You lean back. The last thing you see is a red satin hand waving goodbye as the heavy lid bangs closed and you are plunged into darkness. Then you hear the locks slamming into place.
WAIT!!! You yell. I’M ALIVE!!!! You bang on the lid with both fists, but it’s no use.
Suddenly your untimely tomb begins to buck and sway, jerking you to the left and then the right. You hear muffled voices. WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME??? Laughter. The sound of metal slicing through gravel. Digging…they’re digging…
Your nostrils flare as you’re blasted with the putrid scent of mold and wet…buttered popcorn…?
Meanwhile, I’m tucking your $5 dollars into my bra while several hundred people waiting in line are watching the live coffin-cam, which is currently projecting your terrified face 15’ large across the wall.
Your fear is our entertainment.
One day in my early 20s I burst out of my bedroom in our Back Bay brownstone and emphatically proclaimed to my roommates that I had realized my TRUE CALLING!!!:
To create haunted attractions.
Then I cold-called every tourist trap in Salem, MA offering up my artistic services ‘til one said yes.
She was a conservatively dressed retiree wearing a petite golden cross who, she explained as we strolled around the darkened room, had recently inherited this prime real estate on Salem’s main drag. In a low-budget attempt at monetizing the location, she had turned it into a simple 3D blacklight walk-thru. This is a kind of minimum-investment set up where visitors get a pair of chromadepth glasses (that make reds appear closer and cool tones recede) to stroll through a dark maze of hastily erected dividing walls wherein murals of technicolored ghouls appear to pop out at you. My task? To create a “vortex effect” for the floor that would make folks feel like they were tumbling in. Had I ever done anything like this before? No. But I said yes. I was hired.
Fifteen minutes after meeting, she handed me a key to the building and left. My first gig! Getting paid to teach myself everything there is to know about chromadepth 3D blacklight painting. Life purpose fulfilled.
That’s when I learned that being alone in even the shittiest, barely-more-than-strip-mall-laser-tag kinda haunted attraction will give you the goosebumps. Even when you’re looking right at the boombox tucked behind the styrofoam tombstone that’s playing the “4 Hours of Continuous Spooky Sound Effects” CD, things move in the corner of your eye. It’s a pretty simple formula for what gives humans the creeps— restrict sight lines, add some well-timed surprises & a sprinkling of spooky sounds to light up the imagination. Alone in the dark, things definitely go bump in your mind.
My next gig was consulting on ways to install immersive projection for a haunted attraction in the USS Salem, a decommissioned Naval ship in the bay just south of Boston which had recently been the subject of one of those ghost hunter shows.
Navy ships have everything that works well for a haunted house—even before you fill them with masked creeps and splash it with bloody bits: you’ve got this creaky, groaning, briny metal environment with squeezed tight passageways, an obscured sense of direction & no sense of time in these dark labyrinthine corridors… And this one was evidently very much haunted by some well-documented, active and persistent former crew members.
Stepping on board in broad daylight to meet with the caretaker, I was instantly on extra-sensory alert. As we walked through the groaning belly of the ship he proceeded to tell me about the many unsettling ghost encounters folks have had onboard since the 1950s. Deployed on an earthquake rescue mission, the ship’s morgue had filled with hundreds and hundreds of victims, those burned and buried alive. “The morgue is just below us now,” he said as we strolled through the dank mess hall scattered with an assortment of prop cleavers and bloody body parts on plates.
“And then there’s John– the old crew member who shows the tourists around. Once, a couple stopped me on their way out to tell me how great their guide was – they didn’t believe me when I said I was the only one on the ship!” He laughed, leading me through a tight metal door into another dark corridor.
Honestly, it was hard not to feel like this haunt was stepping over the line into some potentially sketchy spectral territory. It’s one thing to have everyone agree to pretend a place is full of ghosts, but another thing entirely to know a space is the eternal home of unsettled soldiers and disaster victims when you’re bringing throngs of costumed middle schoolers through for $25 a pop…I dunno… Maybe it’s because I’ve now had my own very real encounter with the deceased (you can read a bit more about that here), so I know how deeply life-changing that experience can be. In light of that, it feels somewhat reckless to treat truly spirit-inhabited spaces like any old sideshow? (The ship no longer runs a haunted house, but rather a full “paranormal investigation” and overnight stay package. You could not pay me enough to sleep on that ship.)
