The Rise of Haunted House Attractions

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today we are talking about haunted house history. Uh no, not a place that people actually believe might be haunted, but the kinds of places you go to be scared on purpose, that kind of haunted house or just called they're called haunts a lot these days. So fun, and I thought I forgot about an event that happened when I was a kid that was not fun at all and really shapes haunted house history, and so we had to include it. Um. My apologies that that part is not fun at all and it comes towards the end. Still, I will say this offers up a lot of delights. There is some very good newspaper quotes that I quite enjoyed and giggled uproariously while reading them the first time. Um, and we get to mention a couple of my favorite subjects. I promise upfront for those of you that are concerned only the briefest mention of Disney's haunted mansion. We have to do it because it's contextually important to the bigger story. You'll also notice, and we'll talk about this some in the behind the scenes that, Um, we're talking mostly about North America and the US in particular, because haunted houses seem to be our thing. Uh. We'll talk about that and that aspect of our culture a little bit more in Friday's episode. But other than that, get ready haunted house discussion. Yes, humans have been making things to scare other humans and potentially to scare other creatures or entities, probably for thousands of years. Think of things like scarecrows, or decorations on tombs, things like that. Even Greek and Roman mythology feature tales of things like mazes, uh that house, frightening beasts. But the idea of a haunted house meaning a space that is set up as an entertainment that is based on the idea being scared on purposes fun. Actually, that idea is pretty new, only a few hundred years old, and even before haunted houses the way we would think of them when what comes to mind when we say that word developed, there were other entertainments that you could pay a fee to go and see and be frightened. One of those was the phantasmagoria, and this was essentially horror theater. It was enhanced by the use of early moving image devices to create astonishing for the time visual trickery that left audiences frightened and often questioning their reality. Magic lanterns played a big part in the development of phantasmagoria. A magic lantern was an early projection device which used a light source like a candle or burning mineral lime, and it allowed users to cast an image onto a green or a wall so that numerous people could view it at once. These weren't moving images, but some expert lanternists would combine multiple projections at once layered together to create really intricate imagery. A popular motif for this was demons, which would sometimes be projected by multiple layers at once onto a gauzy material to make the optimal eerieness possible. Yeah gave it an almost three D effect allegedly, and by the late seventeen seventies this technology was used widely by magicians and performance mystics. But the name that's perhaps most famous in this space is Etienne Gaspa Robert, who came to be known as Robertson. That was the stage name that he took, and he took the use of magic lanterns to entirely new levels in his storytelling performances. Robertson realized that by moving the lanterns during performances and incorporating sound effects like bells and thunder collapse, he could create an immersive experience that seemed alive rather than just having people look at static images. Robertson performed in Paris in a converted space that had once been a convent. The physics scholar found ways to make people believe, for the span of a performance that they were seeing the grim Reaper, or a ghost or a demon floating before them, all too real. His advertisement for his earliest show read Phantasmagory by Citizen E. G. Robertson. Apparitions of specters, phantoms, and ghosts such as must appear or could appear in any time, in any place, among any people, experiments with the new fluid known by the name of galvanism, whose application gives temporary movement to bodies whose life has departed. An artist noted for his talents will play the harmonica. Well this ad, it's really good. That harmonica that's mentioned is probably not what you're thinking. Uh. He was referring to a glass harmonium, or you'll sometimes see it called a bowl organ, which used water on glass goblets to create these spooky, other worldly noises, and this may have actually been a version of that device invented by Benjamin Franklin, known as a Franklin harmonica. There's no h there, um uh there. You've heard them before. They make a very wonderful, spooky noise, and if you have listened to any Halloween anything, you've probably enjoyed the sounds of a glass harmonium. Attendees to Robertson's shows would enter the space and take their seats in dim lighting. Normally there were already static images projected onto the walls to sort of set the scene, and then once the crowd had settled, Robertson would snuff out all the light and begin the sound and vision production. And he was later quoted as saying, quote, I am only satisfied if my spectators, shivering and shuddering, raise their hands or cover their eyes out of