Extreme Haunted Houses Part 1

Astonishing Legends Network. Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey everybody, welcome back to Scare It All the Time. I'm Chris Collari. And I'm Ed Vercola. And to kick off spooky season, we are going to face one of my personal greatest fears. The Haunted House. But not the real kind of haunted house, the fake kind, which for my money is the even scarier kind. Every October, millions of people voluntarily hand over money for the privilege of walking into a dark building and having their anxiety cranked to 11. They know the weapons are fake, as is the blood and gore, and the maniacs are all actors and the chainsaw only sounds real. They just want to jump and scream and come out the other side in one piece, which most of the time they do. Because most of the haunted attraction business is built around selling the safest, scariest version of the haunted house that they can. They want to confuse the part of your brain that knows you bought a ticket with the much older part of your brain that believes that you are about to die. The better the attraction is, the harder it becomes to tell which half of your brain is correct. And over time, a handful of these attractions decided, you know what? Fuck it. Why bother with the illusion? If you're there to stare death in the face, maybe they should just find ways to put you in contact with the Reaper himself. So they started to blur the lines, creating an industry of extreme haunted houses that push attendees to their breaking point and beyond. But before we get to those, we have to take a look at how we got here. From simplistic illusions to horrifying real-life tragedies, Today, we are going to take an extreme trip through the world of haunted houses. What are we? Scared. When are we? All the time. Join us. Join us. Join us. Now it is time for... Time for. Scared all the time. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. You've got Chris here solo for just a quick housekeeping. Ed normally would be joining me for a little bit of housekeeping, but... As many of you know, if you listen to the show, we're coming up on October, which is the month of too many treats, is what we like to call it. It's scared all the time, HQ. It is the month in which we try to inundate you with as much content as possible, both on the main feed and on the Patreon. So if you don't want to miss anything, make sure you go over to the Patreon and sign up. We've got three different tiers. They're all loaded with great stuff. We've got early release, commercial free release. We've got bonus episodes. We've got live streams. We've got button of the month club. We've got a whole bunch of stuff you don't want to miss over there. And everybody who has signed up seems to love it. So join the Patreon if you can. The other thing we encourage you all to do if you want is to leave a five-star review. And that means we will sometimes read your five-star reviews in housekeeping at the top of the show. And I've got Two of those that I want to do for you. The first one is a five-star review from Brady Redman. Excellent laughs, and I learn stuff. Great, Brady. That's what we're here for. We want you to laugh and learn and hopefully not be able to sleep at night. The review Brady leaves is, Chris and Ed are a fantastic team. I love this podcast. I could listen to these guys all day. I love their blend of off-kilter humor and love of learning. It shows how much they love what they're doing. Give them a follow. They're worth it. Thank you, Brady. We do love what we're doing. And I'm happy to say that if any of you do want to listen to Chris and I, to Ed and I, all day, we've got plenty of hours of material. You could actually do that. You could probably even get two or three days. Out of just listening to Scared all the time. We're coming up on 90 episodes by the end of this year, I think. So most of those are at least an hour. So at least 90 hours of content. Most of them aren't two hours. So somewhere between 90 and 180 hours of content of Ed and I talking your ear off. You guys keep the five-star reviews coming. Keep listening. Keep watching. If you haven't followed us over on YouTube, make sure you go and do that. We do video episodes for all of our main episodes now. And with that, I think it's time for Ed to rejoin me at the fear desk, and let's get into the episode. Okay, everybody, welcome back to the show. Before we start, I do want to just reiterate what kind of haunted house we are talking about. It is not a building full of actual ghosts. We've covered a bunch of those in our haunted hotels episode, most notably. The haunted house we are talking about today is a building somebody has deliberately filled with blood and gore and violence and found a way to make money on. These places are usually called haunted attractions, which is a useful term because many of the modern haunts, haunts, many of the modem, modem, modern, blah, blah, blah, which is a useful term because many of the modern haunts might not be a house at all. It's often a warehouse or a prison or a farm or a forest or a theme park or an abandoned shopping center or just a line of temporary trailers in a parking lot somewhere waiting for people to come in and get scared. But Every good haunt is part theater, part kind of a magic show. There are also home haunts, which are constructed by hobbyists in their own homes and garages and used to scare their neighbors. Okay, let me interrupt you for a second. Once you started explaining what a home haunt was, it jogged my memory. But for a split second, my very first thought was how you can hire an Elvis impersonator to come to your house. I thought it was like, oh, what did you get me for your birthday? I got you a home invasion, but like a simulated home invasion. It's a home haunt. It's a new business. And they will come and scare the shit out of you. In your own home. In your own home. I think you may have just invented a third kind of haunted attraction. You've got the ones that are set up in a parking lot or in a mall or an amusement park. Then you've got the home haunts, which are things that people know they are doing in their garages. And then your version, the home invasion haunt is really just a way to terrify your friends and loved ones by having their homes broken into by hopefully actors, or maybe just whoever you could find to pay. It's pretty wild. I hope no one gives me that. Also, if anyone has extra money laying around, don't use it on getting me anything where someone comes to my house. I don't want an impersonating Elvis. I don't want a stripper gram. I don't want a home invasion haunt. Use that money on our Patreon instead. You know what might even be like a fourth version, though, instead of the home invasion, if you did just pay someone... To haunt someone's home as a ghost. I mean, I guess you couldn't pay a real ghost to do it because that would involve a lot of transactions that ghosts probably can't make financially. But maybe you could, you know, I guess really you'd be paying a frogger to live in someone's home. Yeah, you're paying with ghost coin. You're paying with ghost coin, which is going to tank in two months. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll circle back to home haunts later. They become very important near the end of this story. But first, I think the timing on this is great because just before, not just before, but recently before this recording, Ed went to a haunted attraction and I believe had a good time. Ed, do you want to tell us about your relationship to haunted attractions? Yeah, it's the thing I probably turn down the most when it's offered. It's crazy. Like, yeah, for years and years, you know, we've lived out here for years. So, you know, you have Knott's Scary Farm. You have, you know, Universal Hollywood, sorry, Universal Halloween Horror Nights. Queen Mary does one. Queen Mary does. And then there's also more crazy ones I'm unaware of. But I mean, there's a lot of like tickets you can buy for pretty elaborate sets and, you know, big horror nights. And for years, I've said, no, thank you, no, thank you, no, thank you. And then I finally accepted, begrudgingly, some friends to go to it this year. And, you know, it's early enough where I thought the lines wouldn't be too crazy or whatever, and they absolutely were still crazy. People fucking love this shit, apparently. Yep. It was a really fun time, actually. But I'm told, I'm told, and I was a baby about it the whole time, from the second I walked in, I was pissed off. Like, guys and ladies ran up with chainsaws. I got, like, right in my face. This is from the, like, just past the turnstile, you understand. I just wanted to make my way to where you could like, it's annoying. You can't go on your phone because you go on your phone to like text your friends, where are you? And then they take advantage of the fact like, he's distracted, get him now. And then other times I finally just had like a moment of peace where I was like, all right, I'm just going to get a drink and sit here. And that person dressed like a skeleton just stood, like came, you know, 10 inches from me. It just stood there. Just stood there staring at me. Stranger style. Yeah, didn't do anything to me, didn't whatever, to the point where it just became so uncomfortable. And I was like, I just said, this is a true thing. I said, don't you have a fucking karate kid to chase or something? Get the fuck out of here. And he just continued to stare for like 30 more seconds. She just walked away. And I was like, man, you really can't get a minute to yourself at a haunted thing. But that said, I ended up having a really fun time. But I'm told... that where I was, which is the universal Halloween horror nights or whatever, uh, that it's the tamest of all the ones around LA that like, they can't touch you. They can't, you know, kind of, there's like a lot of rules. There was like literal children there. So it makes sense that it would be the tamest, but you know, I did say, you know, it was a lot of fun. In some ways, the main drag was scarier than some of the haunted houses because it was just like I felt like I couldn't. The haunted house, I've agreed to be scared, but the main drag, I've agreed to get a sandwich. And that's the only thing I've agreed to, and I'm being bombarded. But the houses were pretty fun, too. They can come from anywhere. You know, when you're out in the crowd, they're like making their way through the crowd and jumping out at you from places that you're, you know, when you're in the house, you kind of know where they're coming from in front of you. Usually. Yeah. And they're called like mazes, like haunted mazes, but I did, they were really on rails that you couldn't get lost in them. Not this version. No, but I did like that. My favorite thing about, you know, we didn't get to do all of them because there was so many people and I didn't have like an express pass or whatever. I wasn't really prepared for how long some of the lines would be. It's almost like it's a theme park level lines. But yeah, I did like when some of the mazes kind of escalated. It's scary in the beginning, what have you. But then as you're going through that final minute, the scares come a little faster and harder right before you kind of get out. And my friend Natalie and I were also discussing that I think they also pump in, like, dirty smell. I don't know why. Some of these just smelled fucking terrible inside. I think, is it sometimes the fog, the fake fog and stuff that smells bad? I feel like sometimes those, like, things. I think one of these chainsaw guys shit their pants or something. It was awful. But, yeah, so that's my long-winded way to say that, like, I was against it for literal years. Then I finally went and it ended up being a really fun time to the point where later this month, some other people are going to be in town who want to go and I'm actually going to go back. So yeah, good, good. I mean, I, I've always felt like, I mean, I ha I think I've told this, this story on the show before. Well, here, wait, well, let's back up. So you had a good time, but generally you hate these places because you don't like having things jump out at you. You don't like that anxiety creeping up your spine. I do not like that at all, but, Almost in a way that like, I don't know, I was surprised to learn this about myself, which is when I couldn't be touched, it really did declaw or defang it or whatever a little bit for me, which made it a bit more fun. Like, yes, I'm being scared, but like my level of danger is unless someone doesn't have like their shoes tied and they trip and fall into me, one of these actors. I did get wet. Like the Terrifier one, I got like, they shot blood on me, but it wasn't like colored. It was just water, but it was- Right. So that was, like, ugh, gross. But other than that, yeah, like, that defanged it so it made it more fun. But, like, I was actually less scared doing this than I am just, like, watching a scary movie at my house. Because I felt