“Dad, are you taking us to the haunted house today?”
“Um, sure.”
It wasn’t a question I expected. I had just walked in the door after being out of state for two days for a comedy writing conference, where I taught aspiring humorists how to run a newsletter. It’s the kind of thing my friends and family members would literally pay money for me not to talk about, but there, packed classrooms hung on my every word for two seventy-five minutes sessions. Now, I was back to reality. As soon as I got home, my kids began scheduling all of my time, as is their wont. For Saturday afternoon, I was booked to watch Gremlins, then take my brood to a haunted house at the local fairgrounds. My daughters all thought both activities were brilliant ideas. I went along with them because I needed something to write about. For everyone at the conference who asked me for ways to come up with content, that’s how it’s done. Step 1: Traumatize your kids for life. Step 2: Profit.
The kids took Gremlins better than I expected. They’re not exactly known for bravery. All four of them are terrified of spiders to the point of hysteria, despite the fact that we live in Indiana, where everything with eight legs is absolutely harmless. It would be different if we were located somewhere else. In Australia, if they spotted a tiny arachnid, I’d pull out a flamethrower. Based on that data set, I expected the movie to be way too scary for them. It was for me when I was their age. In fact, it inspired the earliest nightmare I can remember. I had a bad dream, then woke up safely in my bed. My parents were already awake and getting ready for church. That part was horrifying enough on its own. We always went to the earliest mass. I waited for my mom to force me to get out of bed. Instead, a gremlin walked in. That’s when I woke up for real. I would have been in first or second grade at the time. I’m now thirty-seven, and I still remember that nightmare. Clearly, Gremlins left a mark.
The movie had no such effect on my kids. They spent the entire runtime talking about how they wanted Gizmo as a pet. For the record, they can barely handle normal pets, let alone an adorable fur ball that turns into a horde of reptilian killing machines if you take care of it slightly wrong. If our guinea pigs followed the same rules, we’d all be dead. Apparently the movie hits differently today than in the early 1990s. In the age of computer animated 4K blood and gore, jerky claymation goblins just aren’t that scary. The modern world had jaded my kids in all the wrong ways. Maybe they wouldn’t think the haunted house was scary after all.
Technically, the haunted house had been my idea. I come up with lots of half-hearted proposals for things we can do as a family, nearly all of which get shot down. Most of the time, they don’t pass the YouTube test. That’s where my kids ask themselves if they’d rather do whatever family activity I just proposed or watch famous YouTubers read other people’s memes. The memes win 99 percent of the time, which is for the best since even the remaining one percent of activities keep me pretty busy. I first found out about the haunted house at a local festival, where its organizers were handing out flyers. The sheets looked pretty slick except for the fact that they failed to mention any times. Perhaps you could just show up to get scared whenever you wanted. I figured it couldn’t actually be that scary if the group behind the haunted house couldn’t afford a proofreader. Little did I know they spent their entire budget on generating abject terror. Don’t judge a haunted house by its typos.
When I first brought up the haunted house to the kids, only my twelve-year-old, Betsy, seemed interested. The rest were indifferent, so I dropped the idea. I had completely forgotten about it by the time Saturday rolled around. I don’t know what happened in the intervening weeks, but all four kids were suddenly really into the idea. They never agree on anything, so I couldn’t miss this chance. I looked up the schedule online—I can’t stress enough how useless that flyer was—and discovered that night was the very last one for the haunted house. Now we had to go. After our decidedly non-scary movie session, we ate a quick dinner and loaded into the van. My wife, Lola, opted to stay home. That should have been my first sign that things were headed off the rails. She wanted no part of the chaos that was about to unfold.
Other than a small sign at the entrance to the fairgrounds, there was no posted information about the haunted house anywhere. Mostly what I saw were hundreds of kids in costumes going to an unrelated trunk-or-treat event we hadn’t heard anything about. I still don’t know what it was for, but given that we’re in Indiana, it was probably something sponsored by a church. We asked a few people about the haunted house before we found someone who could point us in the right direction. It was hidden in a far corner of the fairgrounds with almost no external indicators to mark its location. The sketchy lack of signage was the creepiest thing about it. Despite the fact that it was advertised as a haunted house, it was actually a giant 4H livestock shed. I guess “haunted horse barn” didn’t have the same ring to it. It was open on all sides with animal fencing to mark parts of the perimeter. It looked about as claustrophobic as sitting under a beach umbrella. To escape, all you had to do was walk in literally any direction. How creepy could it be?
The crowd caused me to lower my guard even more. We were the fourth group in line because I made sure we got there early. I don’t care if you scare me to death, but I refuse to wait a long time for you to do it. One of the groups in front of us had a baby, and another had a four-year-old in a pink princess costume. My ten-year-old, Mae, noticed two of her classmates a few spots behind us. Clearly, everyone else thought this was kid-appropriate. I wasn’t so sure. I was the most on the fence about my six-year-old, Waffle. Given that Gremlins had terrified me when I was about her age, I wasn’t confident she’d be up to the challenge of the haunted house, but she wanted to go so badly. Either she was going to be emotionally scarred by people jumping out at her or she was going to be emotionally scarred because I took her sisters and left her behind. Pick your trauma. That’s parenting in a nutshell. In the end, I decided to take her. I cannot stress enough how excited all the kids were. This is a picture of them pretending to be scared right before we went in. It was the last time all night their fear would be fake.