fear of ghosts and devils dashing towards them, if even the most indiscreet among them run into the arms of a skeleton. His shows became so popular in Paris that he soon started touring them to great success. Next Halloween season we might actually do a whole episode on him. Tracy referred to him as a physicist. He was, and yet he ended up in this area of of of employment, so as you can imagine, he's kind of an interesting figure. Yeah, and the image that we have gotten to go on our social media with this episode is an artist's interpretation of one of these events. H And there is indeed a whole lot of raising their hands and covering their eyes out of fear in the success. In eighteen o two, in London, Marie two sawed, fresh from Paris herself, set up a display tableau of famous French icons without their heads. The theme of beheading meant that Robespierre, right, King Louis the sixteenth, and of course Marie Antoinette were all included. This separate chambers display, which is a name that Tussled used for this display, was created using death masks that she had created of those people. If you've listened to the Madame Tussaud episode by previous host Sarah and Babilina, you also know there's some doubt about whether she was actually able to cast the faces. Of the royals or whether she artfully recreated their faces. Either way, though, this exhibit caused a sensation, and while she had displayed her work in France, her set up in England was where this really modeling theme as a separate area caught on as an attraction in and of itself. By eight thirty five she had a permanent exhibition in London which included the now famed Chamber of Horror. It wasn't exactly a haunted house, but it made it pretty clear that there was an audio ants for this kind of maccab entertainment. Yeah, that episode that Sarah and Deblina did talk a lot about how her wax works were so impactful because, of course wax looked so realistic to people compared to anything they had seen before representing any of these gory scenes. So in the spirit of the phantasmagoria, of course, that Taskla do Glogogno, which we have talked about on the show before several times, debuted in the late eighteen nineties, once again offering a taste of horror to an audience, But that was still a passive situation. Although guests certainly reacted with great intensity, they were still all seated there as the imagery of the stage played out. In nineteen fifteen, the first true commercial ghost house opened at lip Hook Fair in England. This is a project undertaken by the company Orton and Spooner. George Orton was a wheelwright and Charles Spooner was a woodcutter, and they combined their skills into a company that produced fair ound rides and attractions in the eighteen nineties. The attraction they built, which is said to have been designed by a man named Patrick Collins as a gift to his wife, Flora, was a steam powered walk in house, similar to a lot of carnival funhouses at the time. The floor rocked, there were blasts of air and purposely wobbly walls, but it was themed with scariness instead of silliness in mind, and that made it a first. The Haunted Cottage, as it is called, and we say is because it still exists today, is small. It's about the size of a train car, and the Haunted Cottage changed hands over the years until it landed at the Hollycomb Steam in the Country Museum in lip Hook and it remains there on display. It was restored in so you can go visit it if you are nearby, or once travel becomes more realistic. Pranking behavior was common as part of Halloween celebrations in the US in the nineteenth century. Something that traveled from Europe. For example, on right Up from the Cincinnati Daily Star in eighteen seventy nine described various stunts pulled by kids on Halloween night. There's one potentially terrifying prank that's described as follows quote on the Louisville Short Line track in Newport, the boys laid a stuffed man. The engineer of the passenger train saw the man on the track in time to check up. He got off his engine and went forward to pull the fellow out of danger. When he was greeted with shouts of about two hundred boys. Strange to say, the engineer never cussed a word. It reminded him of when he was a boy and practiced the same tricks. I love that the newspaper right up concludes that he didn't do any swearing. But one can imagine how fearful it would be to think you were seeing a body on the tracks. Yet he was cool as a cucumber. Uh, And that account is pretty benign. Thanks to the good nature of that engineer. But reading accounts of what happened each hall Aween, because a lot of papers would do like a here's what played out on Halloween night, you definitely get a sense over the years of people getting really tired of these pranks as the years wore on. In in Arlington Heights, Illinois paper in nineteen two, the following was written under the headline malicious Halloween mischief quote. Many innocent parties were victims of cowardly Halloween tricks committed under the shade of darkness, and considerable property damage resulted. It might be all right to tell in a police court, but it is hardly suitable to mention in a clean home paper. No intelligent person will stoop to such dirty tricks. Those who committed depredations should be exposed and