like what I left from this was a lot of memories of having fun with my friends going through these. When I watch a movie, I'm left in my bedroom with, like, I'm scared. I don't know why. Like, I was able, like, the fun I had with friends... uh left the emotional imprint for me that was greater than the fear i felt in the house where just watching a scary movie the fear i felt watching the movie is like a greater imprint than me than than the audience i was with if that makes sense so i'm like oh this is more fun being the more fun way to be scared for me than just going to a scary. Movie interesting interesting i i hate these places, or I did for a long time. I don't so much. Even the easy ones that I went to? Yeah, yeah. Because I, it turns out, part of the reason I think I've come to enjoy horror in my life is because I am very easily affected by it. And I have... I walk around most days with enough anxiety that my shoulders are up around my ears just from everyday life. So walking into a place where they're going to be hitting the adrenaline button... and the anxiety button for however many hours I'm there is extremely exhausting. And every time I've been to the universal mazes, I've fallen down at least once. You fell down like, like you were so scared you fell backwards. I, in my defense, no one believes me, but as you just said, they squirt shit at you. And, and this has happened three times. I've, I've slipped, like I jump and then I'll slip on like a little bit of liquid or whatever. But one time it was really embarrassing because I went, when I was working at Blumhouse, they took us all because they eventually had like every maze there because they were all Universal movies. Yeah, I did find that interesting. I'll interrupt for a moment. I did find that interesting to be like, oh, there's a lot of giant, you know, work went into it, production mazes for movies that were like a million dollar horror movie. Yeah, well, that's the business model. It's like, oh, are these guys getting any of the fucking, like, Like, I didn't see Obsession, but is that kid... Are you getting paid for all these Obsession churros they're selling right now? You know what I mean? I mean, the Terrifier guys might be. And honestly... Oh, that's a good point. Yeah, there was a million Terrifier things there, and that movie cost eight cents. Yeah, and Curry Barker, who did Obsession, might be too, because that was made super indie and purchased later. I don't know any of those deals. But the Terrifier guys, for sure. I think a lot of them, you know, because... That grew over so many years, they had their fingers in a lot of it. So possibly they are. But I was going to say that's kind of the business model of horror movies. It's like it's cheap and then it can spin off all this stuff that can make a lot of money. And as a horror fan, my big pitch has always been that I would pay twice as much to get to go like an hour early before the houses all get turned on because It really is like Disney for horror fans. Like the level of detail in those mazes is so great. Yeah, the Ozzy Osbourne one I went into had some seriously like big animatronics and stuff. Yeah, you feel like, you know, they've done super specific ones too for like Nightmare on Elm Street 3 or Halloween 4. And you feel like you're in the set pieces of those movies. And I would, I'd love to go through them without something jumping out at me all the time because I appreciate the, craftsmanship and the work that goes into all. Of those things. These, like, Disney Imagineers, Imagineers. Hey, hey, hey, they should use that. I was thinking about how Universal, and I don't want to, you know, in case they want to sponsor us, I won't say anything too bad, but it is not as good as Disney. I think we could all agree that there's just not a level, like, it's fine. It's one of the better theme parks, but, like, it's not Disney. And I do think that Universal must be so happy that, that Disney can't do this. It's just doesn't fit the brand of Disney. And so it's like, yeah, you're going to get like Jack Skellington on, you know, like at the haunted mansion or something, but, but they're, they can't have chainsaws chasing, you know, moms with strollers. Yeah. So universal must be like, I wouldn't be surprised if, if next year they start Halloween horror nights on like July 2nd, like just to get as much like no competition with Disney as they can. I mean, Hershey, Hershey started one a few years ago and I was surprised. It's not, you know, it's far from the most intense, but it is fully like violent, bloody, scary. Like one of the mazes was like the abattoir or something. And it was, it was like a butcher shop for people kind of thing. And like, it was, it was, you know, they, they closed the park down and then they opened these mazes that are very much for adults, um, I don't think Disney could get away with that. But Hershey, I was surprised how many stops they pulled out to scare the shit out of people who wanted to come visit. Ironically, the scariest maze they could make is like, how we source the cocoa or whatever. How we source the chocolate, the ride. The centuries of pain and terror that American business has run roughshod over the... international south to source their cocoa beans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I spent most of my life hating these things. I think I've told this story in the podcast before that in first grade, a kid in my class had a birthday party around Halloween, and he had us all go to Indian Echo Caverns, which is a cave system in Hershey. And for Halloween, they do like a haunted caverns thing. And I didn't really even know the kids very well because it was first grade so you just have to invite your whole class because back you know when you're you know everyone has to get invited but i wasn't really friends with a lot of them so i remember being very nervous to go already and then we get there and we all walk down to the front of the cave and there was like a you know like a mining zombie or something was like ushering us all inside yeah and saying how we're all never going to get out and the second we all step inside it was just like it was way way way too scary for first graders i don't know how scary it would be you know looking back on it as an adult but it was too scary for first graders and we all just started running and screaming and i remember looking down at my feet so i wouldn't see anything scary and basically like trying to feel my way out and i remember uh running into a guy like a scare actor and And he grabbed me and I looked up and grabbed you. Well, he like he I i ran into him and i think he grabbed me at to like keep me from you know running into a rock wall or something because i was just like wow and this poor fucking guy was just trying to help but he had like an arrow or an axe in his face there's something sticking out of his face and i remember him being like It's okay. Hey, hey, it's okay. And just being like, it's not okay. I was so fucking scared. And so from that point on, I hated when I said up top that this is one of my actual greatest fears in a way it really truly is like I would not go on, you know, the boardwalk haunted house. you know, janky wind up version of something like that. Like it was too scary to even contemplate. I did ultimately in high school go, we have Jason's Woods out here in Pennsylvania and Field of Screams were the two big ones. And I remember in ninth or 10th grade, I got dragged to Field of Screams because there was a girl I had a crush on. And I went on one of the haunted hay rides and I don't really remember it, but I do remember at the end, you had to get off the hay ride and go through like one of those tunnels where the walls are rotating. And so you feel like a fun house thing. Yeah. And there was all this fog and there were these zombie hands or something like people were under it, reaching over the top of the railing to grab at you. And I remember I completely freaked out and slammed my hand down on the metal railing. And I remember it landing. Like, I remember the feeling of my hand landing on one of the reaching hands and something like, popped. Or you killed someone you broke someone's wrist. And then there was a scream and there were lots of screams so i don't i can't say what happened for sure but if you're out there and you hear this and some fucking idiot broke your hand uh when you were working at field of screams in like 2002 i'm i'm so sorry i i promise you i did not have fun that night either But anyway, these things have been around for a long time. Ed and I both have complicated relationships with them in the degree to which we like to have our anxiety buttons pushed. But to understand how we got to this point, we got to go back to the beginning. So Ed, do you want to guess where haunted houses, the idea of a haunted attraction even began? Yeah, it's a wild... Someone had to suggest it. So with people, this wasn't a natural formation, correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone had to be like, it's probably P.T. Barnum. It's always P.T. Barnum. Close-ish, sort of. It was Paris at the end of the 18th century with a man who liked to claim that he could actually show you the dead. Like seance guys, like it was just, This is before that was popping off, right? Like the Houdini and the seance stuff. Yeah, this is before... This is the 1700s, so. This is before the rise of spiritualism. This is right after the French Revolution, which was an excellent time. They saw some fucking horror in the streets. They did. This was a great time to start a ghost show. And also, they saw horror... They built horror through engineering, too. So they had, like, guillotines or whatever... And so they were like, what else could we attach a rope to and scare people or kill them? Well, yeah, I mean, this is a little bit more complicated than a rejiggered guillotine. But yes, France had just spent several years cutting the heads off of hundreds, thousands of people, including a king and queen. So the country was absolutely packed to the brim with a fully... A death-obsessed populace full of people who had lost relatives or neighbors or political enemies or all three. And into this extremely death-focused environment came Etienne Gaspar Robert, a Belgian physicist, painter... balloonist we don't have many of those anymore and showman. No we do rob the balloon guy that is true he worked at universal i think he did a halloween horror nights he went to college with. A balloon guy yeah balloon guy well we know one there's one balloon guy. Uh he's got one of the all-time great business cards too remember i don't it was like rob the balloon i'm messing it up i'm messing up i'm paraphrasing a thing from 20 years ago seems like but it was like it was something like Rob the balloon guy. That's just my name. Don't do that. Or whatever. It's something like that. But it was fun. Well, this guy was many other things in addition to being a balloonist. And I suspect he was not a balloon artist. I think by balloonist, they probably mean. Also, 1700s. It wasn't like they had balloon material. Was he just like blowing up like sheep liver skins or whatever? Like sheep bladders? I think they. What was he blowing up? They had uh hot air balloons i believe were invented in the mid 1700s so he was probably doing something with with hot air balloons. Whatever that material and for my next trick another small hot air balloon it's just always small he just keeps making hot air balloons it's not like they're doggies. Uh Into this extremely death-focused environment came Etienne Gaspar Robert, a Belgian physicist, painter, balloonist, and showman who performed under the name Robertson, which is a really plain name for a guy that much under his belt. Yeah, you had like a wild name and then. According to Atlas Obscura, this guy, quote, first stepped into the public eye in 1793 with a scheme to use mirrors as a defense against the British Navy. a ship-scorching idea he adopted from the story of Archimedes' heat ray from around 214 BC, which is said to have incinerated enemy ships with mirrors. So he came out swinging. Oh, so I thought his big plan was to just put up enough mirrors that the British Navy... would see themselves and think there was a equally big Navy that we, like, oh, we can't possibly be. Oh, no. Our information was wrong. They actually have a huge Navy. Turn around. Turn around. But it's not surprising that I think, I've never been to the, whatever, Palace of Versailles, but I think, like, it's got all these, like, mirror-lined, it's like super mirror. It's mirrored out. And I think it's like a really big deal at the time. I think it was like they got really good at making beers and it was like a difficult thing to perfect and to get good at. And that like the ostentatious... aspect of that palace was like look at this thing that's hard to do that we did a ton of well and i'm not 100 true sure that that's like true but in my mind it is and it would make sense for why like a