Halloween and Spooky Season bring many haunted attractions and events for people to attend and have a little fun, get a little scared. But what if I told you some of those scares aren’t props and dummies after all? In fact, it is way more common than you’d think for real corpses to be mistaken for Halloween decorations. Today we’re digging into some real deadly haunted attractions, from a High School production gone wrong to Disney Paris and a Queens basement the fire department called a death trap; these are the haunted attractions where the horror stopped being part of the show.
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SOURCES
1990: Teen Who Posed as Victim of Hanging is Found Dead
Timeout. A Haunting in Hollis Closes Down
NBC. Teen has Fatal Heart Attack at Ohio Haunted House
NBC. Halloween Hayride Crash Kills at least 3. 2016
https://nypost.com/2017/09/17/man-killed-after-being-hit-by-moving-coffin-in-haunted-house/
6 Deaths in Haunted Attractions. Ranker.
History of Haunted House as an Attraction!
9 Haunted Attractions that Went Too Far. People
Disturbing Things That Actually Happened at Haunted Houses
Article on Risk Management in Haunted Houses
The Blackout Experiments (2015). Directed by Rich Fox.
All Year Long, People Are Paying Good Money to be Terrified. La Mag. Julia Murray. 2018
https://rottingskulls.com/?v=tldkft-dp1h
https://www.reddit.com/r/ExtremeHaunts/
https://www.haunting.net/recollections/
LAist articles about Heretic by Juliet Bennet Rylah - 2015
https://laist.com/news/entertainment/heretic-house
https://laist.com/news/entertainment/alone-index-of-absorption
https://laist.com/news/entertainment/heretic-house-cabin
Reckless Ben v. McKamey Manor - Playlist
TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to start this episode with a story that honestly feels like an urban legend. But we found a Time magazine article that details the way this story went down, and I assure you it’s real.
It was 1957 in Utica, Kansas. A small town – and when I say small, I’m not exaggerating. At the time, it listed a population of around three hundred people.
Late September was always a busy time for the local high school – it was a homecoming party of sorts for the incoming freshman. This party, usually held in the school’s gymnasium, often got rowdy and led to instances of hazing. The school faculty didn’t want to encourage this kind of behavior, so a teacher proposed an alternative.
Mrs. Betty Stevens — English teacher and sponsor of the senior class — suggested that they set up an early Halloween party. A haunted house that the senior class could set up and lead the Freshmen through. It would be a fun spooky group project for her 11 seniors.
The school principal, William H. Sallee, was apprehensive of the idea at first, but eventually he came around. His one stipulation, was they had to keep the event safe. He was tired of seniors bullying freshman and hazing them. He wanted a safe fun fall time activity, that was IT.
And so, the students promised him that they would do everything they could to keep this event safe, and then they got to work setting it up.
The haunted house was set up two miles out of town, in this big, abandoned farmhouse. They had fake skulls and bones, toy snakes, and they scattered the floor with chains, broken bottles and burlap sacks. It was very makeshift, but that almost added to the scary atmosphere of the house.
The plan was that the seniors would be the tour guides. The freshman would come, and be led through by the seniors, with some of them dressing up and being part of the haunted house with their teacher- hiding in the shadows and waiting to jump out and scare the younger students.
Principal Sallee began to love this idea. Maybe he was just happy the seniors were going to be on their best behavior, but he started getting really into it. And he decided that he, too wanted to dress up for the haunted house.
So the night of the event, he took black ash and dabbed it all around his eyes. He got a bottle of ketchup and he splashed it all over his shirt to imitate blood.
And he got to the house early to figure out where he was going to hide. There were a couple of shadowy corners he could hide in, no that wasn’t enough. Maybe he could fold himself up and hide inside of an old piece of furniture. No, he was 60 years old, he wasn’t going to cram himself in a trunk.
That’s when he got an idea. In the kitchen of the abandoned house, there was a rope and a hook in the high ceiling. He could string up the rope, climb up a little step ladder, and then slip the rope under his armpits to make it look like he was hanging. But the students were going to be arriving soon, so he had to do it quickly.