required to make good all damages. Most everybody enjoys a joke or fun to a proper degree on suitable occasions, but when property is damaged or destroyed, it is time to call a halt. Over the next few decades, the pranking continued and adults reached a point where they had simply had it. We will talk about that and how haunted attractions figure into this story after a quick sponsor break. The Great Depression drove the growth of the haunted house concept in the US. This was, to some degree, a way to keep all those Halloween pranks at bay. The idea was that if the kids who would normally harass people or destroy property had something to actually do on Halloween, they would not indulge in those undesirable behaviors. Halloween had for many years been largely about pranks, less about seeking candy from strangers. That kind of develops a little later, but in some places those pranks had just continued to escalate to a degree that started to alarm people. On November four three, a ride up appeared in various Minnesota papers that was titled Halloween Hoodlum's so and with quote Tuesday was black Halloween and Minneapolis and the city never wants to see another like it. The night was given over to gang terrorism and destruction, and youthful vandals held the upper hand from first to last for sheer, viciousness and insolence. Minneapolis has never had a Halloween to equal it. The police were virtually powerless to cope with the marauders. Property was wantonly destroyed, and the lives of citizens endangered in every part of the city. It was, in every sense a nightmare in which not the slightest regard was shown for the rights of others, and through which hoodlum's paraded with the utmost contempt for even elemental decency. And that article describes to go on some of what happened, unlike some of the previous papers who dared not discuss it, writing quote when windows are smashed, street cars derailed, automobiles overturned, hydrants turned on, telephone and power, polls sawed down, and thoroughfares blockaded, Desperate chances are being taken with human life. That article also blames beer, the depression, and a breakdown of parental authority as the various causes of the mayhem, although the writer struggles to decide which of those should get what portion of the blame. Are kind of things that have been blamed for a long time for UH youths getting into trouble. So in the years that followed, this idea of creating a fun and scary place for young people to visit really started to grow. One seven pamphlet that offered ideas for setting up a Halloween haunt at home gave adults a very vivid description of what they could achieve. Quote an outside entrance leads to a rendezvous with ghosts and witches in the cellar or attic. Hang old for strips of raw liver on walls, where one feels his way to dark steps. Weird moans and howls come from dark corners, damn sponges and hairnets hung from the ceiling touches face doorways are blockaded so that guests must crawl through a long, dark tunnel. At the end, he hears a plaintive mew and SE's a black cardboard cat outlined in luminous paint. The idea developed that these kinds of home built haunted houses would be a collective community effort. Multiple homes in a neighborhood would create spooky scenes in the homes, and kids in the neighborhood would go from one to another on a sort of Halloween Holmes tour. From there, the local haunted neighborhood tour expanded with the creativity of the residents of any given neighborhood, and it became a staple in a lot of communities. The idea of let's all go into each other's houses. It's so alien at this point. Um. We have, as I said at the top of show, talked about Disney's Haunted Mansion before several times. But it does have a part to play in making a haunted house attraction mainstream in the US because this serves as this important moment for haunted houses culturally. And that's because one, it brought a high level of technology and artistry to the idea, kind of elevating the whole thing, and too disnease. Haunted Mansion was created entirely to delight. It's not really there to divert the energies of kids away from misbehaving. It's just there to be enjoying. And the pristine exterior that Walt had insisted on to house the attractions n happy haunts made this idea of a haunted house seemed fun and a little less threatening and even wholesome. The nineteen seventies were significant for the development of the haunted house attraction for several reasons. One of those was the United States Junior Chamber, better known as the j CS. The j CS is a not for profit civic organization that focuses on leadership development for people eighteen to forty with attention on community improvement. It's believed that as early as the sixties, various JAC'S chapters had started setting up haunted houses as fundraisers. The lack of certainty is due to a lack of clear documentation, but what is documented is that by the mid nineteen seventies, chapters all over the U s we're doing it. And the person who's usually cited as being the most important to this spread of charity haunts for the j c's is a man named Tom Hilligas. He was head of the Bloomington, Illinois j c's chapter, and after having put together a number of haunted houses for his local organization, he decided to write