Every Halloween season, thousands of people flock to haunted houses looking to get a good scare. And while it's fun for us, it seems it is even more entertaining for those who work the attraction, as these hilarious stories from real haunted house employees more than demonstrate.
The Domino Effect.
“I was a talking head on a table. A group of five people led by a girl comes into my room and when the get close to me I say, ‘Hello’ fairly nonchalantly. The girl in front screams and falls backwards with a domino effect taking everyone else in her group with her” (Source).
Choosing Fight Over Flight.
“We had a guy who would chase after you with a chainsaw after you left the house. One time these two girls came out and I swear to God, one of the girls just had like an extreme panic response and I guess her body chose fight over flight. She literally chased the guy down while he was yelling, ‘I’m just kidding! It’s just a joke!’ and she kicked him in the balls so hard he vomited. She apologized and said she just freaked out” (Source).
Always Blaming The Boyfriend.
“I was working the special VIP attraction, it’s basically a really dark trail in the woods but the actors are allowed to touch guests. Grabbing and pulling people off into the woods and whatnot. Hiding kind of sucks, I had to lay in the mud and grab at people’s ankles and then chase after them, but the funniest g-ddamn thing is the world is the lanterns. We give them little electronic hand-lanterns as their only light source, and two guys have remotes that can turn them on and off. Every time, without fail, the guy’s girlfriend is yelling at him to stop turning the lantern off. It’s even better if you have a really dark costume because then you can walk up behind them, lay a hand on their shoulder and say, ‘Yeah jerk, don’t turn the lantern off!” (Source).
“What Are You Looking At?!”
“My brother worked at a haunted jail. He said it was all going well until like an hour before it ended. Nobody was showing up and he had to take a leak. So he decides to piss in the corner. As he unzips and starts, he hears talking and commotion. Of course, he couldn’t stop. So by the time that large group of people reached his cell and looked in expecting a scare, they saw a wolf man pissing in the corner. The only thing he did was turn his head and growl at them while pissing” (Source).
An Unexpected Reaction.
“One time me and three other actors were working the last group left in the house, which is always a really fun group because everyone gets to kind of focus on them. The group was a middle-aged woman and three teenage guys. We’re chasing them through this maze area near the end and three of us manage to separate the mom from the boys. The three boys escape the maze by CLIMBING OVER THE WALLS like a buncha Spider-Mans (a first for us), leaving the mom all alone. We kind of ‘trap’ her in a dead end, and then started chanting to summon the chainsaw guy. We hear him rev up the chainsaw from across the room and the mom gets really wide-eyed, looks at all of us and goes, ‘Uh oh, are we about to have a gangbang?’ We all just about lost our sh– laughing, had some more fun with them and eventually saw them out. We ended up running into them in the parking lot afterwards and they started gushing about how good of a show we put on for them and how much fun they had. Working haunts can be really exhausting and you run into a TON of a–holes, but great groups like that really made the time spent doing it worthwhile” (Source).
Fail.
“Was a faceless hood trying to scare people from behind the curtains, but didn’t hear them approaching, so I didn’t manage to pop out to scare them. They pulled open the curtains and asked me which way the exit was. It was both humiliating and amusing to be honest” (Source).
Think About The Consequences Guys.
“Any of the boyfriend/girlfriend couples where the boyfriend starts yelling, ‘Take her! Take her!’ or literally throwing their girlfriends at us so they can get away. It has become our standard response to catch the girlfriend, make sure she’s steady, then yell after him, ‘Dude, you’re not getting any tonight after that stunt!’ They suddenly look mad, and she usually starts yelling, ‘Hell no you aren’t, you threw me at the monsters!'” (Source).
The Haunt Starts In The Car.
“Family of five pulls up to the haunt one year when me and a buddy are working the lines. Mom, dad, middle sister, younger brother all get out. Oldest daughter refuses to leave the SUV. Dad comes up to us, hands me the keys to the car, and says, ‘Go get her and bring her in.’ My friend and I look at each other, back at him, I stop and take my mask off. ‘Excuse me, I just want to make sure I heard this right. You are giving me the keys to your car and telling me that you want me to go drag your daughter out of your car, kicking and screaming?’ ‘Yup.’ ‘YES SIR!’ We both jog over there, she sees us coming and locks the door and looks all smug. I hold up the key fob and click unlock. Her eyes go wide as she hits the lock again. We do that a couple of times before I walk up and put the key physically in the hatchback lock. We start crawling into the SUV over the back seats as she is scrambling reverse crab walk between the seats. Then she actually goes into full blown hysterical paralyses and completely loses the ability to move or do anything. We decide thats enough and go give the keys back to dad with, ‘I think we broke her'” (Source).
The Act Quickly Disappears.