That night, the haunted house was a huge success. seniors led each of the 23 freshmen one by one through the spooky farmhouse. There were no lights, so everyone had to use these small flashlights to see. Teachers rattled chains in the dark, they jumped out from behind corners and screamed… it was a good time.
And for being so DIY, the freshman were really impressed with the decorations. Some of them were cheezy like the toy snakes. But the skulls and bones, the broken bottles everywhere, they all looked so real
But the most impressive thing came when the students walked past the kitchen. There, Principal Sallee dangled from the kitchen rope, perfectly still. He didn’t even open his eyes one time. One of the first groups that walked past him heard him making strange groaning sounds, but when they called his name, he didn’t even budge. He was really in character.
After the entire class had gone through, Mrs. Stevens gathered all 34 students for a photo. There were so many scary parts of the house to get the photo at, but they decided they wanted to take it with the creepiest prop of all, Principle Sallee- who was still in character, still hanging from the ceiling.
The kids all gathered in the kitchen and Mrs. Stevens lifted her camera. Principal Sallee, Smile! She screamed. But Sallee just kept dangling. She called for him again. But still no answer.
So, she grabbed a flashlight. And shined it directly at him.
And that’s when she realized that the rope was not around his arms, like he had planned. Somehow, in the chaos of setting up, Principal Sallee strung the rope around his neck, couldn’t get his foot back on the step stool to help himself, and was strangled to death.
Strangulation is one of the most common stories I find in deadly haunted houses. Even researching for this episode, I found another case from 2017 where a 17 year old girl accidentally hanged herself with a prop noose at Creepyworld, a haunted attraction in St. Louis. She survived, but she slipped off of a tub in front of visitors and started struggling, but because they were in a haunted house, they thought it was part of the show. It wasn’t until another employee walked by that they realized something was wrong.
But that’s part of the horror of a haunted house. That if we saw something happening inside, we might just think it was part of the show. Even if we felt like something was obviously off.
And that brings me to my next story
Our second story comes 32 years after the first one. 1987, in Rootstown, Ohio – a township a little ways to the east of Akron
The Woods of Terror was a haunted attraction set up by locals in nearby forests. The pitch for this attraction was exactly what it says on the tin – a group of local young men decorated their favorite woodland trail for spooky season.
One of the men responsible for decorating The Woods of Terror was the 17 year old Matthew Platt from nearby Ravenna. It was not a great year for him — he’d been nursing a broken heart since that spring. His girlfriend of the last year and a half, Rose Workman, had broken off their relationship and done her best to move on. And Matthew did not take this well.
Now, there’s normal bad feelings that are associated with breakups, but Matthews friends noticed that he was starting to obsess a little. He regularly told his friends how much he hated Rose, and that he wanted to kill her. His friends shrugged this off. He was just letting off steam. Even when he asked one of them how he could get his hands on a gun, they thought he wasn’t being serious.
On November 12th, the Woods of Terror was still fully decorated. Even though halloween season had passed, decorations were still up and locals would walk through. Matthew invited a friend to come to the woods to help with something.
What it was, he wouldn’t say, he would have to show him.
Once they got to the part of the woods where the attraction was, he handed his friend a shovel. “I want to dig a grave” he said.
Now, Halloween was almost two full weeks ago. So I don’t know if this friend thought that this was part of the scares, but he helped Matthew Dig.
The next day, more teens went out to walk through the Woods of Terror, when they saw a patch of disturbed ground.
It was the hole that Matthew dug, Only is wasn’t empty. The dirt had been filled back in. If anything it looked like a shallow grave, there was even a little cross over the site.
But again, considering that this was a haunted attraction, no one batted an eye. No one called it in. They just went on their way..
They had no idea that earlier that day, on Friday, november 13th, Matthew invited Rose to go for a walk with him. The newspapers described this as a “date”, so it’s possible that Rose was considering getting back together with him. Not knowing that he was still stung by her rejection. That he hated her for dating other boys that whole summer.
