Area haunted houses change up their game

Area haunted houses change up their game

By Dylan Frost

It’s the season when people enter the dark demented realms of haunted houses, paying to have their dignities challenged, and some residents are ecstatic to assist in the scares.

Perhaps one wouldn’t consider haunted house designing to be an art like Michelangelo’s painting on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but some residents take great pride in creating nightmare-inducing fantasies. Trap doors, sliding floors, electronic fireworks — are some of the many devices used to create the illusion of legitimate danger that attracts customers.

However, creating a good scare factory requires more than just using props and spooky sounds, Anthony Winkleman, co-coordinator of Wolf Creek Hollows, said.

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“The past two years, since we really started in this location here, we ran a lot of the main haunt off of pneumatics props, which is air props,” Winkleman said. “But the thing is, air props don’t always scare people, people scare people.”

The Winkleman family has been in the haunted house business for 13 years.

What started as a 2-car garage became the Haunted Barn, where the family used the event to raise charity. After the 2012 Harrisburg tornado destroyed the barn, the Wolf Creek Hallows Scream Park near Carterville became their primary site.

Winkleman said he looked at what really scares people: the element of surprise.

“What we did was took what we’ve done in the past and eliminated a lot of that,” he said. “We’ve added more people, less props, and the scares and reactions have turned out way better than previous years — even previous years we’ve had in the haunted barn.”

Johnny Long, an actor who has worked for the Winklemans for several years, said the realism of being in a scary movie keeps people coming back. Haunted houses stay popular because of simple economics, he said.

“People want us to supply and demand to be scared. They want something to do around this time,” he said. “Trick or treating is just trick or treating. They want to feel like what it feels when you watch a horror movie.”

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Long said the best way to scare people is to get in their way so they feel entrapped and helpless.

Wolf Creek has several misleading paths that take patrons to frightening statues, startling effects or chainsaw-yielding actors. A television projects a video of a nurse getting her head bashed in by a man, while someone sneaks up from behind to startle you. The actors can hide inside various secret doors, which usually lead to other hidden areas, allowing the actors to get in multiple scares of the unassuming customers.

Toward the end of the haunted maze, fog fills the entire room, eliminating any sense of direction, which often confuses the person into going back toward the beginning of the maze.

Up Route 13 from Wolf Creek Hollows, The Chittyville School Haunted House in Herrin has added on to the experience as well. Chittyville operators Sammie and Michaela King said they wanted to give guests a fresh experience.

“We’ve revamped over half of it,” Sammie King said. “We’ve expanded to two additional haunted houses, one being the Lair and one being Spooky Town for the kids.”

The haunting of Chittyville School has been somewhat of a mystery since its construction in the 1930s. Supposedly the school was built on a burial ground, which evoked a response from ghost hunters to investigate in 2005. The investigators said they picked up odd magnetic reading and orbs on videotape, suggesting that the school is haunted.

Whether or not paranormal activity lurks in the building, King said that it once served as a behavior center with padded rooms until it closed in 1972 — remaining vacant for 32 years.

Sammie King – in his down time between working summer concessions – works on recreating Chittyville School making it a different experience from the previous year. He considers the school’s layout, themes that haven’t been used, the strategic placement of props and how to get a second scare.

“Redesigning the haunted house, I try to incorporate where the actor can get more than one scare from the customers,” he said.

Before the show Saturday evening, Sammie King is eager to show off the variety of tricks that cause scares: platforms that elevate automatically by motion sensors, electronic explosions also triggered by motion sensors and air pneumatics that make objects shake and rattle.

If one of the traps was not working quite right, he was adamant about getting it fixed so the customer could get the full show.

A “vortex tunnel” is a major attraction at both Chittyville and Wolf Creek. It is a large, 20-foot tunnel with multi-colored lights that constantly whirls around the room, throwing off the person’s equilibrium and giving them the sensation of being jerked around on a merry-go-round.

The entertainers at Chittyville and Wolf Creek both agree that the best part of the job is evoking a good scare and seeing people react to the strategies they spent so much time orchestrating.

“What compels us to keep going is it’s fun,” Winkleman said. “It’s a hobby; and we get laughs out of it as much as we get scares out of it.”

Anthony’s mother, Tina Winkleman, recalled one show where two teenage boys sprinted out of the haunted house and dove through the window of their parent’s truck because of the intense finale.

Despite having fun and running a legitimate business by scaring people, Tina Winkleman is concerned about safety laws potentially affecting the business of all haunted houses in the region.

The Office of the Illinois State Fire Marshal considers haunted houses “special amusement buildings;” because they are closed-in mazes with visual and audio distractions intended to confuse and mislead customers.

Such buildings, which require carnival licenses, need to have automatic sprinkler systems if the ceiling exceeds 10 feet in height and 160 square feet in area. Fire marshals take caution because structures are often built with combustible materials such as felt and plywood.

Typically, it is up to the city fire marshal to decide if the buildings need sprinkler systems. If the state decided to step in and require all haunted houses to have sprinkler systems, Tina Winkleman said it would be a costly investment for Wolf Creek.

Sammie King said Chittyville would remain unaffected, because they’ve already made the necessary safety installments.

“It’s an expense; but safety is a key one,” he said. “We have lots of safety involved in haunted houses and that’s why we’re inspected by the state. And they come and make sure we’re doing our job.”

Sammie King said he hopes other haunted houses can keep up with code.

“Hopefully that doesn’t interfere with everybody else because we need everybody as a whole to keep the popularity up,” he said.

Chittyville will host its Total Black Out event Thursday through Saturday. The haunted school will be pitch black during the event and those who attend will be armed with nothing but a glow stick.

Wolf Creek Hollows Scream Park will host its last night on Halloween.

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