37 Haunted House Workers Shared Their Best Scare Stories And They Are All Hilarious
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 (made of plywood, plaster, and some dry wall).
By Eric Redding
1. They Went Down Like Dominoes
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.
2. When You Gotta Go You Gotta Go
My brother worked at a haunted jail in my town. 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 the cell and looked in expecting a scare, they saw a wolf man pissing in the corner. And he says, the only thing he did was turn his head and growl at them while pissing.
3. “These Animatronics Suck”
Not exactly an actor, but I was the guy who opened the door when a group went from one room to another. I wore this black cloak that had a hood that almost entirely covered my face (was thin enough I could see through it). These two kids (13-15 years old) came around the corner as I was moving my head back and forth looking at people and one of them said “dude these animatronics suck”. I took a single step forward and he screamed in a really high pitch and jumped so far back he smashed into the wall. His friend stopped moving for a solid minute to laugh at him.
Also the amount of appreciative looks I got from guys whose girlfriends got scared and clung to their arm was far higher than I expected. Except for the one guy who was making comments about how this place wasn’t THAT scary and he would protect her, only to scream like a girl as soon as he turned the corner. His look wasn’t so appreciative…
4. Lights In The Forest
I got to work in the special VIP attraction last year at my local place, 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 goddamn 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!”
5. Eat My What?
Standard jump scare scene, a guy with a demon or whatever mask pops out, spooks the tour, then disappears back behind the wall…but I guess the guy got a little overzealous?
Demon pops out: “I’m gunna eat your ass!”
Tour member: “You’re gunna eat my what?”
Demon: Recedes into shadow and myth, leaving more questions than answers
Tour member: “That’s fine, this is fine.”
6. A Faceless Hood
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.
7. Fainted And Pooped
I did volunteer once at a haunted house. I was the chainsaw murderer or something like that and i had a real electric chainsaw but with a rubber/fake chain. I jumped up at one girl who was by herself but i got no response so I thought damn didn’t get her. I look away for a few seconds to see if someone else was coming and she was on the floor fainted and pooped herself.
8. This Is How You Scare Someone
My costume was vaguely like the girl from The Ring, a year or two 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, breaking and 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 (made of plywood, plaster, and some dry wall). Someone else ended up having to take him to first aid because because even once I was out of character he still couldn’t stand to be near me. I won an award that year for Best Scarer.
9. Ratchet Brings The Pain
I had been working at a volunteer red cross haunted forest thing. I was in the section where we dressed up like zombies and lurched out of the forest at people. We did this for two weeks, but, on Halloween night, I went to a party before we opened the haunted forest. Unfortunately, I had left my zombie costume at home and I was dressed up as Ratchet from Ratchet and Clank.
Well, we decided to roll with it anyway and we got a ton of laughs. Zombie Ratchet was a huge hit.
10. Muscle Man Sacrifices His Girlfriend
I wasn’t an actor myself, but I was in a haunted house with a group of people. There was this huge muscular dude that was there with his girlfriend. For the entire time, the girl was somewhat clinging to the muscular guy, who hadn’t really reacted to anything himself.
Eventually we get to the end. But it turns out it’s not actually the end, because an actor in monster costume suddenly jumps out of nowhere. The muscular guy shrieks and pushes his girlfriend right in front of him towards the monster.
He very quickly realized that the danger was fake and tried to compose himself. But it was too late, everyone had seen him. And everyone, including the monster actor and girlfriend, began snickering uncontrollably at his cowardliness.
11. Maternal Instincts vs Survival Instincts
A woman who I assume was the mother of the kid pushed her in front of her and sprinted while screaming “survival of the fittest!”
12. Who’s Scared Now Mr. Scary Man?
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.”
13. People Piss Themselves A Lot
As someone with an experience based PhD in Haunted Housing who has visited hundreds of these over the years, I can honestly say that I’ve seen lots of funny/crazy shit.
However, the thing that comes to mind is when I was at Universal Studios in Orlando during Halloween Horror Nights (if you’re a haunted house enthusiast like I am, the production, acting, and scares are all top notch). I was with my ex-girlfriend at The Nightmare on Elm Street exhibit. One of the rooms was filled with sheets, with a strobe light blinking quickly in the background; actors were dressed in blood-ridden sheets and meandering around, coming as close as possible to bumping into people but coming just shy of it. The group in front of us (about 5 feet away) was comprised of four teenagers: two girls and two boys. Most groups of teenagers followed a pretty similar stereotype at these houses and this one was no different: the girls were quick to scream and then laugh, the boys acted as though they were too cool to be bothered by some cheap scares.