I was genuinely so creeped out after my first visit I didn’t go back.
Years later, a couple months after my dad died, I buried my pain by joining the set decorating team at the largest haunted attraction in the Pacific Northwest. Occupying a 30,000 square foot basement for an October-only event, this city-block sized creepy carnival show moved into the empty space every September, pouring out of shipping containers at a fever-pitch, to become three simultaneously operational haunted walk-thrus, a concessions stand, and— Buried Alive: the coffin ride.
To convey the scale of this operation and the speed at which it was resurrected each year is difficult. It took serious talent and a lot of late nights/early mornings/caffeine/weeping/tantrums and cases upon cases of spray paint(/whiskey) to get this job done.
Into the barren and cavernous concrete room the team built towering walls and intricate mazes with hidden access corridors, complex lighting and immersive audioscapes, animatronic jump scares, fog fx and air cannons, fully decked out graveyards and gardens and libraries and dormitories and laboratories and a museum of curiosities, a food court “of the damned” and y’know a room full of creepy dolls…and for some reason a bunch of Christmas trees? If it was spooky or bizarre (and ideally both), we had a lot of it.
And the talent! Immersive theater artists are a special, special breed. There’s a Venn diagram of personnel in the haunt industry that includes stage professionals, theater kids, anime adults, carnies, criminals, cosmetologists, war vets, drag queens... a true cross-section of America. Many of the set decorators and makeup artists and techies and extras working on the film and tv shows you love pick up seasonal work on crews like these, believe it or not—and bring with them such cool knowledge.
Things I learned & practiced as a professional haunter:
• Airbrush art & makeup FX painting
• Latex prosthetics & wig-making
• Faux finish modeling, painting & weathering
• Bizarro carpentry like best methods for stacking shipping crates so they’ll both support a stripper and conceal chainsaw wielding clowns - all while meeting fire code.
• Puppet, prop & costume making
• Blacklight painting
• Light rigging & projection installation
• Improv
During my youth in the theater I had to choose between being an actor and being a techie, but immersive attractions let you have it all. I’m hard pressed to imagine where else I would have been able to flex this ENTIRE bonkers skill set other than a haunt.
If you’re the kind of person that likes to do a little bit of everything, for very little pay, might I recommend a career in the haunt life!
So, was I wrong? About my true calling?
Y’know…
I consider the decorated caves at Lascaux…
Painted & viewed by torchlight some 17,000 years ago, deep in the dark and echoing chambers of a prehistoric cave. Beasts of horn and claw emerge from these dank disorienting shadows, surrounding you there in the belly of the earth. The flickering flame would have made the scene jump to life as your senses flooded with amplified echoes and petrichor prickled your nose…
Humans have been creating haunted attractions for a very long time — in the name of ritual.
So I wasn’t too far off, really. Everything I did then trained me beautifully for a life of creative, ritual immersion. And that truly is my calling.
And I still look forward every year to the transformative, transgressive play of the Halloween season. I mean, I’ve thrown some legendary Halloween parties.
And those of you who’ve been around a while might remember our Halloween 2020 After-Life-Drawing Night on the Vision Train…or Drawing from the Dead?
And I’ll leave you with this seasonal sonic experience I made for the Image Word Mystery class of ‘22–
🎧👻 Grab your headphones, close your eyes & drop into this audio-haunt:
A few spooky, spooky prompts for you this week…
What was your favorite Halloween costume as a kid? Why?
Write a letter to your past self– as a specter from the future. What do you know now that you didn’t know then?
What really haunts me at night is the thought of falling prey to the sinister whims of a christofascist government. Please vote like the lives of everyone you love depends on it. ❤️
Happy Haunting!
Reading this with the photos is next level!!
A fun easter egg in the photos is the air-cast you’re wearing on your foot. The fact that you, not only, took creative lead on the largest haunted attraction in the Pacific Northwest, but did it with a broken foot, is wild! I feel truly privileged to have been witness to that nearly unbelievable chicanery.