french guy was like we're working on mirrors here we're pretty good mirrors. This guy robertson wanted to work on mirrors but the government wasn't as thrilled with the idea and turned him down. No, I just meant like why mirrors would be on his mind, maybe. Right, right, right. Mirrors on the mind. Mirrors on the mind. This guy was turned down, and it wouldn't be his last failure to win over the local authorities. He was constantly coming up with crazy screams. Crazy screams. That's when you pitch things for extreme haunted houses. Crazy screams is the name of his first haunted attraction. Yeah. His specialty, now just to remind you, out of, Being a physicist, painter, balloonist, and showman, his specialty was optics. And so you add that to the list. He's the Mysterio of his time. He was. He could have fought the British Navy single-handedly with his optical tricks. But he was particularly fascinated by something called a magic lantern, which... you probably are familiar with, even if you don't know it, it's just basically a projector. Like, you shine a light through a painted glass slide, and then that throws a picture onto a wall or a screen. Magic Lanterns had been around in different forms for more than a century already, and even though spiritualism wasn't quite taking off yet, it had been used, Magic Lanterns had been used by scamby spiritualists to make ghosts appear during fake seances, which is I know sounds kind of unbelievable now, but at the time, it would have been like having a crazily advanced holograph or something to trick people with. Most people weren't thinking you could even do that. So if you put a ghost on a wall during a seance, people got the shit scared out of it. They didn't know what it was. Yeah, was it Lumiere Brothers who did the train video? Was that them? The Lumiere Brothers, also French, were like, pioneers in camera technology and filmmaking. Yes. And I don't know if they did the original, like... So for people who don't know the history of filmmaking, and obviously I don't know enough to remember all the names, places, and times, but there's a very famous just shot of a train driving towards the camera. It goes by the camera eventually, but just a train on the tracks coming towards the camera that when it was shown in theaters for the first time, people literally got out of their seats and, like, ran. Yeah. Like they genuinely were like, what the fuck? There's a train here now. And so I imagine if that years later was fire in a theater, I can't even imagine if you had a seance and then you see that technology on the wall is what I'm trying to present as like, it must have been like outrageously scary or shocking. Yeah. Yeah. That train film was probably like 1912 or something. So this would have been over 100 years prior to that. Yeah. Yeah. These people probably all killed themselves. And Robinson was like, oh, what have I done? Robertson actually improved the magic lantern by mounting it on wheels so you could move the projector around. Toward or away from the screen, which would make the image. Which would make it bigger and smaller. Yeah, and it would look like it was rushing towards the audience or running away or whatever. He called his version the Phantoscope. And the basic image was still just paint on glass, but his additional tweaks were to surround the projected figure with black, which would hide the lantern portion from view. And then he would... And this is particularly brilliant, I have to say. Because, you know, I was just talking about this would be like having like a super advanced hologram or something. One of his insights was he would shine his Phantoscope instead of onto a screen, he would aim the image onto smoke. So instead of the audience seeing a bright square with a picture of a skeleton inside of it, that would still be inexplicable and spooky. You just saw a brightly lit skeleton hanging. You put a little Vaseline in the lens. I think it's why VFX, as often as they can, you try and have those shots be during nighttime seeds. So, you know what I mean? You get a little faded at the edges. You can't really tell that Transformer is VFX. I mean, Transformer's a bad example. It's very good VFX in the first Transformers movie that kind of still hold up. But usually you don't have the money for that. So, yeah, he was early adopter of, like, make them squint and they'll believe it's a ghost. And he went even further to make them believe this is a ghost. He added sounds, thunder, bells, ghostly voices, and unsettling music, which a little bit more on that in a second. Chose one person in the audience to kill each night. Yeah. Grew out an evil looking mustache and perfected his cackle. Assistant for Robertson operated multiple projectors and spoke for the spirits and So a figure could appear in the distance, grow larger, move toward the crowd, disappear, and it would blow people's fucking minds. Also, if the assistants are speaking, it's not like a, whatever the record technology would have been, like one of those cylinders or something. If it wasn't pre-recorded, I guess you could also just be like, hey, there's a woman in the third row with big red hair. You can, like, have the ghosts almost interact in a way that's like, I think I see a woman with big red hair. Yeah, and I'm sure, I looked and I couldn't find anything, but I'm sure that these voices, they were probably speaking through some sort of, like, you know, pipes or something that made their voices sound weird, I think was part of the idea. It wasn't just like. This person's a showman, so. Oh, yeah. Robertson is a showman. And in 1799, he found the perfect location for the show he was developing, the remains of a Capuchin convent near the Place Vendome. He designed his space for this show so that visitors, and this is why it's considered the beginning of the haunted attraction, because you didn't just come in and sit down. you entered through the crumbling religious complex that used to house the convent, and then you would move through rooms with various optical illusions and come to sit in a space designed to resemble an underground chapel, and that is when Robertson's ghosts would arrive. So there was a big wind-up to getting to the place where the ghosts would be, and even though it was a far cry from a modern haunted house, it was the first time Somebody thought to go, hey, you know, if I designed a place with this sort of optical illusion pathway, I could really scare people. Yeah, it is interesting that his show is fear. Like it's everyone else's show was probably like Moulin Rouge dancing ladies or like, you know, musicals or we're going to all get together and like listen to, you know, Beethoven at the orchestra. Yeah. It is wild that this guy's, this is a really early example of someone who's, the show itself, like you're not going to go home whistling the tune of what you heard tonight. You're going to go home being like, can you believe we saw a ghost and it was scary as shit. We should go back and like bring people on dates to this. Yeah, well, this is how he advertised it. There's an exist, a newspaper ad for the event, which has survived. And it reads, quote, Fantasmagory by citizen E.G. Robertson. Apparitions of specters, phantoms, and ghosts such as must appear or could appear in any time, in any place, and among any people. Experiments with the new fluid known by the name of galvanism, whose application gives temporary movement to bodies whose life has departed. I'm sorry, what? Hold on. The last sentence, because this is important. An artist noted for his talents will play the harmonica. So we're also going to have John Popper there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hope you like Hootie and the Blowfish and now a dead body. But so there. Really was a thing that made dead bodies move or that was part of the lore? No, that was part of, he was making up lore for his show. That's awesome. This guy was pretty ahead of his time, you know? Like this is again, the year 1800 and he's. How did he fund this? I think, I mean, I assume with his loaded resume, he must have made some money in some of those fields. Or there was genuinely wealth distribution after they cut off all the rich people's heads. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Immediately after the rich people were like, It was better when we had it. Like, they just keep making horror houses. Yeah. There was a little extra money floating around, and then basically people just started carnivals and haunted houses, and the rich took it all back. Yeah. But about that harmonica, because we're going to go on a little bit of a side quest in this episode. This was not... The harmonica the way that Ed and I were just joking about like a blues harmonica. The harmonica noted here is called a glass harmonica, which is much less hilarious in this context than the harmonica that we're all imagining. Okay. These things are also potentially one of the scariest instruments ever invented. Wait, what? Wait, what's scary about them? Tell us what's scary about them. We're going to get to that in a second, but first you want to guess who invented the glass harmonica. P.T. Barnum. Benjamin Franklin. Oh, there's nothing that guy wouldn't invent. He was popping off for a while. Yeah. You think Etienne Gaspard Robert had a laundry list of talents. Benjamin Franklin sought to top him, and he invented the glass harmonica after seeing water-filled wine glasses played by Edward de Laval at Cambridge in 1761. That thing where. Like, you rub your finger on top of, like, a wine glass? Yeah. He went to a show where, like, a guy played music by doing that. He laid out all these crystal glasses, and he was running his fingers around the edges of the glasses, and people were playing glasses commercially that way. Ben Franklin looked at that and thought he could improve on what he saw. So he created this instrument that is called the glass harmonica. It basically, it looks like a series of glass bowls. So if you took a, you know, a series, and by series, I mean like 30 or 40 of them. And each one is larger or smaller than the next, depending on which direction you're scanning your eyes across. And he mounted these glass bowls horizontally and, On a rotating iron spindle that was turned via foot pedal. A lot of foot pedal stuff back then. A lot of like, what do you call that thing? Like a billow. A lot of billow-based instruments back then. And I think it comes from organs, right? Like church organs work through wind. I think a lot of people thought wind was the way to do it. So billows is wind, baby. Unless you meant like it's a rope on a pedal. Well, it was just turned via foot pedal. I don't think it was billows. I think it was more like a sewing machine. It was like spun a wheel. Well, if he's not using billows, he's not ready for primetime, in my opinion. You know who else isn't ready for primetime? Ed, because he called billows, billows, like a hundred times. We have just a couple of minor criticisms for Ben Franklin. He invented quite a lot of things. And in a letter addressed to his friend... Gian Battista Beccaria, an Italian priest, physicist, and mathematician in Turin, Franklin wrote from London in 1762 about this musical instrument, quote, the advantages of this instrument are that its tones are incomparably sweet beyond those of any other. In honor of your musical language, I have borrowed from it the name of this instrument, calling it The Armonica. Wait, wait, wait. Why are they called that? I guess there must be something in Italian that's like, I don't know what Armon or Armonica means in Italian, but he called it the Armonica. No H, just A-R-M-O-N-I-C-A, the Armonica. But Ed, I want you to open this link. I found a Creative Commons video on YouTube that demonstrates the sound of the glass harmonica For people who are listening to the podcast, it's kind of hard to see. but you can listen to the sound of it. Here it comes. This is glass harmonica. I don't hate it. I can hear it's giving music box. I can hear that there is, you know, automaton technology behind the like spinning of something, but it is, it's haunting. It's haunting in like a circus, whatever the hell that type of music is called. So get this, that haunting sound is one of the reasons that the popularity of this instrument did not last beyond the 1700s. Oh, you're not. Making a lot of pop hits with that. No, you're not making a lot of pop hits, but The more grounded reason that it did not survive past the 1700s is that it wasn't quite loud enough. It didn't generate sufficient sound to fill the large halls that were becoming home to stringed instruments, brass, woodwinds, percussion, giant orchestras. So it was very hard to hear it over the sound of an orchestra. The sound of screams at this type of place. There was also the small problem of the fact, and this makes me laugh when I was researching this, they were apparently incredibly difficult to move because they are made completely of glass. Yeah, glass is heavy. It's heavy and it's just breaking