So, as we’re trekking through this matrix of sheets, fog, and strobe lights, one of the boys–who had spent the majority of the first section of the house talking about how gay it was–suddenly got surrounded by three of Freddie’s victims as he was pushing his way through the sheets. The kid let out a blood curdling scream and then pushed the actor in front of him to the ground and bolted. Problem is it was dark as hell, and we were right near the exit – but with all of the fog and the way the lights were you really couldn’t tell where the end was. He bolted forward, tripped over the actor he’d just pushed to the ground, and smacked his face into the wall, knocking him right on his ass. His buddy ran over and tried to get him up, which caused the teenage Ray Charles to jump in the air and start flailing his arms wildly. It seemed like one of his arms/hands connected with his buddy because he fell to the ground. The girls started crying. Security ran out to get them and lead them to the exits and this guy starts shoving them out of the way. They finally get them out of the house and we all start moving again (talk about ruining the immersion).
As we get outside, we can hear a ruckus on the other side of the partition. It sounded like security was trying to talk them down, when we hear the evening’s hero scream, “I FUCKING PISSED MYSELF. FUCK YOU. MY DAD IS A LAWYER!” etc. etc.
We laughed all the way to the next exhibit.
14. Girls Throw More Punches
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. Girls throw more punches than guys do too.
15. *Whispers* Jennnaaaa
I volunteered at one for a few years in high school. The best thing that happened was that I saw a girl from grade school going through the room. She obviously couldn’t recognize me so as she passed I whispered her name. She got a huge fright and the next day she asked on Facebook who was working in the haunted house. I never told her who it was. Sorry Jenna.
16. “Y’all Need Jesus”
I work at a haunt in PA that is part of a multi-attraction location (there’s a haunted house, hayride, and corn maze. I work the house and we are generally the crowd favorite). Last year, my job was to sit in a shed where the exterior had been modified to look like a small mausoleum in the graveyard portion of the haunt. Thanks to a relatively simple system I knew the names of at least three people in each group that would come through. Into a mic connected to wrap around speakers (the sound followed the guests) I’d 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 would 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 mid-season, 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 MOTHERFUCKERS NEED JESUS!”
Without question my best story of the entire season.
17. Oh HELL No
I was a scare actor for a local maze back in high school. People would go inside in groups, and I was right near the beginning. I was dressed in all black and had long “fingers”;with claws and a burlap sack mask over my head. Right before me, however, were a group of killer clowns. My job was to crawl out of a ditch onto the path right after the clown scene.
This one girl comes in with her group of friends and is immediately freaking out at the clowns. Refused to go through. After much coaxing, she finally decided to do the rest of the maze. Well, during her freaking out I had crawled out from my ditch and ended up in the middle of the path right in front of her. After they finally convince her to go through, she looks up and makes eye contact with me. With my long claw hand, I slowly make the “come here” motion. She immediately screams “oh HELL NO” and storms out. Didn’t see her again for the rest of the night.
18. A Haunted House Veteran Spills His Secrets
Oh a great number of things, as I’ve worked and ran haunts for nearly 20 years.
Some of my favorite moments:
1) 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 lifesize doll of Regan from 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 shit, 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.
2) Little old lady, had to be 80 dragging her two 60 year old sons by their hands into the haunt, telling them in the sweetest little old grandma voice you can imagine “Now now boys, don’t be pussies.” She gets into the last room which was dressed as a movie theater where the entire screen would break open as a giant monster jumped out. She sat front row center.
My friend literally got his phone out and dialed 911 and was waiting to hit Send. Monster jumps out 2 inches from her nose, she shrieks, and then just collapses. We all rush in, she turns and looks at us and starts laughing. “We have movement!”
3) 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!”
4) 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 (auto lock won’t function if the key is physically turning the lock to open it). We start crawling into the SUV over the back seats as she is scrambling reverse crab walk over them up between the bucket seats, where 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.”
5) 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!”