“Four gangsta wanna-be black guys, late teens or early 20’s. Acting all big and tough, we let them on through into the haunt. Minute later when they hit Regan’s Room (we had a life sized doll of Regan from ‘The Exorcist’ that would spin it’s head and then squirt water on you from it’s mouth) and we hear a bunch of 12 year old girls screaming. ‘I didn’t think there were any girls in that group?’ ‘There weren’t…’ ‘Oh s–t, come on, we’re missing it!’ These four gangsta wanna-be’s screamed like little girls the entire way through, and by the end were running out of there all back to back to back to back spinning like a gawddam top so nothing could sneak up behind them” (Source).
You Gotta Go When You Gotta Go.
“My town puts on a fairly large haunted house. We had a ‘bathroom’ room, full on including fake scents. I was hidden in one of the stalls and had a sprayer hidden in my outfit that would spray when I threw open the door. Stepped out after the group was gone and there was a drunk guy using one of the fake urinals. He simply nodded and continued on once he was finished” (Source).
These People Never Would Survive A Horror Movie.
“I was a psycho chainsaw clown that chased people out of the exit of the haunt and I’d say the funniest thing is when people lose their minds and just fall all over each other. Also some people have literally zero survival instinct and when I jump out and chase them they don’t run they just immediately cower into a corner. I would yell, ‘well isn’t this awkward’ to make them laugh and usher them out. And girls throw more punches than guys do too” (Source).
The Psych Ward Full Of Wizards.
“I was the patient in an electroshock therapy scene. The door leading in had a frosted window with ‘Psych Ward’ painted onto the glass. During a tame, lights-on session for young kids and the faint of heart, a young mother and her son came through. Before entering, the mom pointed to the door and exclaimed, ‘Look honey, it’s the psycho ward. I wonder what’s in here…’ Her son, probably 3 or 4, yells out, rather excitedly, ‘Wizards!’ We do our bit (‘Help me, help me!’ followed by some light strobe lights). As they are leaving, the boy says, ‘I don’t think these people know what wizards are…'” (Source).
No Touching.
“I was a nurse in charge of the insane asylum room. I wore scrubs and had my hair in weird pigtails. Lots of white makeup with dark circles under my eyes. I stood right where people walked in and I just stood still, no blinking, no head turning. I’d just follow them with my eyes. Many people thought I was one of the animatronics. While people were focused on me trying to figure out if I was real or not, another guy would jump out of the coffin in a straight jacket and scare the crap out of people. One night he scared a girl so bad she fell in the coffin with him and had her crotch in his face. He couldn’t get her out because he was in a straight jacket so I had to go help lift her out, but I was laughing so hard it took longer than it should have. One of the other nights a group of guys came through and one assumed I was an animatronic and he grabbed my boob. I just asked him if he was into f–king dead people. He felt so bad when he figured out I was real. It scared the s–t out of him though” (Source).
How To Really Scare Parents.
“I helped out with family-friendly Halloween walk a few years back, mostly involved sitting in a bush and letting some of the kids walk a little past me before making some kind of sound in the middle of the group. However for the parents I would always moan, ‘university costs are rising – oooooOOOoooOoo!'” (Source).
“Y’ALL NEED JESUS!”
“I work at a haunt in PA. My job is to sit in a shed where the exterior had been modified to look like a small mausoleum in the graveyard portion. Thanks to a relatively simple system, I know the names of at least three people in each group that comes through. Into a mic connected to wrap around speakers (the sound follows the guests) I sing, ‘Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies…’ and then pick a name and ask, ‘Why won’t you play with me, (name)?’ and people lose their minds. Part of the ‘lore’ for the house was that a young girl had died on the grounds and she was buried in the graveyard. Well one night I did this to a poor, unsuspecting soul named Tiffany. And Tiffany’s reaction was to scream, at the top of her lungs, ‘Y’ALL MOTHERF–KERS NEED JESUS!'” (Source).
Keeping Score.
“We have scoreboards for the rooms. Numbers of pissers, s–tters, pukers, and fetal positions. It’s a badge of honor to get the most people of the night to lose control of their bodily functions” (Source).
Perhaps A Bit Too Intense.
“My friend and I worked in a room as crazed mechanics who were operating power tools on a dead woman. We used air compressed drills and acted out ripping her head off and such. Now, like most places there’s a no touching rule. However, the attachment bit to these drills are just cylinders so we could run them along surfaces to make metal grinding noises/ scare people. The wooden floor would vibrate violently if the drills were used on them. Well, we had a group of teenage girls come in that were so scared of these drills and that we were going to, ‘kill them’ that they ran into the corner of our room, climbed a shelf and stayed up there in pure panic. We couldn’t get them down for about ten minutes and had to act out the scene a few more times because other groups were sent in. Oh and some guy had a heart attack after he exited our area. Whoops” (Source).
A Dream Come True.
“I had a little girl come in. She was in a wheelchair accompanied by her mother. She got to my room, where I was the living doll. I had prosthetics that made it look like my eyes had been cut out, wrapped in barbed wire in a tattered tutu. She and her mom screamed, but then the girl started clapping and laughing. I curtsied and she said, ‘Mama, I wanna do THAT!’ I looked at her, looked at her mom, and knew I had enough time to ask if she would like to for the night with me (they were the last group of the day shift). Happily enough her mom agreed, and we got that girl in full makeup with a sailor suit, bright doll eyes and got her legs hidden with gore. Night comes and the f–king terror on customer faces as we cry and moan and scream for someone to ‘please end it’ just makes her giggle more once they leave the room. Bonding through haunting” (Source).