left and right. Anytime you bump it or shake it, it's just like pieces of glass are falling off everywhere. The other reason, though, is a rumor about it that is really spooky. So according to Wikipedia... There were rumors in the time of this instrument that using it caused both the musician and the listener to go mad. It is a matter of conjecture how pervasive the belief was. All of the commonly cited examples of this rumor seem to be from Germany, if not confined to Vienna. But one example of the alleged effects from playing the glass harmonica was noted by a German musicologist named named Johann Friedrich Rocklitz, who says, quote, the harmonica excessively stimulates the nerves. plunges the player into a nagging depression and hence into a dark and melancholy mood that is an apt method for slow self-annihilation. Whoa! Number one, if you are suffering from any nervous disorder, you should not play it. Number two, if you are not yet ill, you should not play it excessively. If you are not yet ill. Well, yeah, back in these days, you were going to get ill eventually. It's not an if. It's not an if around here. It's a when. And then number three, if you are feeling melancholy, you should not play it or else play uplifting pieces. So, ladies and gentlemen, the glass harmonica, the scariest instrument of all time, known to drive both musician and listeners mad and pretty much drummed out of existence in the 1700s. You get out of here. I'm trying to think of what the smaller version, I guess the theremin, like what came back to replace it in a less cumbersome fashion? I mean, a theremin kind of, you know, I think there are still people, we can't play any of the videos because we'll get flagged on YouTube. But if you're interested and you go to YouTube and you search Glass Harmonica and you'll find dozens of videos. Of people playing glass harmonicas. I mean, I'd love to hear someone do a full-on horror score with one because I couldn't find a lot of videos of anyone playing anything too spooky with it, but it is a weird, specific sound that I can see how back in the day, I mean, a lot of musicians are mad to begin with, so I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to To be a guy who's like, I'm mastering the glass harmonica and then you lose every job because no one wants to hear it anymore. Or pay for shipping or storing it. I do follow a guy on YouTube who has like a giant automaton music box runs off like punched sheets of paper, like thing that he travels around to like in England or something like to parades and things. And he's got to like haul it in a trailer behind him and shit. It's like gigantic. It's really impressive, and I have no idea. Obviously, bellow-based or whatever I said earlier. Bellows-based, yeah. But can you imagine walking into a falling-apart, crumbling convent to watch a ghost show, and someone's playing this fucking thing in the corner? And if it's a new instrument. The thing that works for this guy is like, Everything involved in this show was cutting edge, it sounds like. From the instruments that was played to the projections that were done. They probably invented the first fog machine that didn't require burning someone's house down to get the smoke. Actually, that is kind of crazy to think. I can't imagine going to something scary and hearing an instrument that I've never heard before. You're hearing sounds you've never heard. You're seeing sights you've never seen. Someone invented a sound. Just to scare the shit out of me. And we don't know who did it because they went crazy. We know who took the idea, essentially, and then built upon it. I do find it interesting that Ben Franklin, who you said invented this harmonica, even though he said he saw someone else do it and then he just kind of made an automaton version, it sounded to me, unless I misunderstood what you said, that he was praising it as this was the most amazing sound I've ever heard. Yeah. Not in a way that will drive you mad. No. In a way that he found pleasing. That's how I feel about the French horn and the lap steel guitar. Those are, to me, the two most pleasant sounds in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, you heard it here first. Ed Vicola, fan of the French horn. I never knew this. And the pedal steel guitar. Those are both my two favorite sounds. Well. To bring this all back around to the idea of haunted houses, Robertson had one of these freaky things playing tunes at his phantasmagoria, possibly driving everyone who ever heard it insane, but we will never know. He hadn't yet invented what I would call the modern haunted attraction, but the ingredients were there. An ominous location, concealed machinery, spooky sounds, and something horrifying waiting for you in the dark. So, While this guy was projecting the dead onto smoke in France, Marie Tussauds was creating an entirely different kind of nightmare. Is this Madame? That's correct. Madame Marie Tussauds. I didn't know they had a first name. It was just Madame. Well, I thought it was made up. I thought it was like an Aunt Jemima thing. I thought it was just like we slapped a name on it. No, it's very far from an Aunt Jemima thing in so many ways. Well, I actually don't even know. We haven't researched it. We've mentioned Aunt Jemima twice in the last two episodes or something. Things we've recorded, but I've since not Wikipedia'd it, but it's one of those things where I wouldn't be surprised in my head if it was like, oh, Madame Tussauds was just like made up corporate lore. No, she was a real person. Her history, which we'll get into in a second here, is a little bit spotty, mostly because as many well-known figures are, she was a very effective promoter of her own legend. So it's really hard to tell what exactly is true about a lot of her life. But we do know that she learned wax modeling in Paris from Philippe Curtius, a physician and artist who made eerily accurate wax portraits. Hey, you want something as impressive as like a statuesque bust, but you really have to keep it at a certain temperature? Come to me for your wax portraits. Yeah, I feel like in France, I mean, France doesn't have the craziest weather in the world, but their summers have got to be pretty humid. So you're keeping those things in your wine cellar, probably. Yeah. Which means you have to have a wine cellar. Yeah. And then you also have to trick people or at least to convince them to follow you downstairs to look at your work. Yeah, your giant room of wax figures in your creepy wine cellar. That's a local figure of note for sure. That's a person who for sure is doing their own horror, home haunts or whatever. Yes, yes. Actually, you know, we should back up a little bit because I realized you knew who this was. And so we never actually introduced the idea of who Madame Marie Tussauds was. Oh, yeah, please do. Please tell us more about this person. So Ed knows the name Madame Tussauds, as many of you listening probably do, because of the Madame Tussauds wax museums that have spread all across the world since their invention back in the early 1800s. And what a lot of people don't know is that Marie Tussauds actually had a hand in creating what we think of as the modern day haunted house. So she learned... wax modeling in Paris from Philippe Curtieu, a physician and artist who made eerily accurate wax portraits. And then during the French Revolution, she took her skill and created, she says, some people think she just sort of helped create death masks of people killed. By the guillotine. I do. I'm a fan of death masks. It's something where I could see myself collecting it, but also not at all like i do find it interesting. This is a new ed fact i never knew that you would consider collecting death masks. I would i would i find them i find them in very like they're cool to me. We could decorate the studio with them that would be nice But you. Know I'm like an originalist person. Like, I like all my stuff to be original. Like, my movie posters to be original. There's just no way I'm going to get, like, an original Abraham Lincoln. You know what I mean? I guess you're just going to have to start killing people. And then you can have all the death masks you want. Yeah, and I guess I wouldn't want an original death mask. That really should be with the family. Well. In this case, she was creating death masks of people killed by the guillotine. So I'm not sure how much of their family was left because I think a lot of them were all killed by the guillotine. Well, didn't they wear them in like some ancient places? Like when someone dies, it might've been Rome, could have been Greece, could have been anywhere where they had the technology and the wherewithal and will to make death masks. But I think there were some cultures where like when, so if you die, Well, I'll choose someone else so it feels less targeted. No, no, no. Go ahead. Let's pick me. Let's say I come out to LA to record a bunch of episodes and you kill me. Well, I want to find a person who's failed but cares about them. Actually, Calari is a good example because you said you went to Italy and it was like tons of graveyards that just say Calari everywhere. Yeah, yeah. In the town, yeah. Yeah, let's say an Italian Calari dies. Giuseppe Calari dies. And there was a time, I think a bunch of these kind of cultures, I could be making this up or a dream I had, but I want to say that the funeral procession, when they like took the box down the street, people would wear death masks of their previous generations to be like, we're all walking with you. So it's like people would wear the death masks of their great grandfathers and great grandmothers to be like, like your ancestry is bringing you home to be with them. And they're like here and they are, I don't know. It could have been a dream I had. And if it was, it's an interesting idea. But that's a cool way to wear, use a death mask. And they would make copies of them, obviously, like so people had like them for the day. It's before everyone just had Guy Fawkes masks. As always, dear listener, if you have any idea what Ed's talking about, feel free to email us to let us know if this is a dream he had. It sounds real to me. It sounds sick. What also sounded real to many people were the details of Madame Tussauds' biography, which have in modern day been called into question because a lot of people feel that she sort of was the number one promoter of her own story. And so it's a little unclear how many of her claims about her background and how she learned this stuff are actually true. Madame Barnum over here. Yeah, she was an early... She was the... P.T. Barna may have learned from her. She would have a cryptocurrency for sure today. If she was around today, yeah, that's what she would absolutely... All the self-promoters do. She would have gotten into NFTs hard. Oh my God, dude. And it whacks NFTs. Yeah, I mean, what were these death masks if not the NFTs of the 1700s? They were very unique. They were valuable, I assume, to anybody who found them valuable, which is... what an NFT was. So I think she would have done well. But what we do know for sure is that she left France with a collection of famous wax figures like Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, John Paul Marat, and other famous victims of the revolution. In 1802, she showed up in Britain and toured with these statues and arranged them so that paying customers could stand in the same room and study them. Which again, Kind of crazy to think about. Until this point, the closest the average person could get to foreign royalty like this was to see them in a 2D painting. So to see them in anything resembling real life. This was the metaverse of its time. It was, and they looked honestly better, I think, than the images... Yeah, because they had legs. Yeah, that helped. That helped. So Tussauds eventually opened a permanent London exhibition of these statues, and the bloodiest material... became known as the Chamber of Horrors, and it quickly expanded beyond the French Revolution to include criminals, murderers, executions, and scenes of violent death. So if you, for whatever reason, couldn't find a public execution to attend back in the day, you could now go see what you were missing at the Chamber of Horrors at this wax museum. One of the reasons I wanted to include the Madame Tussauds wax museum is because I've been to the London chamber of horrors. And it was one of the other scariest experiences in my life because I was also too young. I was in sixth grade and my aunt and uncle, my mom's sister and, and their kids, my cousins were living in Belgium for a few years for my uncle's job. And so my mom took my sisters and I out there for like two weeks one summer and And we went to Paris and London because Belgium is really central. You could take the train and everything places you're saying. Yeah, it was pretty easy to get around. And I was old enough at this point that I was starting to read Goosebumps and getting horror curious. So I foolishly thought that I would be able to handle