Haunting

 

 

When my boyfriend brought me to the small town in the hill country of Wisconsin where I now live, one of our first social calls was to an old Power & Light building, a huge red-brick pile in a deep valley, where some friends of his were building a haunted house for Halloween. I remember sitting on a blanket and drinking beer with them next to a pile of cornstalks and boxes of ag plastic, aka "scary black plastic." Later I attended the haunted house and, despite knowing everyone in it as well as being aware that it was a constructed artifact, I was scared shitless (while loving every minute of it). I was amazed at how one room the size of a gymnasium had been transformed into a graveyard, complete with fifty-foot trees, heaps of leaves, gravestones, cornfields, wind and thunder and lightning, and a tunnel twice the size of the average bungalow in which I was lost for a good half hour in pitch blackness, relieved only by occasional strobe flashes that revealed a monster inches from my face.

The next year I moved out here from Madison and became an official member of the troupe. There were and are about ten hardcore members and maybe forty or so associates. We got to haunt that old building for four more years, with each try getting increasingly baroque and drawing visitors from as far away as Chicago, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee. Our tableaux ran the gamut from alien abductions; nightmarish Christmas scenes, complete with a gory and ill-tempered Santa, severed limbs hanging in stockings, spider- and rat-bedecked trees, bloody presents, and variable-speed Barbra Streisand carols warbling in the background; torture chambers, outfitted with full-size swinging pendulum; voodoo swamps; and always the tunnel and graveyard (which boasted such headstones as Jim Morrison's: "I was the Lizard King / I could do anything."). When our friend sold the building-it had been his playhouse--we moved on to haunt an old high school; the cellars and actual caves, complete with springs gushing out of the wall, creeks, mud, frogs, and stalactites, under an old brewery; and a building that had most recently been an auction house.

I love to scare people. Most of the time I hate to see people suffer even if they really deserve it, but at Halloween, I lose all compassion. Start crying or going into hysterics, and you might as well be a swimmer with a paper cut and I, a great white shark. Any pleas for mercy, no matter how tear drenched and anguished, merely guarantee that you will receive none. Long strings of children customarily hurry through, hand in hand, eyes focused straight ahead lest they alight on something horrifying, and making them peal like rabid air-raid sirens is so very satisfying, albeit easy. (The best thing to do with them is insinuate yourself into their line, grabbing hands and walking with them in the dark until they come into the light and see that some . . . THING . . . has been with them all that time.) Scaring cocky teenagers who are just old enough to be too cool to be scared is a more visceral thrill. Along with the joy of inflicting terror, you know that you've called their bluff. And getting some big ol' redneck to make whimpering noises in the back of his throat and cringe against his wife or children in sheer fright is better than some orgasms I've had. Less messy, too. At least for me. Every year, people threaten to be on the verge of peeing their pants, and we've developed Merry Prankster-style recording/transmitting devices and speaker systems that can pick up what anyone is saying and then broadcast it to our heart's content any- and everywhere we have a speaker. They really hate hearing themselves like that.

We had to take a year off a while back, owing to the lack of a house to haunt, and this year, several key players were either on vacation or involved in other projects such that we did not have a quorum sufficient to construct sets (which often takes a month and a half). And neither did we have a place offered, although had said key players been in town, they might have been approached with likely sites. About two weeks before the Day of Days, we found out that we could at least haunt the wooded grounds of a large mansion in town that serves as the headquarters for the local historical society, and it took us only a few hours to climb into the pigeon-infested attic to hang lights and then up to the cupola to rig strobes and a sound system for the thunderstorm tape; lurk in various rooms and set up more lights and dummies to cast silhouettes in front of the windows; and otherwise ghoulify the joint.

On Halloween afternoon, a few hours before our jaunt, we brought up a throne from our store room, a large, gold-painted and jewel-encrusted model, and set it up on the front porch to serve as the resting place for Satan, complete with foot-long horns and spiky fangs. Another green-faced dummy, dubbed "Keith" owing to his uncanny resemblance to the Rolling Stones's guitar player (we augment the look with a bandanna around his head and a shock of brown hair), sat side-saddle on the throne with his arm around Satan. Around them were strewn various dummies from years past. We used red and yellow lights on timers to simulate hellfire and a smoke machine to blast infernal fogs into the air.

Our plan was to accept donations of canned goods rather than charging admission to be donated to a charity as in years past, and we were "open" only for an hour and a half on one night rather than three hours a night for five nights. It was like the methadone version of our usual hauntings . . . just enough to keep us from jonesing for screams. But our reputation preceded us, and we were swamped. Canned goods were dutifully placed in a coffin--we wanted to make sure that our victims were decanned before we started frightening them, as a concussion caused by creamed corn or beef stew would be too truly scary--and then they were set to wander off into the shadows of the wooded property, where we laid in waiting.

For some reason, this year many of the teenagers wanted to know who I was. I didn't grow up here, and I guess they assumed I was one of their high school pals. "WHO ARE YOU??!!" they'd scream as I lunged at them in a hideous vampire mask, my hands dripping with fake blood and my body swathed in a dark green hooded robe made by a real witch years before. "What is this fascination with identity?" I'd reply in a grisly, basso profundo voice. "NO, tell us who you really are!!" they'd exclaim. "Well, people pay their therapists thousands of dollars to find out just that, don't they? Do you know who YOU really are?" There are few things more amusing than trying to strike up a rational exchange with folks who are running from you in fear. They also disliked being circled silently or followed.

At one point, I ran into my friend who is the acknowledged Queen of Halloween, the mistress of all our diabolical efforts. She was carrying a limp, blood-spattered female dummy and occasionally gnawing on its head. I greeted her with a feral snarl and battened on its feet. Soon we were pulling the dummy out to its full length and then some, growling and making unclean feasting noises. A crowd of teenagers and freaks from the college down the road gathered and stood, watching, as the two of us began flying in a circle, the dummy holding us together, and we began to laugh, first quietly and then like maniacs, losing all pretense of being our characters and just being us. As we whirled in front of the porch, with the Prince of Darkness and his left-hand man Keith Richards looking on, we were no longer ersatz monsters but rather two actual humans who found comfort and amusement in pretending to be ghouls and cannibals, rending a corpse (if corpse and not living body it were) with the brute force of our teeth and hands. The faces in the crowd, which had previously been distorted in terror of us as characters made real through suspension of disbelief, now assumed a more genuine look of horror. I could almost hear them thinking, Whoever these people are, they're really into this.

I looked into my friend's eyes as the dummy's leg stretched even longer and knew from the rising pitch of her laughter that she, too, had read the crowd. My laughter grew to match hers, and when the dummy came apart at last, with each of us clutching part of the torso and gasping for air, the onlookers melted back into the trees, waiting for the solace of being scared by mere monsters.

 

 

The last House of Dummies Haunted House in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, took place in October 2001.

 

© 2000 Gregor Everitt