Matthew brought Rose to the shallow grave he’d dug in the Woods of Terror and shot her five times – three times in the chest, twice in the head. He buried her there, and To anyone passing through, it would just look like another part of the experience.
I don’t know exactly how far he planned beyond this. Maybe he thought that when they took down the decorations, they’d remove the cross and assume the shallow grave was just a small patch of upturned earth.
But that’s not how things went down.
The day after the murder, Matthew confessed to a pair of close friends. Apparently, he couldnt keep inside what he had done and he gave them all the details. They didn’t believe him at first. But then he took them to the grave . And even still, they thought it was a prank, just another prop. That didn’t last for long though. Police arrested him and he was tried for murder. He plead guilty, and was sentenced in 1989 to life in prison plus three years, with a minimum sentence of 23 years.
Since then, it’s hard to pin down exactly what happened to Matthew. It seems he found religion in prison, but was still behind bars at least as of 2019. The last word I found of him is a facebook post quoting from a book he wrote called Hope in the Midst of Darkness.
I keep coming back to what might have happened if he hadn’t had that crisis of conscience and confessed the murder. Would Rose have ever been found in a town of that size? Would she have been written off forever as a Halloween decoration?
It’s not impossible to imagine.
Ironically, the nicest thing you can say about Halloween decorations is that they look “so real”. So it’s no surprise that people don’t always call in these things, even when they feel like something isn’t right.
But what if… what if that suspiciously smelly body outside your neighbor’s front stoop wasn’t just a really good dummy? What if that hanging decoration was where a human being spent their final moments?
I know these hypotheticals sound a little crazy. I know the difference between a human body and a dummy. We all do — it’s instinctual.
But… mistaking human bodies for Halloween decorations is actually more common than you might think.
While researching this episode, I found not one but four instances of this in the last 20 years. And that’s not including the one I already covered for this very show!
From oldest to newest:
In 2005, a 42-year-old woman in Wilmington hanged herself in a tree in her front yard. her body went unreported for hours because people assumed she was a Halloween decoration.
Around halloween 2009, a man passed away while sitting on the balcony of his apartment in Los Angeles. His body was ignored for DAYS because his neighbors said he looked like “a halloween dummy”
In October of 2015: The body of 31 year old Rebecca Cade was seen hanging from a fence on a construction site. People said she looked like a hanging zombie prop and they didn’t call police. She had died from blunt force trauma and it seemed like she had climbed the fence to get away from her murderer. Her murder remains unsolved.
2023: Robert Owens was left facedown in front of an abandoned North Carolina home for several days. The gardener was so convinced that he was a prop dummy, he mowed the lawn around the body without disturbing it. This was also a home where police would conduct trainings, so another reason their might have been a dummy there
These stories send a chill up my spine. It’s not the bodies that scare me — it’s the way in which the playful illusion of Halloween can hide real horrors in plain sight.
And it’s not just something that extends to inanimate objects either:
If someone dresses up in a mask and a costume near a haunted house… we just assume they belong there. And we assume that they mean us no harm.
On October 5th, 2018, a 29 year old Tennessee woman named Tawnya Greenfield was on her way to the scare of her life and she didn’t even know it. She and a trio of friends went to a venue called the Nashville Nightmare.
Unlike the last couple of haunts we described, Nashville Nightmare is pretty famous. It’s Tennessee’s premier haunt event. A haunt event that takes precautions to make sure that its attendants are safe. There’s employees that work there, you have to go through a metal detector to get inside.
Tawnya and her friends had to wait in a long line to get into the event itself, but once they got in, they found themselves in the midst of a series of carnival-style games, outside the scare mazes. Actors wandered in and out of the crowd, interacting with everyone in-character. If you’ve ever been in a scare zone before, you know the vibe. Little spooks and playful taunting.
But then, they were approached by a costumed figure that didn’t look like the other employees. While the other scare actors had in depth SFX makeup, fake cuts, and elaborate costumes, this one was much more pared down. The man just had a full face of skeleton makeup on, like Evan peters in American Horror story, and a straw hat.