the Chamber of Horrors. Big mistake. I remember, not much, but I remember that we had to go down these stairs that were designed to look like a crumbling old castle. And then that dumped you into this hallway where that looked sort of like, you know, like if you go to the Natural History Museum, you know, there's like glass displays with like a caveman or whatever. And it was that, except in each display was a real, a mix of like real and fictional monsters throughout history. I distinctly remember an Adolf Hitler and I distinctly remember a Vlad the Impaler because it was the Vlad the Impaler model that sent my sisters and I running and screaming and Because he was surrounded by skulls and corpses and impaled bodies. And it was just way too fucking scary. And then we briefly got lost. It didn't move. It was just wax, right? It wasn't like animatronic? No, it didn't move. It was just wax. But it was very realistic and way too much for us. And then the day got even worse because when we ran, we got lost. We got separated from my mom. And this was before cell phones. So her fear was that she lost her three children on the streets of London, and we were just going to become chimney sweeps or something. Yeah, and if this was Italian horror, she would have been like, my kids are on the streets of London, and then it would have been a slow push in that the three of you are now wax figures. Yeah, exactly. We don't see how it happened or who did it. We're just forever permanently in the exhibit now. Yeah. And then it's like your mom getting put into like a loony bin and then a shot of you three. like as wax figures and then it's, it's Italian horror. So they always, in my opinion, they always end like, they always have unhappy endings, but they play like the credits will roll with like somewhere over the rainbow. It's always like the most insane. Well, yeah, she would have, it would have ended on, on my mom going to the loony bin, us becoming wax figures. And then my mom, uh, screaming for a nurse that's standing in her bedside and saying, nurse, nurse, where are my children? Where are my children? And we would, pan up and see that the nurse was also a wax figure and then yeah it would cut to credits and be like a disco cover of yeah yeah yeah twinkle twinkle little star or something. They made some wild wild shit it's it's some of my least favorite cinema. Well more than a century after madame tussauds first exhibit was displayed in london the haunted attraction industry took its Next big step towards the haunted houses that we recognize today. It was in 1915 that the British Fairground Company, Orton. Here's a who? Orton, here's a haunt. It was in 1915. We can sell that tonight. It was in 1915 that the British Fairground Company, Orton and Spooner, built what is often identified as one of the first haunted houses specifically built as a commercial enterprise. Oh, wait, so was the one in France free to go into? The one in France was not free, but it was not really considered a haunted house in the modern sense. They weren't trying to franchise this. Yeah, it was a spooky thing that you would go do, but it wasn't really designed as a, hey, everybody goes in one end and comes out the other and a bunch of stuff jumps out at you in between. Sure, sure, sure. This was sort of the first version of that. It was called... The Ghost House. It's just a wooden structure that's not much larger than like a boxcar. And if you find pictures of it online, there's ghosts and monsters painted on the front. They're not really all that scary looking, but they give an idea of the frights contained within. And this was the first time where you were required to move through a series of dark rooms. And the jumps here were not provided by actors or people wearing masks. They were steam-powered scares. So the first haunted house was actually a steampunk haunted house, including a maze of rocking floors, air blasts from below, and vibrating walls. And third degree burns if the steam got out of any of these pipes. Just those screams are very real. It's every single person getting burned in a way that cannot be fixed in 1915. Yeah. What's really cool too, I mean, I don't know if I'll ever get a chance to visit it, but if you are a listener in the UK, the original Orton and Spooner ghost house still exists at the Hollycomb Working Steam Museum in England. So if you are in town, you can go check it out and tell us how it is. I think it's probably kid-friendly. It seems very, very low on the scarometer. I don't think it's super frightening. Watch out for that hot steam. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But even this ghost house was really just a blip on the radar in the history of commercial haunted attractions. It wasn't until the Great Depression that the formula really started to take shape, though it was initially an attempt to bring some sense of order to what was becoming a wildly dangerous holiday. For decades, boys and young men treated October 31st as an unofficial night of lawlessness. They rang bells, blocked roads, frightened pedestrians. dismantled anything in town that could be dismantled. History.com reports that one boy's craft guide reads, quote, this is the only evening on which a boy can feel free to play pranks outdoors without danger of being, pinched. And it is his delight to scare passing pedestrians, rigged doorbells, And carry off the neighbor's gates. They weren't calling it Halloween yet? No, they were. They were. But this person's just saying that it's actually the Purge. Yeah, I mean, in the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween night and the night before Halloween night, which is often known as Devil's Night, which we're going to do an episode on later this month. got nuts. So this was, it was, it was pretty intense. According to this guide, even if a boy had to fetch the gate he stole out of the tree he left it in, quote, the punishment is nothing compared with the sports the pranks have furnished him. Some of these pranks got out of control. In 1879, around 200 boys in Kentucky reportedly stopped a train and by laying stuffed bodies across the tracks. Oh, you can't do that. And in 1900, University of Michigan medical students stole a headless corpse from an anatomy lab and propped it against the doors of the building. So just goofs. They're having fun. Really? Just goofs with... Real dead bodies, fake dead bodies. Easier to get a real dead body back then than to, like, how long it took to make the fake dead body to stop the train is what guided the hand of others to be like, it's easier just to grab real ones. It took us all night to make that one. Putting leaves in the jeans. Like, no way. Not doing that again. I couldn't find how 200 boys were involved in laying dead. a body across the tracks. They all had to collect leaves and twigs to fill the jeans. They had to make these scare. There you go. Or it's an, I am Spartacus situation where it's like, no one's in trouble. Just tell me who did this. And it was like, I did, I did. And they all just, that one person wouldn't get in trouble. 1933 was really the nadir of the Halloween vandalism. I don't know if it was a combination of the depression and like general, like genuine, anger or anxieties or what, but in 1933, on Halloween night, teenagers around the country flipped cars, cut down telephone poles, and damaged homes and businesses to the point that newspapers and angry residents called the chaos across the country that year Black Halloween. Some communities considered banning Halloween. Others tried bribing vandals with something better to do, which resulted in both the birth of the home haunt and modern trick-or-treat nights. Cities, schools, and parents organized costume parades, parties, and neighborhood trick-or-treating. Families began turning their basements and sheds into temporary haunted houses. And according to a brief history of the haunted house from the Smithsonian, quote, those first haunted houses were very primitive. No, no shit. People were working on shoestrings, 1933. Get this. Well, this was so from a 1937 party pamphlet that the Smithsonian has in their collection. There's a description that, of how parents could design, quote, a trail of terror to spook their children. The pamphlet reads, quote, an outside entrance leads to a rendezvous with ghosts and witches in the cellar or attic. Hang old fur, strips of raw liver on the walls where one feels his way to dark steps. Weird moans and howls come from dark corners. Damp sponges and hairnets hung from the ceiling touch his face. Doorways are blockaded so that guests must crawl through a long, dark tunnel. What? At the end, hear a plaintive meow and see a black cardboard cat outlined in luminous paint. You know, luminous paint was giving you fucking cancer back then, I'll tell you that much. Well, yeah, I don't know who had the money to outline their cardboard. The liver alone in this economy? Yeah. Wasting liver? That liver needs to be eaten by your family. Yeah. Also, you want to be early into the house that evening. You don't want to be the 300th person to have a liver, like rotting liver, kind of slide across your face in this dark corridor. On the walls. That smell ain't never coming out. No, no. You have to build the structure for a specific... purpose. You can't do this in your living room. So lots of people turned their homes into these home haunts every October. And the home haunt that would eventually lead to the rise of extreme haunted houses at first really gave rise to the civically minded haunted house where every year churches, schools, hospitals, and other local neighborhood organizations would make these haunted houses to become as fundraisers, basically, for whatever they were supporting. And so you would both keep the kids off the streets, and you would make a little bit of money for whatever your project was. None of these charity haunts went down in history as particularly scary or memorable, but they did lead to the standardization of ideas about where and how to hide people to jump out, how to keep a line moving, how to apply all this monster makeup and everything else that was required to put these things on year after year after year. And so for a while, the charity haunt really dominated the American haunted house market. Well, I feel like the charity haunt, you know, you're not worried about return on investment. You have a group of collected, like-minded people working together who don't feel like outsider criminals. Like, if you, me and a couple of friends were like, we're going to build a box of hanging liver and dead bodies and radium cats. And, uh, and then we're going to sell tickets. People are like, you guys are fucking gross. But like, this could be like a PTA or church group who, who approaches the haunted house. No different than, uh, uh, an enchantment dance or a car wash where it's like, it's a means to money in the collection basket and not like, we don't, we're not creeps who just want to scare kids. I mean, they will do that and then hide that for years. But I mean, you could do it in an almost puritanical way. So that's probably why they were able to do it so much more than just the creeps who do it for the love of the game. And so the creeps who do it for the love of the game was able to utilize, like you said, going through it enough times to go like, it would be cooler if someone actually spit in your mouth. or whatever, like, you know, that's how they build on it. That's how they build on it. If I ever had the time, and I certainly don't, but I do, I get a genuine chill down my spine thinking about the fact that it is almost certain that at some point between 1937 and, you know, we'll say 1969, which is going to be the next marker on our haunted house timeline here, some group of kids or kid had a really bad time in someone's janky fucking, you know, creepo haunted house where they could just bring kids in and do whatever the fuck they wanted. Like there's no way that, and, and, and, and to have a real genuine adult creep creeping on kids surrounded by like homemade monster makeup and like store-bought pumpkins and shit, just. Like, Something tells me the 19, I mean, the actual, the idea that the best home haunt is also like a pedophile or something or like a murderer, you know, at a time prior to having to go around and tell everyone that you moved into their neighborhood. Yeah. Like, like that is genuinely so much scarier. It's one of those things where it was like, you know, before they caught him, you know, he was the most popular house haunt. In town. But given the dates you just gave me, I mean, we got a couple of wars coming up. I imagine during World War II, the house haunt reduced a bit because the know, we need to use all that material in the war effort. Yeah, all that nuclear paint is going straight overseas. Yeah, it had to go somewhere else. Yeah, no, you're exactly right. It's like, who was the, you know, the whole, you know, John Wayne Gacy was a birthday party clown. Like, Who was the John