The Easiest To Scare…
“My costume was vaguely like the girl from ‘The Ring’ a year after the movie came out. Pink little girl’s dress, long black wig over my face. I was pretty tiny back then and quite flexible, so I could contort myself in pretty creepy ways. Add a strobe light and you’ve got some terrifying movements. Without fail, it was always the huge football players in letter jackets who would absolutely lose their minds in my room – screaming, trying to climb the walls to get away, running, the whole works. Usually their girlfriends would be standing by calmly. One guy’s reaction was especially delicious. Once he saw me in the corner, contorted but slowly uncurling to drag myself across the floor, he screamed, ‘Oh HELL no!’ and ran through the nearest wall. Just took it right out. I won an award that year for ‘Best Scarer'” (Source).
The True Ghost Hunter.
“A friend of mine used to own an old building where they ran a haunted house during the Halloween season and the rest of the year they’d do ghost tours. I would often babysit wannabe ghost hunters to make sure they didn’t get hurt or damage expensive equipment for the haunted house. One of these babysitting nights, it was a group of 10 friends in their mid-30s. What we’d do is split up into smaller groups (I was watching a group of 3 people, there was another three person group and then a four person group). During the off season, a lot of the props and decorations were stored either in the upstairs or the basement and these rooms were always clearly marked. Some dude from the four person group snuck away to look into one of the rooms in the basement, not paying attention to the big sign that said ‘PROPS,’ and started screaming hysterically. I come running over to make sure everything was alright. I wish I could say that what he saw was a clown statue, a Leatherface mask, or even anything remotely scary that caught him off guard. What freaked him out was that when he opened the door, the large mirror in the room made him think someone was moving around in there and he went into a full on panic. He was terrified of his own reflection. Many laughs were had over this” (Source).
Best Job Ever.
“I was an actor at The Haunted Hotel and one season we had half a car attached to a track that can be pushed quickly forward, complete with a real working horn and headlights. So when people walk threw the pitch darkness, a staff member would shove the car into motion, blare the horn and the headlights simultaneously, blinding the guests and making them s–t themselves. I have never laughed this hard in my entire life at anything. People’s reactions where absolutely horrified on a debilitating level, their faces were indescribable; I’m talking ‘preparing for death’ faces. People would fall over backwards, men would push their dates in front of them… I couldn’t breathe and my abs constantly hurt from barreling over laughing every night. Most incredible job I’ve ever had” (Source).
The Act Never Stops.
“I was dressed as Death, big antique scythe and everything. This little boy, like maybe 6-7 years old got it in his head that I wanted to personally kill him. He’s crying like a baby, I get yelled at to take my mask off. So I take my mask off, everybody turns around to look at him going, ‘See? He’s not going to kill you.’ I on the other hand am furrowing my brow, nodding my head, and mouthing, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ He starts shrieking, ‘He’s STILL going to kill me!'” (Source).
Probably Not The Best Place To Hide.
“Two contenders here. One year I worked as a tiny doll girl and talked in creepy child voice, asking them if they wanted to meet, ‘Mr. Giggles,’ my favorite doll. Giggles is a 6’5″ man with a chainsaw in a closet. Everything from flapping to screaming ensued, but the best was when some girl literally jumped into the baby crib in the room to escape him and got stuck. He lifted her out, then picked up the chainsaw and chased her out while she screamed, ‘I’m gonna s–t!’ We still talk about it. Another year I worked as the clerk in the hotel room, and jumped out at people when they rang the bell on the desk. I once popped up only to see some dude’s a– and b–ls just right there. I rolled with it, making a joke about the full moon, but as there are young girls working the trail he eventually got thrown out. Still, it was hilarious” (Source).
The Other Way Around.
“Back in the mid 90s I went to a haunted house with my family. I was around 8 and my little sister was like 4. She had those light up shoes that everyone loved back then, and still do. One of the actors saw the shoes light up and thought they were on fire. He broke character and started screaming ‘FIRE!’ My mom didn’t skip a beat and was just like ‘those are her shoes'” (Source).
An Unexpected Fright.
“Stupidest ‘What the hell is wrong with you people?’ bit though was the play sand. Had a section of a dark maze (a totally pitch black maze you have to feel your way through) ended up going out onto the grass at one point, and there was basically a pothole in the ground. We were afraid people would trip in it in the dark and break an ankle, so we filled it with a bag of kiddie sand from the hardware store. By pure happenstance, that spot was EXACTLY where the majority of the people would put their foot down while rounding the corner. We constantly heard, ‘EWWW! What did I step in?!?’ and, ‘I just stepped in s–t!’ All the work and planning we put into that haunt, and the biggest reaction we got was the damn pothole sand. Couldn’t do that again if we tried…” (Source).