Tawya was standing there talking to her friend James, when the actor approached. And interrupting them, he asked if James was bothering her.
Now, these scare actors are in character, and you’re allowed to play along with them. So Tawnya jokingly said, Yes, actually he is bothering me.
That’s when the actor reaches under his shirt and pulls out a knife. He hands it to Tawnya and says “Well here, stab him.”
Tawya turned to James with the prop knife the actor just handed to her, and playing along with the game, she thrusted the knife towards James’s arm.
And instead of it bouncing off of James, it sliced into him, hard. Blood started pouring out of his arm, spurting like you see in movies. And in horror, Tawnya turned around to scream at the guy, why would you give me a real knife?! But he was nowhere to be found, and no one has ever found this person.
The friends called an ambulance and had James rushed to the hospital.
James was alright in the end, but everyone was badly shaken up. He later said “Keep in mind, we’d been chased by chainsaws, holding other weapons, all kinds of stuff all night, and it was all fake “So she stabs at me with it, and everything got really black.”
Who was the guy who had given her the knife? Had he been working there? And had he meant to cause harm when he gave her the knife?
Tawnya and James hired a lawyer to pursue legal action against the haunt and the person who gave her the knife. According to a spokesperson from Nashville Nightmare, they take the safety of their guests extremely seriously, and had placed one of their employees on leave until they could determine whether he was involved.
As far as I can tell, the employee – or interloper – was never publicly identified.
Now, what’s maybe the most shocking there, is that people were supposed to go through a metal detector before being let in, in theory, this should have never happened.
But big haunts have problems too
The same year that Tawnya Greenfield was stabbing her friend in Nashville, the researcher for this very episode was working as a scareactor at Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights. Big events like that are deeply invested in keeping everyone as safe as possible behind the scenes — one night when a rare thunderstorm hovered over LA, they pulled several Michael Myers performers out of the Halloween maze because of the minute risk that lightning would strike a metal pole near one of the actors. There is a lot on the line, reputation and money, when it comes to these big places
However, there’s no controlling for every danger in a big attraction. Especially, when there’s machinery involved.
First, let’s look at an attraction called The Phantom Manor — an elaborate, machinery and special effects-driven haunted house.
It’s actually in Disneyland, Paris. It’s their version of The Haunted Mansion, but with a notably darker storyline than you might see in the other Disney parks around the world.
The story goes like this: A young woman named Melanie lived in the mansion in the mid 1800s, and became engaged to a train engineer named Jake. The house was owned by Melanie's father, Henry, who struck gold in big Thunder Mountain, another disney ride.
On the couples wedding day, a mysterious phantom appears in the mansion and lures Jake up to the attic where he’s killed. His body was found hanging from the rafters.
Riders hear the story and wonder who the true phantom is? Is it Henry preventing his daughter from getting married, or someone who is out to get Henry?
It seems really interesting, let me know in the comments if you’ve ever been. But like other attractions we’ve covered on this show, The Phantom Manor was no stranger to sudden, inexplicable mechanical failure.
On April 3rd, 2016, just as the park was about to be opened, the doors closed on the Phantom Manor. It remained closed all day, to the frustration of guests. Many assumed that it was undergoing repairs.
The truth was far more tragic.
Earlier that day, a 45 year old park maintenance tech named Olivier, had gone inside the manor.
Olivier had worked inside of Disneyland paris for 14 years and was very good at his job. He had probably seen every type of ride malfunction you could imagine in that time. He wasn’t a stranger to having to fix rides.
It had been reported that there was some faulty lighting in the attic of the Manor, and so Olivier went in to check it out.
But hours passed, and he never came out. His colleagues tried radioing him. No answer.
Eventually, Park employees, doing their customary sweep of the attraction, found him lying unresponsive in the attic. He was pronounced dead at 10 AM local time. Investigators determined that the death was caused by accidental electrocution. Apparently, Olivier hadn’t taken the proper safety precautions.
Or at least that’s what the story that was reported said
You guys know I dug a little deeper, so let me share what I found.