Wayne Gacy of the. Home haunt community. Home haunt. I'm sure there was one. I mean, John Wayne Gacy was like preparing for it. He was making furniture, I think, like out of skin and stuff. Like he could only show this off during his home haunt events because no one would believe that's real. He couldn't have anyone walk through his garage and basement because they were stuffed full of fucking corpses. So he couldn't let anyone. No, he gets the one night a year he could, I'm saying, because no one would believe it's real. You know what I mean? Or I'll drink it out of like Skull Guy. Goblets yeah and they're like what's that smell and he's like oh that's all the liver i put on the walls. Oh just i'm following this guide i found on how to terrorize your kids a trail of terror um an end trail of terror if you will yeah uh the like no the reason i brought up the 60s is that the dates you just said is that you know uh and we're going to get into that right now but if you told me in 15 minutes that the biggest perpetrators of or makers of home haunts and haunted extreme haunted houses were the cia i would believe you yeah they were like if it's a fucking psyop like i would believe you. They were testing early mk ultra ideas exactly. You you could only catherine zeta jones around the lasers so much uh through this time period to not hit like the cia was involved you almost have to like There's an above 0% chance that the CIA probably invented also home haunts as like a psyop. Yeah, to see what they could do, to see what would happen if you shined a store-bought strobe light at a nine-year-old child for 45 seconds straight because you get them to snap. Yeah, I think that's pretty highly likely. I can tell you what, though. The next haunted house that we're going to talk about opened in California in 1969, and I can. Almost doubly assure you that the CIA was somehow involved in this. That's right. The Haunted Mansion, a.k.a. another place that scared the shit out of me as a kid. The third. Disney's Haunted Mansion? Disney's Haunted Mansion. There's nothing. It's one of my favorite rides. Nothing scary about it. Okay. There was when I was five years old and my grandparents took me to Disney. Not only did I skip the ride entirely... But I remember they bought me a Disney souvenir photo book, kind of like a paperback little photo book with just pictures of all the different rides. I wouldn't even look at it because there was one of the pages in there was the ghosts from the Haunted Mansion. And I was so afraid. Like the hatbox ghost? Yeah, and I think the dancing ghosts maybe were in there, a photo of them, or maybe it was a photo of the graveyard or something. I mean, I will say this, in terms of the Haunted Mansion and in terms of what we've already spoken about, the translucent ghosts through that Imagineer technology where they have that glass that when you go by, it looks like down in the dining room. There are people dancing and ghosts eating and stuff. That, to me, must be as impressive as... using a magic lantern 100 years earlier to project something where it was like, I'd never seen anything in my life like that. No, I mean, I think it's a similar technology. I mean, it's far more advanced now, but the basic idea is still the same. You're just shining an image. In this case, I think more of like a 3D image. holographic image, but you're just shining it onto glass, basically. So it's the same idea. I've since been on the Haunted Mansion a number of times. It's my wife's favorite ride. I even worked the ride into my proposal when I proposed to her. But for our purposes today, the Haunted Mansion is a case study in how it elevated the haunted attraction into a true art form. That's Disney for you. That is. It is. I mean, it used to be. It was a long road to get there. No less an authority than WaltDisney.org tells us that, quote, the development of a haunted house attraction goes back to the earliest concepts for Disneyland. In one of the earliest layouts for Disneyland, Imagineer Marvin Davis indicated a haunted house located near Main Street. One of Disney legend Harper Goff's first illustrations for Disneyland from 1951 depicts a creepy, bat-infested haunted house high on a hill overlooking a country church and graveyard. They didn't do any of those things. They didn't. It's not near Main Street. It's not on a hill. No. And part of that was because nobody could convince Walt to make an actual haunted-looking House at Disneyland. Some Imagineers wanted the ride or whatever it would become to be frightening. Other people thought the ghost should be funny. They all agreed that the exterior should be old and decaying looking. But Walt Disney did not want what appeared to be a ruined house sitting in the middle of his. We're not universal. We don't need the psycho house up there. Exactly. Exactly. And that actually answered when I learned that during the research, that answered a big question that's always been in my mind, which is why is the Haunted Mansion so Baroque and kind of like normal looking? And why does it not look everything else at Disney looks like what you want it to look like. But the Haunted Mansion just looks like a big New Orleans house. Well, it's in... Everything down there is New Orleans. It's in the French Quarter, if you will, of Disneyland. Right, but it doesn't look haunted. It just looks like a nice house, which always bugs me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not covered in cobwebs and cracks. There's a cemetery outside, though. There is when you're in line. Yeah, this is why I'm not Walt Disney, though. I would have been like, let's get that decaying home. I want it right in the middle. I want everyone to be afraid of it. And Walt Disney said no. My favorite piece of Walt Disney lore... about the parks, and I have every reason to believe it's true. I think I've heard it in numerous interviews, whatever, is that when they were designing the park, they were figuring out where to put trash cans. And he's like, well, I don't want those places, you know. Trash cans, no one's thinking about trash cans ever, basically. You're thinking about the rides, Hudson Mansion, whatever, Main Street. And so the way they figured out where to put the trash cans is he got a hot dog, and then he walked with the Imagineers or whomever he was with, and he ate a hot dog. And when he finished eating the hot dog, he was like, how long do we walk? And he was like, well, I started eating it over there. He's like, all right, we should have a trash can this distance all the time. So he's like, it's around the time it takes someone to eat a hot dog. I now have garbage in my hand. And so we should have it like that's the distance between garbage cans should be. I was like, that's so fucking rad. It's the distance. It's about the distance of how long it takes you to get sick and tired of your kid. And you just leave them at the trash can. They whine for Mickey too much. Toss him in the bin. I think with the first open, when he was making the garbage can stuff, those Mickey costumes could have been home haunts on their own. Those 1950s Mickeys are terrifying. All of them are terrifying back then. Way scarier than anything in the Haunted Mansion. Yeah, absolutely. The first plan for the Haunted Mansion, though, was to create not a ride, but a walk-through house like... some of the walkthrough haunted homes that had become popular as civic fundraisers that could accommodate 40 guests at a time. They'd be welcomed, the plan went, by a recording from Walt himself. And this is a little bit long, but again, I just found this fascinating. So I'm going to. Read the whole thing. WaltDisney.org actually has a draft of what Walt Disney's introduction was going to be. This draft is dated September 1957. I was about to. Say, 1969, you're saying the house opened, the ride opened. I was literally going to say when you first said that, it's like a decade after the park. So it took them a long time to get Haunted Mansion in there. Took a long time. But it sounds like it was on their mind when they were first starting. It was, yeah, yeah. It was always the plan, but between not knowing what it was going to be, changing directions a couple of times, and probably however long it took to write this whole next chunk, you know, it was a decade. So this is what Walt Disney was going to tell people when they entered the walkthrough version of the Haunted Mansion. Bloodmere is the name of this old house, which was the lakeside estate of the Blood family. It was built around 1800 in the swampy bayous near New Orleans and was moved here intact because it was such a fine example of early architecture from that section of the country. It had not been occupied for some time and was badly in need of repair, so we started the work of restoration as soon as it arrived at Disneyland. But strangely enough. The work.... The work each day was destroyed during the night, and the night watchman reported that when he had passed the house, he'd heard eerie screams and seen weird lights. Every day we make a new attempt to repair the house, but in vain, for every morning the windows were broken, the furniture smashed, the shutters hanging by a single hinge, and even the new coats of paint scratched and peeled off. Additional night watchmen were employed to catch Vandals red-handed, but they were unable to do anything other than report weird and frightening apparitions. The destruction continued unabated, and we were forced to halt the useless attempt to restore the house. Meanwhile, we conducted a thorough investigation through special agencies in New Orleans who furnished us with startling new facts. Our house had a tragic and bloody history of unlucky owners who died sudden and violent deaths, which resulted in their unhappy ghosts remaining behind to fulfill the uncompleted missions of their lives. We were warned to expect unusual activities from the ghosts since they would be disturbed by being transplanted from their native haunts to Disneyland and without their permission. In fact, we are sorry to report that the latest tragedy of all occurred here in Disneyland and when one of our carpenters engaged in restoration work on the house disappeared completely from sight and has not been seen or heard from since. The house has proved too dangerous to be lived in since 1900, but we have succeeded in making it safe enough for a visit, when accompanied by one of our trained and competent guides. Guides are necessary by another strange characteristic of the house. It has rotted so long in the dank fastness of its lost hiding place in the swamps that not even the Southern California sunshine or the best efforts of electricians and illumination engineers can dispel the dimness of the bayous. I think that's cool. That's cool. That, like, no matter how much light we put on it, it always remains kind of haunted-looking. Yeah, it mysteriously remains always night within the house, the night in which all ghosts are condemned to live in. Now, we cannot promise you that anything at all will occur during your visit, since it is usually... in the wee small hours that the dead ones live it up. However, be prepared to see and hear something or other and take whatever precautions you please. We recommend that you stay close together during your visit and please, above all, obey your guide's instructions. Thank you. Super long. Super long. And I think I even, I think I, I don't remember exactly when I wrote this episode. I think I cut a chunk of it out to shorten it up a little bit. Well, it's Disneyland, so they would have found a way to integrate that huge thing into something you're doing. Yes. Like, it wouldn't have just been standing. I mean, you, even knowing you famously currently in the Haunted Mansion, still have to, like, stand in that weird elevator room. Yeah. And get told about shit, but not as much as that. Yeah, yeah, that was, that was, it's a long one, but I just find it interesting. I also just think it's so funny that they went with the name Bloodmere, the lakeside estate of the Blood family, which is such a first-grader's idea of what scary is. It was their initial. Also, these are people who make cartoons, so they knew that we had to thread the needle of scary and events for kids. Yeah. There's actually a great little documentary, I think it was on Disney +, about The Imagineers. It was, yeah. There's a whole section about the battle to make the Haunted Mansion and figure out what the tone should be. And that the reason it's become so popular and so iconic in so many people's minds is that the end result is the mixture of some people being like, no, no, no, it should be actually scary. And other people being like, no, it should be silly. And that's why it feels so unique to... what it is because it was a battle the whole way through. Yeah. But it's also like that, that giant speech is like the, you go to fuck it universal or you go to six flags or you go to anywhere else. And it's like the introduction to that ride is somebody hits a button where