6) Happened just a couple of weeks ago. I was taking the girlfriend down to Netherworld in Atlanta just because their haunt is one of the best in the country. We had gone through, had a great time, and were in the gift shop when this girl, maybe 11 or so, comes tearing in there. She had clearly been running away from one of the line worker monsters. I’m about 6’2″ and without thinking I run over and tell her “Its okay, you don’t need to be afraid of the monsters…” and then dropped into my crazy psycho voice I use in my haunts “…its the rest of us you should be scared of! Eh hehehehehehee!” Her eyes go wide as saucers because at this point I’m looming over her, my girlfriend grabs me, pulls me away and just goes “Honey, we talked about this, you’re not allowed to do that to the normies!”
Girl ran out faster than she had ran in, and even the gift shop employees were going “That was awesome, good on ya!”
7) One year I’m doing the autopsy room. Body parts everywhere, a basket of intestines hanging from the ceiling, blood everywhere, you know the normal stuff. One night early on I had missed dinner, so I raided the candy bowl and grabbed a bunch of those fun sized Snickers and hid them in the gut basket. Group comes in faster than I expected just in time to see me take the candy bar out of the basket and pop it in my mouth.
A woman screams “Oh my GOD HE’S EATING SHIT!”
She swears she saw me squeeze a big old lump of shit out of one of those intestines (which can’t be true, they were made out of expanding insulation foam and painted, they were all solid). After that I started working that into my routine. Made more than one person vomit that year…
8) The scare in the final room of the haunt one year was a big stone looking room with my friend in monk’s robes who would stop the crowds and do a quick bit about how “The Master demands a sacrifice, one must stay so that the rest may leave”. So the group would pick a sacrifice, who would be left alone in the middle of the room as I in a Headless Horeseman costume (with flaming jack-o-lantern head) would burst through the giant hidden hinged doors that made the entire false wall crash open at them, with my giant two handed axe in order to claim their heads. You know, normal every day stuff.
Except one group of all white guys and one black guy came through, and the group voted to put the one black guy up for sacrifice. My friend is just going “Really? REALLY?!?” but shrugs and does his summoning of me. I’m wondering what I’m going to do, but acting quick I barge out of the doors, then stop dead in my tracks. I make very exaggerated head movements (to be seen through the mask) of looking at the black guy, at the white people in back, back to the black guy, then I just throw my hands up and yell “Ah hell nah!” and storm back into my hole, closing the doors behind me.
Black guy is laughing his ass off going “I told you so! Even the monster thought that was crap, I TOLD YOU SO!”
9) Stupidest “What the hell is wrong with you people?” bit though was the play sand. Had a section of the 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 shit!”. All the work and planning we put into that haunt, and the biggest reaction we got was the damned pothole sand. Couldn’t do that again if we tried…
19. Their Faces Were Like They Were Prepared For Death
I was an actor at The Haunted Hotel (located in the basement of this huge building downtown San Diego) 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 through 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 shit 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, Im 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.
20. Tiny Doll And Mr. Giggles
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–she got stuck, he lifted her out, then picked up the chainsaw and chased her out while she screamed “I’m gonna shit!” We still talk about it.
21. Scared So Badly They Wouldn’t Leave For Ten Minutes
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 drilling into this dead woman. 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.
22. Japanese Couple Unphased By Anything
I was with my dad, and it was at one of these local places it was called ” Shattered screams asylum”. Anyway, I was 15 and working with my dad. For me it was a bit of a game. I had this bloodied dress, an axe, and looked like just a crazy girl. I can’t count how many people thought I was a random person who broke in and tried to murder, because my act was to drop out of a tree and charge. But the strangest was this Japanese couple. They weren’t freaked out by anything, and were more focused on taking pictures of everything.
23. Another Haunted House Veteran Tells His Stories
I work at a haunted house and have done so for two years. Last year I was in a ghillie suit. It wasn’t made to be a grassy or to blend in with nature, it was supposed to look like a bag of magic beans. I was in the fantasy themed area so there were lots of fairy tales and I was supposed to just look like a prob laying on the ground. At first I thought it was a terrible costume, but it turned out to be one of the best. It was even one of the big bosses’ favorite costumes out of the entire park. No one ever knew i was real unless they saw me move, so I spent all night sitting outside the area against a box that had cheap hard plastic i could slam my elbow into and create a super loud and sudden rattling sound. There was one time a huge church group came to the maze and I moved a little just to get there attention so they would be trying to figure out if I was real or not. Once they started staring they all (at least 40 people) screamed and went crazy and sprinted into the maze. I jumped up and chased after them through the entire thing. It got so crazy that afterwards I was even pulled aside by management and told not to do that because people were almost trampled. I ended up getting monster of the year for my maze with this costume.