The case actually went to criminal court in France, and a deeper investigation found that the attic was- similar to the ride’s storyline- a deathtrap.
They found a degraded, non-compliant power cable running from a distant outlet, no differential circuit breaker (which is the device that cuts power in a fault) protecting the work area, there was also a cramped work platform about five meters up with poor lighting and inadequate access, aging equipment, and staff safety warnings that had gone unheeded.
The prosecutor called the failures "entirely attributable to Euro Disney." Disney's defense was that the technician "forgot to take precautions," like didn't confirm the power was cut, and misjudged the risk. The court didn't buy it.
Just this summer, 10 years after the accident, Olivier’s two daughters were awarded roughly €50,000–53,000 each in moral damages, and the UNSA Disneyland Paris union, which joined as a civil party, got €10,000–12,000 for harm to collective interests. The union's statement blamed "chronic understaffing and degraded working conditions" in maintenance.
So maybe the real phantom, the actual danger in the manor, is the fact that it wasn’t up to code.
And Disneyland Paris isn't the only mega-park where the machinery behind a haunted attraction turned deadly.
Ocean Park is one of Hong Kong's biggest theme parks, and every fall it throws a massive event called the Halloween Bash — multiple haunted houses, hundreds of scare actors, the works. In 2017, one of the headline attractions was a haunted house called Buried Alive.
And the premise was exactly what it sounds like. You climb into a coffin. The lid closes over you. And then, the bottom of the coffin drops out, and you slide down into a dark maze below. That was the gimmick: the moving floor of the coffin was the slide.
Then you’d be dropped into A two-story house with eight of these coffin-slides feeding into it, and a one-way path through the dark that funneled everyone toward a single exit, where a performer would jump out and scare you through the doorway.
On September 16th, 2017, a 21-year-old student named Cheung Chiu-kit went down one of those slides. Security footage showed him walking the maze for about two or three minutes. And then, somewhere in the dark, he missed the exit.
Instead of turning toward the doorway, Cheung backtracked down a path that led to one of the other slides. The only thing standing between guests and the machinery was a warning sign, which one source later described as dim. Cheung climbed over the stationary base of the slide, into the mechanical zone behind the scenes... and disappeared from camera view.
Minutes later, the mechanism came down. The moving bottom of a coffin — with him underneath it.
Staff found Cheung unconscious on the back side of the slide. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.
At the inquest, a trainer testified that the attraction was designed so that at least two employees would notice and stop anyone walking the wrong way through the maze. That night, nobody did. Ocean Park shut the attraction down, and afterward it overhauled its Halloween safety protocols minimum staffing levels, more lights, emergency stop buttons. His family sued the park the following year
Our next story takes place in another haunted house, a smaller production, but one that also was not up to code
Deep in Queens; Hollis, specifically, at the corner of Hollis Avenue and 212th Street, there's a two-family house that doesn't look like much from the outside. But every October since 2002, it becomes what its owners bill as "the number one haunted house in New York City": known as A Haunting in Hollis.
The whole thing is a massive production, three floors of scares, including a basement. There’s Twenty-plus actors. Two pitch-black outdoor zombie mazes where all you get is a flashlight. The house also has Three escape rooms. They've even offered overnight stays.
You sign a waiver before you go in, and if it all gets to be too much, there's a safe word: "peanut butter."
The attraction comes with its own in-house lore, too. According to the official backstory, the house is haunted by three children who started a fire in the attic, and by a haunted toy rotary phone that mysteriously calls the fire department. In the story, the fire department saves the house.
A Haunting in Hollis is run by Janette and LaTaya Carter —and after two decades in the neighborhood, it's beloved. The reviews are good. Their own Instagram calls the haunt "a staple here." And with roughly 22 years of terrors under their belt, you'd think they'd have things pretty well figured out.
And, well... you wouldn't be exactly right.
See, inside the house, there was a giant slide. They called it Satan's Slope.