how to manual for other chapters to use, and he did that along with fellow j C Jim Gould, and this book was approved and published by the j c's. Twenty thousand copies of it were distributed, and it laid out exactly how to put together a haunt for charity revenue, and soon Tom was also touring and giving seminars as a haunted house expert. Eventually, Hiligas decided to open the Haunted House Company and turn his expertise into a business. Over the years, the Haunted House Company introduced a full range of Halloween and hot related products, and even went on to design the first Santa's Village seasonal attraction. In the US and the world of charity, haunted houses grew as well. A lot of people learned how to build haunts from Tom's book, both for charity and for commercial haunts. In n evangelists Jerry Folwell through Liberty University joined in on the haunted house trend with a project that he called Scare Mayor That's an attraction that continues to the present, although it has not run the last two years due to covid UH. Soon other churches launched their own haunted houses, and these attractions, which are often called hell houses, are intended as a didactic measure on the part of conservative evangelical churches. They normally depict the various sins that church leaders believe will lead a person down a path to eternal damnation, and often these are really shocking and horrifying, as well as being disparaging to a number of communities. We mentioned it because it is an important part of the story in the US. The third thing that happened in the nineteen seventies was the rise of the theme park haunt. Knots Berry Farm held their first haunt in nineteen seventy three, called Knots Halloween Haunt. It lasted for three nights and featured a makeover to some of the park's regular attractions to give them a more Halloween feel. Crowds loved it and came back the next year, selling out every night of the event. Over the years, it has continued to grow, and now the Not Scary Farm event takes up the entire hundred and sixty acres of the California theme park. It runs from mid September to the end of October. Once the Knots Haunt was a success, other amusement parks followed suit, but that led to a tragic event which significantly changed the haunted house game in the US forever. We're going to take a break, and then we'll hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going before we get into that sad part of the story. Unfortunately, as haunted houses got more and more elaborate, there were also instances where they became legitimately dangerous. In an attraction called the Haunted Castle, at the Six Flags Great Adventure Amusement Park in Jackson, New Jersey, burned to the ground. The blaze began at six thirty five pm on May eleventh, and just a little over an hour later it was under control, although park officials had believed that the building was evacuated. Later that night, it was discovered that eight people had died in the attraction, all aged twenty and under. While they were within twenty five ft of an exit when they died. Seven of them had been trapped in a maze segment of the attraction, apparently either unable to find their way out or believing that the smoke effect was part of the attraction. That was something that several part guests would later say that they had thought themselves when they saw the smoke. The building itself was not really a building at all, but seventeen aluminum trailers that had been connected together with a stucco facade added on the structure. Operated under a temporary building certificate, but had been running for six years when the fire occurred. Temporary buildings have different regulatory requirements about safety equipment, and this lengthy period operating as one got a lot of attention at the time the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions had standards in place for mechanical rides, but not for haunted houses or so called dark rides, meaning ones that operated with low lighting conditions inside. One week after the fire, New York City Mayor Ed Coach made the announcement that haunted houses operating in New York had to have new safety measures, including emergency lighting and smoke detectors installed, as well as fire extinguishers and no smoking and no open flame signs. Many haunted houses in the city already had safety measures in place, and when Coach made this announcement, he was also joined by Fire Commissioner Joseph E. Spinado and Buildings Commissioner Charles M. Smith Jr. And in their press conference, the commissioner stated that their preliminary survey of the city's haunted houses had shown that they were up to code. At the same time, haunted houses along the Jersey Shore were all closed depending an investigation. Though at that point the cause of the Haunted Castle fire hadn't yet been determined, there was enough concern that similar attractions might also be unsafe as in an emergency situation, so that shutdown was initiated. Because of that concern, State and local officials inspected haunted attractions in the area to assess their fire safety. One haunted house, the Casino Pier in Seaside Heights, was built with the same temporary multi trailer set up that the Haunted Castle had. Management chose to close voluntarily even before the fire officials