This year, I’m in the clown area and I’m what is called a slider. They give us kneepads, elbow pads, gloves with metal on the fingers, and wrist guards, plus we have to provide steel toe shoes. You get a running start then drop to the ground and slide on your hands and knees at people while screaming. After you tear through your shoes and the steel is exposed, there will even be sparks flying off of your feet as you grind against the asphalt. They changed my costume a lot and now they make me what is basically the Joker. They can’t call it that for copyright but they slick my hair back, paint it green and give me similar makeup. I even brought in my own purple trench coat. The look has to be changed at least 20% for it to not infringe on any copyright. It’s been amazing. I could go on about funny stories for hours, literally. If you’ve ever considered a side job at a haunted house, go for it! It’s an insanely fun job because you get paid to just walk around and scare people.
Another story: I was outside my area last year. (Difference between area and maze. In a maze you walk through a designated path and go through different rooms and get scared, in an area you walk around freely and there are monsters that also walk around more freely.). The woodsman which had a fake saw and a bloody face would walk out behind people and jump into their face and scream just when they thought it was over. One girl in particular that he did it to, stopped without screaming and making no facial expression and her friends were wondering what she was doing, after a second she just said, “I just shit,” In a calm voice. We all just kinda sat there for a second wondering if she was kidding and she said, “y’all I seriously just shit.” As soon as she left I sprinted inside to tell the woodsman what he did and I told a manager and he got an award.
Another one was early in the last season. I was working with a guy who was dressed as a horror version of Jimminy Cricket. (Yeah I know it sounds cheesy but this guy quit and the guy who took his place literally sent people sprinting out of the area in this costume) the original guy would stand there and distract them by talking and I would be sitting beside them in my ghillie suit, when they were completely distracted by him I would crawl across the ground at peoples feet and you couldn’t really see me unless you were in the group i was scaring since it was dark and I was on the ground. I was told by people that it looked like a grenade got thrown in the ground because people would just randomly start dispersing and running away for no apparent reason. One time we did this a teenage guy proceeded to grab his girlfriend, push her towards me, and then sprint away into the movie theater after sacrificing his girlfriend to us.
24. Misfits And Coffins
Actor here. My town puts on a fairly large haunted house. In 2005 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.
I just want to add that volunteering at a haunted house is one of the most fun things you can do. If you have a local charity haunted house, they DO need help, and you WILL have a blast. Some of my most fond memories involve listening to The Misfits on my iPod, waiting in some fake coffin or whatnot to jump out at people. Do it, especially if it’s for a good cause.
25. Winning The Staring Contest
I made a very drunk guy pee himself by just looking at him for too long without blinking. Hilarious for me…not so hilarious for the clean up crew.
26. The Japanese Businessman
I was working at Halloween horror nights. It was around 2am and the houses were starting to shut down, and only a few stragglers were going through the house.
Then the final guy goes through. it was some Japanese Businessman in a full suit and carrying a briefcase. His clothes and hair were rumpled like he had just gotten off some red-eye flight.
He was just ambling through and had such a look of child-like wonder and joy on his face as he took everything in.
27. Blocking The Exit
I was stationed in a room in a costume that was way too tall for it. The costume sits on your shoulders, extends your arms by a couple feet, and towers over people. The entrance was in one corner, and the exit was in the corner right next to the entrance, so people really only had a fleeting glimpse at a dark room and a little motion before they were already out again. I got pretty bored, so I left my corner and blocked the exit.
A group of girls came through, and the one in front bumped into me. That’s when I throw the arms out to the sides and start screaming. She starts screaming in terror, beating me in the face (creature’s chest) and runs right into the corner I was supposed to be hiding in. So I chased her and boxed her in. Now she’s punching me as hard as she can to try to escape, but I don’t let up. She finally pushes me back with all her might and yells out “Fuck you I just peed my pants!”
We had to escort her through the access paths to get her out discreetly. I felt bad, but not that bad.
