For several years, I used to participate in
charity haunted houses every
Halloween, 'cause I felt like it was the best way to celebrate
the only really important holiday of the year. Playing around in a
real haunted house might have been better, but I've never found one in over a
decade of searching, so the
spook houses are still my
best bet.
The first year, I was a
senior in
college at
Eastern New Mexico University. One of my friends and I got dressed up, dosed up on some
'shrooms, and went to his
frat's
haunted house (not a bad set-up -- good
makeup, sub-standard
effects). When we were done with the
tour, they let us help out. They stuck me in a
closet, where my only jobs were (1) to pull on a
string to make a
bat flap up and down and (2) to
jump out of the closet and
scream when the
marks were nearby. Not bad, but not that great either.
The next year, I was living in
Levelland, Texas, and I really wanted to be in a
decent haunted house, so I kept an eye on the local
newspaper, and when I heard that the local
EMS was putting a
spook house on, I called 'em up and
volunteered. This was a truly
fantastic house. They
staged the whole thing in a
tiny,
condemned building, and they really worked their asses off to make it
cool. They used one of their
safety harnesses to rig up a neat "
hanged man" effect, and turned a bunch of
styrofoam wig heads into
stunningly gory props. We had some
dry ice, but it wasn't doing a good job of making
fog, so we used it to keep the
beer cold (
Note: Do not use dry ice to keep beer cold -- it will freeze it solid).
For a while, they had me dressed up as the
mad doctor, operating on a
screaming patient. We had ordered a couple of
buckets of
Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I ended up using the
chicken as
props -- I hid a
thigh or a
wing out of sight, then "
ripped" it from my patient's
stomach, took a
big bite, and
threw it at the marks ("Eww,
gross!" one
burly football player hollered --
music to my ears!).
Later, I was enshrined as the
guide, wearing a
torn black jacket, matted black
wig, and a
hockey mask, and carrying a
scythe in one hand and a
severed human head in the other. I adopted a
Freddy Krueger voice and
attitude, and took turns
scaring the hell out of the
marks and making them
laugh their heads off. And
for the record, I was a
damn good haunted house guide.
But the
best moment came at the
end of the
tour. Everyone
crowded into a tiny room containing only a couple of
witches and a bunch of
decapitated
human heads. Nothing much happened, and the marks were thinking (sometimes out loud), "Well, this sure is a
boring ending." And then...
"BRRRAAARRRRRRRRR!" A guy stood up in the back of the room with a
roaring chainsaw (
chain removed, of course), and the marks nearly tore out the
back door trying to get away. Oh, that was a
good one...
The next year, I was living in
Denton, Texas, and I wanted to be in another good
spook house, so I called the local
theater society when I learned they were putting one on. This one was held in the
gymnasium of a
health club and had a much larger
budget than the others. It was pretty
good -- oh, really, it was
very good, but it didn't have as many
E Ticket moments as the one in
Levelland. I was chosen as the
guide for the entire
run of the house, and talking in that
Freddy Krueger voice for so many hours in a row ended up doing
permanent damage to my
vocal cords.
After that, I had to
skip a year. My
boss wouldn't let me off
work on
Halloween night.
The year after that, I was a
grad student, living in
Bruce Hall at the
University of North Texas. Bruce had an
annual haunted house down in the
basement, and I was looking forward to participating, but by this time, I was worried about future
damage to my voice, so I asked if they could make sure to put me someplace where I wouldn't have to
speak at all. They said "
You bet!" and immediately set me up
shouting into an
electronic squawk box. Grrrreat. That was a
weird one: we had some kind of
evil exterminator, a bunch of
evil clowns, and another
chainsaw killer -- this one wearing a big
fur coat.
So that's what I got. I'm
available for almost any
haunted houses (just not those freaky
Hell houses -- that's just
sick, man). Please don't make me
yell too much -- I can only take another few years of this
torture before my
voice box gives out completely...