racing, racing, and I never wanted it to end.

Foggy Graveyard on a Moonless Night

Sophomore year of high school. A cold Friday night in October. My group of girlfriends had just started hanging out with a similarly nerdy group of boys, and we’d all decided to go as a group to Valley Scare, the Halloweenified amusement park about a half hour’s drive from our high school. All throughout school that day, my friends and I were shaking with excitement, jitters, and fear. We were nervous about hanging out with the guys for the first time, but we were excited that we might get to grab their hands when a ghost jumped out at us. Mostly, though, we were terrified at the prospect of being terrified.

We were all screamers and shriekers and jumping-up-and-downers. We were the drama nerds. And that was part of the problem: we had a tech rehearsal for the fall play the next day. “I just know I’m going to strain my voice from screaming so much,” I told my friends. They were worried about it, too: even though we were only sophomores, we’d all landed pretty large roles in our production of The Crucible (how fitting). So, we hatched a plan. Laura, our only friend old enough to have her driver’s license, drove us to Party City where we purchased a six-pack of party favor plastic whistles. Whenever we wanted to scream, we’d jam the whistle in our mouth like a pacifier and propel all our frightened air through it. 

When we pulled up to Valley Scare, it was dark and cold and my teeth were chattering with preemptive fear. With shaking hands, I tore open the package of whistles and passed them out to my girls. We bought our tickets and met up with the guys. I wanted to stand near them, say something funny, or say anything at all, but I was too scared. I huddled with my friends, our whistles clutched tightly in our hands. Upon walking through the wrought-iron front gates, the first section of Valley Scare opened up before us: a vast expanse pumped with thick and billowing curtains of fog. We heard shrieks and the diabolical thrum of chainsaws, but we couldn’t see anything through the thick white air. Beyond, we knew that rides and haunted houses awaited us, but it was as though the park were testing us. Make it through the vast unknown and then the night is yours. 

The boys pumped themselves up with a few cheers and ran toward the sounds of terror. The fog swallowed them up with hungry gulps.

“Well?” my friend Amy said. She jabbed her arm through mine and wedged her whistle in between her teeth. I did the same. The other girls paired up and we looked at each other, gave a final nod, and stopped into the mist.

Within seconds, we heard the rev of a chainsaw and a low, demonic laugh. We blew our whistles as hard as we would have screamed. Amy and I held each other tightly and barrelled through the fog. I blew my whistle, squeezed my eyes shut, and ran as fast as I could past the horrors waiting in the white.

We slammed into a body and I knew, I knew. I knew that as soon as I opened my eyes, I’d see a demented clown with a chainsaw. Or a bloody zombie butcher with a chainsaw. Or worse. Something I couldn’t even imagine. Adrenaline pumped through me and I wanted to release, to let it flow out of me, so I took a deep breath and––

“Stop, stop,” a gruff voice said.

I blinked my eyes open to see a woman with a flashlight in hand, her black t-shirt bearing the word “Security.” “You guys can’t blow whistles like that.”

“We’re in the school play and we can’t lose our voices by screaming,” I said.

“Then don’t scream,” the woman said, simply. “But you can’t blow the whistles. That’s what security does if there’s a real emergency and someone needs help.” 

She held out her hand. Admonished, we placed the cheap plastic whistles in her palm, but the whole time I was thinking: Real emergency? What kind of real emergency?

Emergency Exit Light

There have been instances where people have died in haunted attractions. A collision of a haunted hayride and a Ford F-150 resulted in three deaths and multiple injuries in a town named Chunky, Missouri, in 2016. A couple years earlier, a sixteen-year-old who only had one lung entered a haunted house in Ohio and died from a heart attack. There have also been instances of accidental hangings. I read the descriptions––one of a teenager performing an act in 1990, and another in 1957 of a school principal who slipped, making a noose tighten around his neck in front of his students. In both instances, the audiences truly believed that they were only watching an act. It wasn’t until later that they learned of the horrible accidents. 

I hate these stories. These stories are infinitely more devastating than they are frightening. I click away from the accounts. How quickly it turns from terrifying but fun to terrifying and terrible. Again, some line within me is crossed and I’ve found myself in darker territory––a place I didn’t want to go. Thin lines. Thin lines I often can’t decipher until it’s too late. And by then, I’ve crossed over to the other side.

Inner Chamber

I thought about keeping some of these things from you. I really did. I tried to write a haunted house essay that was light-hearted and fun, like the haunted house my friend Clare’s family made in their garage one year. Claire’s dad, wrapped up in toilet paper like a mummy, lay on a long folding table, but you could see him breathing. Clare hid behind a workbench and shook chains. That could have been a fun essay. Beginning, middle, end. 

But what about the trap doors? What about the walls that slide and reveal inner passageways? What about the jump scare that you swore made your heart stop for a split second?

Being a horror-enthusiast forces me to slam up against and sometimes unwittingly blur past my boundaries. It makes me question what kind of fear I find fun and what kind I want nothing to do with. How far out can I push the thin lines before I veer into too-terrifying territory? At what point do my hands disappear before me in the dark, and at what point do I bang on the plywood walls and wait for someone to come and get me out?

And once we leave the haunted house, once we step out into an autumn evening swept through with cool wind and studded with amber leaves, are we really leaving danger and fear behind? Or are the true terrors of the world lurking behind the next snapping spring-rigged door, waiting to scare us with no way out?

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Thank you for reading my essay, “Haunted House.” I’d love to hear about your experiences with haunted houses—either as part of a Halloween experience or as a home with paranormal goings on. Tell me about it in the comments! I hope you’re having a deliciously chilling October. Take care.

With love from my kitchen table,

Kaia

*images from Unsplash