Haus of Fear
I have taken a seasonal job at a haunted house. I worked for other hundred attractions in the past and thought I was just doing putting on a lot of makeup and yelling at people for no reason. I mean, that’s why everyone does this right?
I got way more than I bargained for. The Haus of Fear, as it is now known, has had a very colorful past. When the home first opened, it was a home for children who did not have parents, before the modern day foster care existed. These children would often go without a lot of supervision and they would grow up without loving families.
Soon after that, it became a home for elderly people whose families couldn’t or didn’t want to take care of them. Age and illness had begun to sink its ugly claws into them. Even sadder is when the home was preoccupied with individuals who had been rejected by their families or society as a whole, their bodies would be turned to ashes in the basement of the place they called home after they died.
After it’s dark past, the home was converted into a bed and breakfast and then it changed hands again and they made it into an apartment building. Then, half the building was converted into a haunted attraction.
I am incredibly interested in the darker side of life here on Earth and life on the other side as well, so when the housekeeper came and spoke with me at work one day, I couldn’t help but ask her if she had any experiences in this supposedly haunted house. Her response shook me to my core.
A housekeeper named Tammy had said that, yes she had experiences. In fact, many times she has gone into clean bathrooms and found clumps of long black hair. She said this experience is regardless of if the person staying there has black hair or if anyone is staying there at all.
The shower has been said to turn on when the entire water system is shut off in order to make repairs or check the condition of the plumbing. Probably the saddest thing is that when the staff was building on expanding the house, in the basement they found a child’s footprint as if the young child had been walking through the dusty portions of the basement. This basement remains unused and it was not occupied by children.
As a fun side note, before it became an apartment building, it was owned by the local minor league hockey league. They thought they were tough guys and that they could handle the ghost stories, so they lived there for a few months. They had to leave because they couldn’t deal with the ghostly activity.
It’s only my second week working at Haus of Fear, and I have already been scared out of my gourd more than once. My job at the haunted house is to sit in a wheelchair and yell at those who pass by when they’re not expecting it. This makes for a good scare and a lot of laughs on my end.
When they said that they were going to put me in a wheelchair I thought they were going to put me in a modern wheelchair, a wheelchair like I use at home. My wheelchair has modern brakes, a shiny black finish, and a nice squishy cushion. I was dead wrong. The wheelchair in question is not like mine. It is, in fact, an old wooden wheelchair with antique wheels, which are very large and have immense spokes and wooden handles on the outside of the wheel.
With the wheels being so large and the chair being so much like a chair one would find on their porch, it takes a lot of force to move it and I was scared to death when it started moving by itself. My actual mobility device is behind the props and there is little chance a person could fit behind it to play a trick on me.
Later that same night, I was with one of the other actors (a young girl who is the opposite room for me). The room that I’m situated in is a very large room that’s designed to look like an old-fashioned dining room. It has a large wooden table with fake flowers and mannequins as dinner guests. We also have music pumping into the loudspeakers at all times, which is supposed to be like that of an old record player and is constant from the time we open until the time we clock out. Despite the loud music playing ad nauseam, the girl in the room next to mine heard someone scream while we were on break and no one was in the building. She said no one was around her and it sure wasn’t me.
I like to think that ghosts just want to play with us and have fun like all the other actors.
If I have any more experiences, I will fill you in. Stay tuned for an update.
Happy Halloween all my lovely readers.