On Friday, October 13th, 2023, a 33-year-old woman from Jamaica, Queens paid her $30 and went into the house. This was two weeks after her wedding and was part of her honeymoon
At one point during the excursion, She went over to Satan's Slope. Now, looking down the slide, you can’t see anything, it’s pitch black. You don’t know if you’re going into a ball pit, water, you have no idea. But, there’s no warning signs at the top of the slide, so how bad could it be. Plus, there was no attendant there so you couldn’t really ask about it. So, she got in and pushed herself through.
But the slide proved to be longer than she thought it was, and soon, she lost control of her speed. When all of a sudden, BAM. The woman slammed feet first into a concrete wall.
Both of her ankles shattered. The woman had to be rushed to the hospital where She needed surgery and then physical therapy to learn to walk again. A year later, she still had issues climbing stairs.
But yes, it turns out, that at the bottom of this slide, there was a concrete wall. One that the owners knew about, and others had already been injured on.
The slide is actually 20 feet long, that’s about twice as big as a slide you’d find on a playground. And from reviews, it looks like it was on the stairs in the house, i’m guessing going into the basement, where it probably butted up to the concrete wall of the basement.
the New York Post confirmed at least one other person claims they also broke their ankles on Satan's Slope.
Another plaintiff , a man who declined to be identified , says he got hurt on the same slide. He described the exit as sitting so close to a wall that you basically launch straight into it. He hit it, quote, "very hard with my knee," fracturing it, and suffered a compression fracture on his spine. He says he was given no safety demonstration whatsoever. His attorney's filings accuse the operators of creating a "trap-like condition."
By the fall of 2024, the Carters were facing five separate lawsuits over injuries inside the poorly-lit confines of the house , four of them filed back in 2023, for injuries in 2022 and 2023. So this was a pattern long before anyone in the city took notice. Solainne filed hers on October 2nd, 2024, in Queens Supreme Court.
Three days later, the city noticed.
On Saturday, October 5th, 2024 , peak haunt season , a member of the New York Fire Department happened to come across the attraction. And when inspectors went in, there were about 40 paying customers inside the house.
What the FDNY found, in a two-family home that had been illegally converted into a commercial amusement: garbage bags taped over the windows as blackout material. Plastic sheeting hanging everywhere, what one official called "a very heavy fire load." Exposed, defective wiring. An illegal smoke machine. Holes in the walls and floors. Piles of combustible debris. Set decoration blocking the exit routes. Fireproofing material that had been removed. And three illegal staircases.
The fire commissioner, when told about the state of the house, also called it a death trap.
The Department of Buildings issued a full vacate order and three violations, and the owners were hit with summonses. Tickets were still on sale online the Wednesday after the vacate order.
Thirteen days after the raid, on Friday, October 18th, 2024, A Haunting in Hollis reopened with the Department of Buildings' blessing…. fire-rated sheetrock installed, the flammable materials and window garbage bags gone, exit signs up, egress fixed, wiring covered, actual fire safety personnel hired. And Satan's Slope? Removed entirely.
They've kept right on operating since, there's a five-star review from ten days after the reopening, and activity well into this year. So if you live in New York, you can still go there... just without the slide... if you dare.
Remember: in the house's own fictional lore, the fire department saves the building. In real life, the fire department is the one that shut it down, so that it could bring itself up to code, probably ultimately saving the building.
If you enjoy going to halloween attractions, I don’t blame you, I do too! I’ve already done horror nights this year AND the queen mary, and I’m just getting started. But it’s worth remembering that sometimes these attractions are put together really fast, and in an attempt to scare the audience, they can hurt people.
Though, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from doing this episode, the most dangerous role inside of a haunted attraction, IS BEING THE SCARE ACTOR. Those poor people get punched in the face and kicked a LOT.
Rob, who helped me research for this episode, was a scare actor and was telling me all about that.
If you want to hear the attractions that didn’t make it into the episode, you can join me on the high council tier of Patreon for FOOTNOTES, our weekly after show. I’ll see you next week with another episode for you all for spooky season,. And until then, stay curious
OOoooOooo