Festival of Fear

This was me and my husband last Halloween. Scary stuff.

Friday night was especially fun this weekend. We went to this crazy haunted house thing, which strangely enough, was situated inside of a bowling alley. The bowling alley has a big laser tag arena in it, so they set up shop there, fashioning it to look like a big decaying old mansion. To fully appreciate this haunted house story, you should know a little history about me and haunted houses. When I was little I would get all gung-ho about going to them. Once we’d get there I’d freak out and cry and wouldn’t even go in. So technically, this was only my second trip into a haunted house in my life. The last one I went to was set up in an old barn somewhere in Knox, PA, sponsored by the area J.C.’s. So it was run by a bunch of little kids. There were big signs as we went in telling us to refrain from using profane language and that kind of thing, since the monsters inside were innocent children. I don’t remember it being remotely scary at all, but my girlfriends were being big babies and hanging on to each other, which made me kind of freak out. I was hanging on to my then future husband until some of the little monsters starting weaving through us to separate us. So I grabbed one of my roommates, and my husband was left by himself in the dark (which he was a little pissed off about). The final room that we went into held a guy with a chainsaw. He was standing there very still until we got about a quarter of the way through the room, when he started up the chainsaw. My friends and I all jumped, and I lost the iron grip I had on my friends’ sweatshirt, and they skirted along the wall and out of the room. I was just inches behind them, scurrying along the wall, when suddenly a door on the wall burst open right into my face, and another guy with a chainsaw jumped out. Forgetting my haunted house etiquette, I screamed, "OW! SHIT! FUCK!" and the little guy with the chainsaw looked at me with concern and said, "are you ok?" as I ran blindly from the room, clutching my face, seeing spots. Some crazy psycho killer he was. The door had slammed me right in the corner of my brow bone, and as soon as I emerged from the barn it began to swell. So I had a nice shiner from that experience.

Needless to say, I was a bit concerned about the same type of thing happening at the one on Friday. But I came out with my face intact, even though my throat hurt a little from screaming like a little bitch. This one was pretty scary, even though thinking back on it I feel a little silly for being so afraid. The people in the haunted house must have thought we were seriously insane or drunk or something, the way we behaved. My husband was in the lead, because nobody else wanted to go first, with me clutching on to his shirt, my friend Starr clutching on to me, and Greg (the one that pointed out my jack o lantern looks like Che) bringing up the rear. As we rounded corners you could see the scary masked people standing still, waiting for us to walk past them, so they could jump out behind us and follow us. One of them followed us through the entire thing. Windows on the corners would fly open and people would scream, which would send us running. I was screaming and giggling and squealing at the monsters in the corners, " I can see you! Don’t scare me!" By the time we were about halfway through I was ready to stop being scared and get the fuck out, but there was more. We got to one room at the bottom of a set of stairs where there was a bloody blonde girl caught in a table saw, screaming in agony. But I could see her holding back her laughter as we all refused to go in, because of the crazy guy standing right around the corner of the doorway. He was fucking scary. After that it was smooth sailing, although I did have a small anxiety attack from hearing the sounds of a chainsaw. The main attraction of the whole thing, a psycho butler who brutally tortured and murdered the mansion’s inhabitants, wasn’t even in it. I was waiting for some big finish, which never came. It wasn’t really worth the 10 bucks a person, but I was still scared enough to want to pee my pants. Thankfully I didn’t. Nor did I maim myself in any way.

At any rate, I hope to keep the scary stories going here until Halloween. Remember back in August I told the story of the crazy twins that are customers where I work? I’ve been trying since then to get a picture of them, just because they are so fucking creepy. On Friday I heard that they were outside of the store, fighting as usual and being very loud. So I took that opportunity to grab a camera from my department and make it a goal to finally get their picture. And I did, sort of. I’ll post that sometime this week, along with their antics for that day.

Oh, and I finally got to see Fahrenheit 9/11. It was even better than I expected.