28. Panic Attack Turns Into Womanly Rage
We had a guy who would chase after you with a chainsaw (chain removed) after you left the house. You know, just run after you a few steps when you came out the door. Well, 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.
29. Fog Machine Run Amok
My friend and I were working the morgue room. He was the funeral director and directed people towards the coffin. There was a mutilated dummy laying in there. Everyone would always think the dummy would pop and scare them. I was dressed as a zombie and came out of hidden door behind the people to scare them. Anyways there was a fog machine that we had to run to fill the room with fog for a creepy effect. For the first 4-5 groups the fog machine wasn’t working. We were just volunteers so we didn’t know how to fix it. Finally after fiddling with it, it turned on and stuck on. We tried unplugging it but the cord ran behind the wall. It ran continuously until the fog material was gone. You couldn’t see anything in the room. It was a good time.
30. How To Truly Scare The 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 passed 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!”
31. Rock n Roll
I worked in a haunted house for 8 seasons. Most of that time I was a zombie in the graveyard, the last 2 years I was chasing people with a chainsaw (best experience of my life).
I cannot tell you how many grown people I’ve seen piss their pants, and we had one dude shit himself. That was .. unfortunate.
The local radio station held a contest a the winner could go through our house with [popular rock band], and afterward the band was supposed to do some meet and greet thing outside (this was in 2008 I think, before they got stupid big). Well, we really gave them a hard time through out the house, yelling their lyrics at them and giving our all, and at the end they ran straight out and directly to their bus. No meet and greet, no passing go, etc. One of my favorite nights ever!
32. Payback
Not in a haunted house, but I was a zombie for a street game, where groups of players have to run a zombie ‘gauntlet’ through the city centre. There were two types of zombies – slow zombies that were there for ambience, and fast zombies, that could chase and catch the players – and ‘infect’ them (we marked their hand with a UV pen, and if it showed up at the end ‘decontanimation zone’ they got zombie make-up).
I was in a fast zone with another zombie, hidden strategically in the shadows so we could jump out, get a good scare, and chase the players to the end of the zone. Well, a group come along and we start to chase them, at which point the group scatters and completely legs it, abandoning one member. When we caught her she just turned around and went, “oh.” She kept saying, “thought we were supposed to work together in a zombie apocalypse,” and was so dejected. Was trying pretty hard not to corpse, but at least she thanked us before she ran off to catch up. I hope she sabotaged the rest of the run and infected them back!
33. She Ded
Saw a 300 lb man scream like a little girl and bowl over his wife when a man dressed like Jason popped outta the bush beside him.
34. Getting In The Spirit
I wasn’t an actor but me and some friends went to a good one. I loved it. The girls (a platonic friend and her cousins) on the other hand were losing their shit. I got out first and decided to do something terrible. I hid behind a trash can at the end of it. When the girls came out they were relieved to be done until I jumped out and gave them the final scare that sent them over the edge. My friend took off running screaming bloody murder and her cousins sank to a huddled fetal position and started sobbing and were almost in complete shock. Me and another guy in the group had to carry them back to the car as they were inconsolable to the point of incoherent. For all I know, they were scared into a reality where they might have thought they were being carried away to be devoured by monsters.
35. Monster, Help?
Did a pretty basic jump-scare to some kids I’d figured were old enough for it. Two of them booked it past me, and one fell and was left behind. I was worried if he was okay – so I offered my hand to help him up – completely forgetting that I was still costumed up with some hideous monster mask and clawed gloves. He did not accept my help, and sort of scampered away on all fours.
36. Scared So Badly She Fell In The Coffin
I worked the last couple years volunteering at a haunted barn. Last year 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 animatronic. 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 assumed I was an animatronic and he grabbed my boob. I just asked him if he was into fucking dead people. He felt so bad when he figured out I was real. It scared the shit out of him though.
37. “See. There’s Nothing In Here.”
I volunteered at a haunted trail one time as a vampire. They were kind of short on personnel so I got a whole “creepy bus” all to myself. I am a short girl, so I was able to fit in one of the back seats with my feet up and not be visible at all to people coming in…
One mother came in with her freaked-out kiddo, and attempted to reassure him by saying “See? There’s nothing in here!” At which point I popped out of my seat and did my best vampire-hiss and scared the crap out of both of them. One of the proudest moments of my life.