like Disneyland, there was this, like, we have to craft a narrative. Like you're coming to be at a place where like, you can't be anywhere else. Like, yeah. Okay, so Ed went on for like a full five minutes about Disney and the state of theme parks and price gouging and who knows what else because Chris and I fell asleep during it. But lucky for you, he agreed to cut it all out to keep things moving over here. Well, the walkthrough plan was thrown out and construction on a version of what exists today began in 1961. The outside of the mansion was finished in 1963, but the attraction inside remained empty for years until Walt Disney's staff worked on the 1964 New York World's Fair and continued fighting with the story and tone of the ride. Construction went on for so long that Walt Disney died three years before the ride even opened on August 9th, 1969. Just one week after it did, Disneyland admitted more than 82,000 people in a single day, which set a park attendance record. The Haunted Mansion not only illustrated just how much money could be made with a haunted attraction, it set a new bar for technical excellence. That's what I'm talking about. If I kept anything in, that's what I'm talking about. And if I didn't, just know that I was having a discussion with Chris about how Disney is the only place that really seems to give a fuck about making it very good, whatever they do. While the ghosts inside the Disney house weren't particularly scary, they were advanced for the times. Most local haunted houses could not reproduce the ballroom full of twirling waltz and ghosts or the animatronics in the graveyard, but they could imitate the structure. The haunted mansion took guests through a sequence of rooms, gave each space a specific idea, and used sound, light, and movement to tell a story. And it kicked off an absolute arms race within the haunted house industry, and within a few years, Everyone from those aforementioned charity groups to commercial operators around the country were attempting more and more elaborate haunts. The business was absolutely on fire. And then the haunted castle burned down. Now, we touched on this disaster in our amusement parks disaster episode literally years ago at this point. It was episode 16. And it's definitely worth listening to that whole episode. I might have to because I don't remember anything about this. We touched on this and it wasn't a big chunk in that episode. We're going to expand on it a little bit here. But if amusement park disasters are one of your fears, definitely go listen to that episode. Oh, I do remember. I do remember now. I do remember now. So we touched on the haunted castle. You may remember if you're really a super fan because Ed and I just realized neither of us actually fully remembered, but we did touch on this in our amusement park disasters episode. That was episode 16, literally years ago at this point. So the haunted castle disaster does bear revisiting not only as the deadliest amusement park disaster in amusement park history, but it is essential to understanding the history of the haunted house industry. So Six Flags Great Adventure opened in Jackson Township, New Jersey in 1974. A temporary haunted attraction called the Haunted Castle arrived several years later and became popular enough to remain at the park, despite the fact that it was built from a series of interconnected trailers. Yeah, now Six Flags is, there's no theming at Six Flags, right? It's just, it's just like wherever we are, we placed it, these steel coasters and these welded together trailers, right? They've never been about theming there. They've never been about theming, although I do think that they did, or maybe they still do have a partnership with Warner Brothers. So they have like a Batman ride. Yeah, but there's no theming around it. It's just like, there's the Batman ride on stilts. It's not Batman land, right? Well, At Six Flags in just north of L.A. Magic Mountain. Magic Mountain. They have like a D.C. land, I think, or they did at one point when I went. I mean, they are the only one of these Six Flags that is between two major theme parks. Like, you have to do something when you're between Universal and Disney. Yeah, Ed made a great point earlier that he probably cut most of out because it was a wandering discursive discussion of how little of a shit most of these amusement parks give about the products that they offer. And Six Flags Great Adventure really was not giving any shit when they kept the haunted castle set up on their interconnected trailers. Wikipedia gives us a pretty thorough description of what the castle offered guests. quote, a facade of false turrets and towers lent the illusion of height to the one-story structure, completing the look of a forbidding medieval castle. After crossing a drawbridge over the surrounding moat, visitors entered the castle and felt their way along a 450-foot-long convoluted path of dim corridors, occasionally being startled, when employee actors dressed as mummies, vampires, and other creatures jumped from hiding. So even the Wikipedia description just sounds really half-assed. Occasionally being startled by employee actors. Various theatrical props at exhibits were in view, including coffins, ghoulish mannequins, hanging spider webs, and skeletons. Alcoves along the route were used to present vignettes of famous and infamous characters and events from movies, horror, and ghost stories, and sometimes real life with live employed actors. I love that they're... Employed. Well, and live. They're live and employed. Well, I think that they may be saying that vignettes weren't live. I think that's all you.... Needed to be to be employed in this. Live employed actors portrayed stars of the scenes. Count Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Wolfman, and Lizzie Borden were frequent guest stars. Strobe lights and eerie sounds completed the scene. I don't know why. I just feel that this does not have air conditioning. No. Just people in, like, hot werewolf costumes collapsing in front of you from dehydration. Yeah, well, we're going to get to the many, many things that this did not have. Because on May 11th, 1984, the scares in the haunted castle got very real. According to an investigation report prepared by John Bouchard, then Assistant Division Director of the National Fire Protection Association's Engineering Services Division... Which is really a long way to say, like, I think this guy was a firefighter who just investigated.... If it's arson? Yeah, yeah, I think. Or it's an organization that won't let you put fires out because they're there to protect fires. It's fire protection. Fire protection. We need more fire protectors. Hey, this kid's on fire. Well, there's nothing we can do about it. Our hands are tied. It has rights as fire. It can't be put out. Yeah. Stand around him in a circle with your arms crossed until he collapses on the ground. We must protect the fire. Yeah, exactly. According to John, a fire broke out shortly before 6.30 p.m. when a 14-year-old boy who was using a lighter to find his way through the attraction accidentally walked into the polyurethane foam padding covering a wall and set it on fire. He tried to put the flames out but failed and then... and this is really paraphrasing everything, but he apparently went the rest of the way through the castle without telling anyone what happened. That's ridiculous. Which is crazy, but also the behavior of a 14-year-old boy who doesn't want to get in trouble and is not thinking about how dangerous this is. You know, like, he... And this comes into play a little bit later because, as we'll see, the owners of the attraction... wanted to get this categorized as an arson because it would have made them less liable so there's a big deal made out of the fact that well this kid he went through the whole he he put the fire he started the fire and then he just never told anybody which again crazy but doesn't really necessarily mean he did this on purpose it just is a kid who was like i gotta get the fuck out of here yeah but i. Mean also you know i think the kid should be in jail right now because you're cheating If the ride wanted you to have light here, it would have included light. So that's why he should go to jail, because he's cheating. You decided to cheat your way through the ride, and in doing so, created a bigger problem because of your selfishness. And then your selfishness to not get in trouble also led to not telling anyone about it, which means you should be in prison forever. I'm sorry, kid. I can't wait for Ed to have kids. It's going to be awesome. I'm not having them. I'm only putting them in prison. That's the goal I have. I also, in this kid's slim defense, I guess, we also don't know, when the report says he tried to put the flames out but failed, we don't know if that means he, like, you know, swatted at them and they got bigger and he ran, or if it means he, you know, threw his jacket over them and thought he'd put them out, but they were lingering in the foam and then got bigger. This kid sounds like an idiot. He probably threw kerosene on it. Yeah. Roughly 30 people were in the attraction when the fire began. Some encountered smoke and immediately headed for the exits while others thought it was a haunted castle effect. One group of visitors apparently saw the fire in its incipient stage and remarked how real the illusion seemed. And this is a good place to pause you here. I'm sure I've mentioned it in our theme park episodes, but, uh, my favorite ride at Disneyland, which is Pirates of the Caribbean, which is the opening day ride, you know, uh, the fire department, like Anaheim fire department. So, so if anyone's ever been on the old Pirates of the Caribbean ride, there's like a lot of fire in it, but the fire is kind of fake ish looking. It's like, it looks convincing for big, like, Oh, that's, you know, whatever blowing in the wind, like little confetti ass looking shit, like little streamers, um, with light. And the reason it looks like that is that the Imagineers had fire previous that when the, you know, fire marshal came to be like, can you open this ride? It's like, yo, is that fire? Um, And they were like, no, no, no, it's not fire, we promise you, it's just really convincing. He's like, yeah, you can't have that convincing fire, because in the event of a real fire, when we come, we need to know what's fire. And I thought that was really interesting, which is why it is a little... kind of cartoony-looking compared to what they were capable of at the time. It's the idea of fire more than real. Yeah, but apparently they originally had shit that was like, our idea of fire is a very realized idea of fire, and they were like, no, no, no, you can't do that. That's funny. This situation, I have to say, One of my most hated subgenres of horror, although Jeremy Saulnier, I think, is about to dip his toe into it this year, so that may change. But one of my most hated subgenres of horror is the haunted attraction that actually has a killer in it subgenre of horror. because it plays on that idea of like, oh, well, somebody could get stabbed in here and you never know. You'd think it was part of the ride, which is just always just feels like such a cheap way to stretch an idea out for 90 minutes that, you know, the first 30 minutes of it, people don't realize that the killer is there. But this is that kind of ultimate nightmare that they thought the fire was just part of the show inside the castle. That's what that kid was hoping, that little criminal. The fire consumed the attraction in minutes. Firefighters brought it under control at approximately 745, but the building had collapsed into a black pile of twisted trailers and burned materials. The confusion continued after the fire was out because the haunted castle had been full of mannequins and fake human remains. So when searchers first found bodies in the wreckage, They thought some of them were props. And the confusion continued at guest services because they did say when you bought the ticket, no refunds. Unfortunately, the only people getting refunded here on life were eight teenage victims who were found burned up in the fire. Investigators began trying to figure out what went wrong. And the first issue was, was that township officials considered the haunted castle a temporary structure, even though it had remained in the park for years. And I love this. So is it one of those things where it's like, if it's temporary, it doesn't need to be up to code? Yes, and this is so darkly funny to me. The trailers that the body of the castle had been constructed out of still had wheels on them. And that technical detail helped the attraction avoid requirements that would have applied to a permanent building. Oh my God, I was just talking to like an HVAC guy in Wyoming about how a lot of places will not put foundation down. They'll put foundation for the main building on your property, but then they will not put foundation down for other expansions of that building. because