The theme of the haunted house in the horse barn was a creepy carnival, which added yet another level of difficulty to suspending disbelief. Still, we were ready to play along. At exactly 7:30 p.m., they let us in. The entrance area featured carnival games. The three groups in front of us split off to play them. Then a worker told us that was just the entry area to occupy people while they waited. The actual haunted house was in the back. We walked to the lady at the real entrance and showed her our wristbands. Instead of being the fourth group through, we would be the first. There was no one ahead of us to set off the jump scares and give us an advance warning of what was in store. Worse, all the workers were fresh and eager at the start of their shifts. No one was just going through the motions until it was time for their smoke break. Still, this was an amateur production in the middle of nowhere. I wasn’t expecting much.
We started off by walking through a fake cemetery with puns on headstones. It was nothing more intense than the decorations you’d find in your neighbor’s front yard. Then we entered the first of the maze-like plywood hallways. A guy jumped out from a trap door behind a skeleton. The kids screamed. A face appeared on the other side of a fake picture. They screamed some more. Then the banging started. There was someone on the other side of the wall pounding on it with a bat. The kids clung to me. I dragged them forward. We got out of the plywood hallway. We saw the guy with the bat. He was a creepy carny. Worse, this was Indiana, so he very well could have been a real carny. He followed us. The kids cried. I held up a hand in the carny’s direction and said, “You got us. We’re good.” I was like Chris Pratt trying to stop an approaching raptor. The kids clung to me harder. The guy backed off.
That’s when we hit the strobe lights and fake fog. There were trash bags hanging from the ceiling in the dark. We couldn’t tell what was an inanimate object and what was someone waiting to scare us. The kids lost it. In Star Wars Rogue One, there’s a monk-like character who, in times of danger, repeats the mantra, “I am one with the Force. The Force is one with me.” My eight-year-old, Lucy, was like that, only her mantra was, “I don’t like this. I want to go home.” She repeated that through tears over and over again for our entire time in the haunted house. It was way creepier than any of the stuff that was actually supposed to scare us. Waffle sobbed. Betsy and Mae whined. All the kids wanted to quit. We were three minutes in.
As a comedy writer, most people assume I spend my days lounging on a private yacht, sipping champagne and eating caviar. Nothing could be further from the truth. I spent forty-one dollars for this outing. That’s way too much for three minutes of entertainment—or abject terror. Call it whatever you want, but I was going to get my money’s worth. We would make it through the entire haunted house, no matter how much my kids hated it. I was too cheap to bail. In hindsight, I failed to take into account the cost of future therapy.
I kept going, dragging the children with me. Lucy chanted. Waffle cried. Mae shouted, “Take it easy on us,” every time we turned a corner. Betsy cowered behind me. We passed a skeleton in an electric chair. A string of firecrackers went off. The kids let out the kind of scream that, in a cartoon, would have shattered glass. Someone else jumped out. Lucy and Waffle screeched, which set off Betsy, who started to cry. They all grabbed my coat and froze in place. I pulled us forward like a plow horse. More scares. More screaming. More chanting. More tears. Lucy was so petrified that I had to carry her. I was very much not having a good time, but for different reasons than the kids. It had to almost be over. I pushed on.
We entered a final dark room. Someone jumped out from behind a corner. That wasn’t so bad. We took a few more steps. A clown burst out, revving a chainsaw. My kids screamed so hard their souls left their bodies. I did my best to keep them from falling over. The clown walked closer, his chainsaw still rumbling. I locked eyes with him. I was just a man, standing in a haunted house in a horse barn, silently asking a murder clown to tone down his murder just a bit for the sake of the kids. The murder clown was having none if it. You don’t get picked to be the grand finale scare on the final night of a haunted house because you’re known for your mercy. Watching later groups, I discovered the clown was supposed to chase us out of the horse barn. He didn’t run after us, though, because I didn’t move. I stood there, looking him in the eye, with four screaming, crying children clinging to every part of my body. I was like a possum with a litter on my back. The murder clown and I shared a moment. Then, he revved his chainsaw again. I slowly backed out of the haunted house, dragging four small but surprisingly heavy humans with me. We were done.
The kids spent the rest of the night swapping war stories. They sounded like they had stormed Omaha Beach, not walked through a haunted house at the county fairgrounds. Mae wants the official record to show that she was the only one of the four kids who didn’t cry. It has been noted here for posterity. After we got out, we ran into Mae’s friends who went in after us. Her friend’s step mom said they quit halfway through. Mae’s friend got so scared she hyperventilated and nearly puked. That makes me wonder what happened to that four-year-old in the pink princess outfit. I can only assume she literally exploded from fright.
Afterwards, there was a hay ride that was included in the price of admission. We only got on the wagon after Mae repeatedly verified with the driver that the ride didn’t feature scares of any kind. We completed the mellowest hayride in the history of the world, then drove home. Surprisingly, the kids went to bed just fine and didn’t report any nightmares. Apparently they repressed the entire evening. I look forward to it resurfacing as unexplained night terrors in their thirties.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.
James
I Can Still Hear Their Screams