technically if you can put like a forklift arms underneath something, so if it's like kind of raised a little bit, then it's not a permanent structure. So you're not taxed as part of your home or business. But I was just like, man, there's a fucking way around everything. I mean, I just, it's just so darkly funny to me that, I mean, it seems dangerous enough. I know that these trailers were technically parked, but just that they were so lazy that this thing stood for a decade and And the trailers still had wheels on them. And it was that, to me, oversight in and of itself that allowed them to avoid having any kind of building permits or certificates of occupancy. The local fire inspector later testified. It sounds like they probably left them on to not pay all those things or get inspections. Well, yes, but I guess what I'm saying is they may have done that on purpose, but it just, that alone feels to me like a safety hazard that you have this giant ride sitting on trailers that still have wheels on them. Like, you know, I know the whole thing's not going to roll away, but it just seems like, it basically seems like the local government was like, yes, as long as you keep this one element incredibly unsafe, that allows you to make all the other elements even more incredibly unsafe. Great job. I'm sure it was a moneymaker for the town. They're not going to let, you know, they're not, they're not going to shut them down because they're probably getting paid taxes. But more importantly, like the thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if they were like, we're never going to let this happen again. And you're like, great. So you're going to make places be up to code. And they're like, no, no, no. We're going to make them build like a lake attraction. next door so that we can just roll the on fire thing which is already on wheels into the lake and it'll probably it'll save time and lives it'll it'll be like oh you fucking. Idiots it'll be a jaws style attraction next door and we. Can just uh yeah that's what i was thinking of the jaw style like you know like man-made little body of water. Yeah yeah uh so the local fire inspector testified he never inspected it and then ed you and i wish we had this hvac guy on but i feel like you can probably speak for him listen to the construction of this place i'm not i'm not nearly as well versed in in plumbing and construction and all that stuff as you are but this just sounds like a death trap to me quote The interior of the attraction was constructed of plywood and wood stud partitions with plywood ceilings suspended below the trailer roofs. The corridors were covered variously with wood, paper, and fabric, and one was covered with polyurethane foam. While there were illuminated exit signs, there were no smoke alarms or sprinkler systems. Well, yeah, I don't know where you're running the sprinkler system from, I guess, but. Well, the Jaws attraction next door, obviously. And the illuminated... Yeah, but also if there's no code, if you don't have to live up to code, then you don't have to have illuminated exit signs. Illuminated exit signs, there are no shortage of live theater that have asked repeatedly, can we not have a giant thing that says exit? We're trying to build this dark, and you really cannot turn those off if you're up to code. But this place is not code-based. They don't have to adhere to any of it. I'm not surprised by all the plywood, and I'm not surprised by the polyethylene or the drop. Ceilings like I mean they have to what are you going to do like they have to build the attraction side of it but. Well I'm not I'm not surprised by it but just it sounds like they essentially strung together a bunch of boxes made of exclusively flammable materials and then did absolutely nothing. To try to protect anyone that would go in and invent. It's funny, this is the kind of place that would still have asbestos, which is ironic because it's a flame retardant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it sounds like... Sounds like a tinderbox. In September 1984, a grand jury indicted Great Adventure, Six Flags, and two park executives with aggravated manslaughter for allegedly ignoring fire risks and failing to protect the people inside. Come on, where's our theme park lawyers? Where's our roller coaster lawyers? No one's getting in trouble for this. I know, right? We love those guys. We love those guys. Prosecutors presented testimony about the missing alarms, failed lights, and recommendations for sprinklers. The defense argued, this is what I was saying earlier, that park management had followed the instructions it received from local officials and that an intentionally set fire could have killed the victims before an alarm or sprinkler made a difference, which is why they tried to argue the kid who set the fire was an arsonist who set it on purpose. I don't know that logic. I don't know that whether it was intentionally set Or otherwise, if you intentionally set a fire, you're not tricking sprinkler systems faster than an unintentionally set fire or alarm. Like it would still be like heat or smoke, depending on what the detector is. Like, I don't see how a guy doing it. He's like, you can't shush the alarm. It can't be like. The only thing I can think is that maybe they were arguing that if it was set intentionally, he would have used an accelerant and that that would have somehow made it, you know, impossible to escape. I wouldn't be surprised if this kid did. This kid's a criminal. Ed's got it out for this kid. This kid's bad business. You're so worried about this. Why does he even have a lighter at 14? Because it's 1983. What else? I mean, every kid, he probably had a leather jacket and a pocket knife. Everything you're describing are criminals. He's in a gang. You're describing someone in a gang. So I was right to put him away and clean up these streets. After 13 hours of deliberation, the jury found the companies not guilty. The individual executives entered a pretrial intervention program and performed community service. Civil cases brought by the families ended in settlements and won jury award. There you go. Dude, theme park lawyers. We love them. We love them. No one ever gets in trouble in these stories. We actually do have. So if you're not a longtime listener of the show, over the years, we have quoted, we have found so many hilarious quotes about different, very specific disasters that We find information on the web pages of lawyers who sue companies over those specific disasters. So we have a running list of like, you know, roller coaster lawyers, ice rink lawyers, HVAC lawyers, elevator lawyers. But also we have like specifically talked in those disaster stories about their defense counsels and how they are amazing. Like they're always just like, well, actually, your honor. Like, if roller coasters weren't dangerous. Yana, I may be just a simple country lawyer, but I do believe you cannot hold my client accountable for running a faulty amusement park when nobody here was abused at all. Yeah, exactly, dude. Like, it's so, they're so good. I need my law degree. Damn. All right. So we're getting to the end here. In the aftermath of this tragedy, New Jersey and other states tightened rules for haunted houses, dark rides, and buildings designed to intentionally disorient their occupants. Fire codes increasingly required alarms, emergency lighting, clearly marked exits, flame-resistant materials, and sprinkler systems. These changes did make attractions safer... but they also made them much more expensive, which is where you see sort of the last and final shift into the modern-day haunted attraction. A question before we move on. Is anything you've just described applicable to temporary structures? Could they still... Is it ride-based now, which is if you're calling it a ride, it needs those things? Or if it's like, your amusement park needs to have that stuff, but if it doesn't count towards... temporary structures and they can continue to get away with this shit. I don't know. I, I don't, I don't know all of the details. I do know that it doesn't matter. The safety codes were improved for anything considered a ride. I suppose if you've constructed a corpse castle out of cardboard boxes and you want to put people through it, holding candles, uh, maybe the safety rules don't apply to that knockdownable temporary structure. We agreed as a company to once a day have a Cessna fly by with a sign that says you're here at your own risk. I don't know what more we could do. I really don't. And what do you want me to put a sign that says look up so everybody who walks past here looks up? I mean, Jesus. So when the tickets go up $ 90 per person, I want you to remember because we had to put the look up signs in. Yeah. Those blinking neon arrows pointing to the sky are not cheap. No. They're cheaper than we're claiming they are, but they are not cheap. So the last movement towards the modern haunted house industry happened here because it all condensed, basically. Many temporary haunts, many local fairs. They couldn't afford to operate for just the few weekends each year that they would normally open those charity haunts or whatever. So they declined while larger commercial operators with permanent buildings, professional staff, and loads of insurance took over more and more of the market. By the end of the 1980s, the haunted attraction had basically become the thing that Ed visited at the beginning of the episode. Actors, props, sound effects, crowd control, fire codes, and in agreement with the audience that it was allowed to make you feel like you were in danger again. but not actually put you in danger. Which is why I liked it, ultimately. Which is why you ultimately liked it, but. Regulation led to me having a good time. Next week, we have another thing coming entirely. Oh, the thing we had promised on the title of this episode? Look, it's got to be searchable, man. It's got to be searchable. Horror fans are difficult customers. The more haunted houses you survive, the better you get at seeing the machinery. You know where the hiding places are. You start teasing the actors back. You're having, frankly, too much fun. So eventually, a few haunters started asking how much of the safety net they could take away while still calling this experience entertainment. Well, sure, just put it on wheels. Do what you want. What if you had to go in alone? What if the actors could touch you? What if they could restrain you? What if they could blindfold you or cut your hair or hold you underwater? I'm sorry. What if you ask them to stop and they didn't? These haunting maniacs had a vision, a vision of an attraction that stops being a traditional haunted house and becomes something else. And no one pushed harder to find out what that something else could be than a Navy veteran named Russ McCamey. McCamey took the home haunts that we discussed earlier and transformed them into an hours-long ordeal. Guests were kidnapped, bound, buried, submerged, humiliated, and filmed while it happened. McCamey claimed no one ever made it to the end, and the more people watched his guests beg him to shut it down on video, the more people wanted to go. So next week, We are taking you inside McKamey Manor. Where no one got to the end of their lives, it sounds like. No one got to the end of their lives. And there's Russ McKamey. There's much to be said about Russ McCamey. There may really be no end to McCamey Manor because McCamey Manor existed as much in Russ McCamey's mind as it did in a physical space. But we'll get to that next week. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. This is a real part two you don't want to miss. This is a real part two you don't want to miss. For now, we are not going to do a fear tier. We'll do the fear tier next week. Yeah, yeah. After we hear about something that sounds way scarier than I was just at. It absolutely is. And we'll get into some of the other extreme haunts as well, because many of them exist beyond McKamey Manor. But that's sort of the one that people really are the most curious about, because it's been the most discussed, I think, in the culture and on the news. But that's all for next week. For now, the show is scared all the time. I'm Chris Colari. And I'm Ed Ficola. And we will see you next week. He keeps saying next week. Two weeks. Next week's New Fear and Luck. We will see you next episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. From McKamey Manor. Good night. Good night. Scared All the Time is co-produced by Chris Killary and Ed Ficola. Written by Chris Killary. Edited by Ed Ficola. Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew. And Mr. Disclaimer is. And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon. You can get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access, and exclusive merch. So go sign up for a Patreon at scaredallthetimepodcast.com. Don't worry, all scaredy cats welcome. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. We are in this together. Together. Together.