called for closures. Yeah, that setup was actually like a UM kind of a modular design that that these theme parks could order from a company where it was like each trailer had its own scene that you could add on to your your haunted attraction, So it was it was part of a package you could purchase. UM. A problematic aspect of enforcing safety measures for amusement parks really came into the spotlight in the wake of the Haunted Castle fire. Multiple municipalities were responsible for sometimes overlapping things relating to coding permits and fire safety regarding theme parks, and sometimes there were actually gaps. A New York Times article from outlined how complicated the situation was. Quote in New Jersey, for example, the Department of Labor and Industry is responsible for checking all rides for mechanical safety compliance with fire electrical, plumbing and construction codes. However, is enforced by local authorities under local statutes and the statewide Uniform Construction Code. The code applies to all buildings put up since nineteen seventy seven. Earlier buildings are checked by the state's Community Affairs Department and Fire Safety Commission. It came to light that because of this confusing situation, the Haunted Castle had never been inspected. When reporters started questioning officials, it seemed that no one really knew who was supposed to have inspected it. When the mayor of Jackson Township, William Schreiber, was interviewed, he initially said that it wouldn't have been inspected because it was a temporary structure, but that status should have only lasted ninety days. When pressed on the matter, Schreiber made some calls and came up with the information that because it was a pre nineteen seventy seven structure, the Uniform Construction Code didn't apply to it. But Haunted Castle opened a and the mayor had no further explanation when that was pointed out. The state Governor's office described the theme park Haunted House as an instance of a structure that had slipped through the cracks of ambiguous building codes. As for the cause of the fire, it was determined that a teenager had lit a cigarette lighter in a dark room because he couldn't see and he was trying to figure out where to go, and that his lighter had brushed against foam padding on a wall that had almost immediately caught fire. He had tried to put it out but failed, but then he proceeded through the haunt without informing the staff of the fire. While there were multiple lawsuits on the parts of the families of the deceased, the amusement park was not held accountable because its management had been misinformed by local authorities regarding the need for a building permit, and a grand jury report on the matter, it was concluded that quote Jackson Township and its officials were neither qualified nor capable to handle code responsibilities in a pride checked as large as great adventure. In an interview with The New York Times after the verdict was handed down, jury foreman Gloria Lujo said, quote, they tried to meet their obligation by going to get the permit. They left the building open and available for inspection. We felt they did what they were required to do. The township should have been doing more. Somebody there wasn't doing his job. They were never told they had to put in sprinklers or the place would be closed down. But an interview with another juror, Irving Powder, revealed that not all of the jurors agreed that the township should actually take the blame. There just wasn't any kind of law on the books that would cover a structure like the Haunted Castle, So he kind of felt more like it was a tragic outlier rather than someone being negligent. The new Jersey state legislature enacted new safety standards for amusement attractions, and even at the national level, the event impacted fire codes in As part of the response to the fire, the National Fire Protection Association added a new section to its Life Safety Code titled Special Provisions for Special Amusement Buildings and included regulations about sprinkler systems even for temporary buildings, and specified smoke detection devices for low light conditions and amusement attractions. Yeah, there are now, of course, all kinds of laws on the book, like there are even laws that say if an emergency situation arises in some municipalities, whatever alarm goes off has to also immediately shut down any of the noises that the the attraction has so that nobody gets confused about what's going on. Um Now, I mean there are there's an extremely high level of standards for places like this. And if you're wondering why we're spending so much time talking about this incident, it's because it was a really significant moment in the world of haunted houses. For for profit haunts, it meant there was more overhead needed to ensure that all of the attractions were up to new codes, but for charity haunts it posed an entirely new level of challenge. Suddenly, just finding an empty building to put a charity haunt in was not enough. Those spaces had to be brought up to code, even if they were only going to operate briefly, and that was often far beyond the budget of a charity build. In addition to that, despite all of those new regulations around setting up haunts, a lot of commercial haunted houses started popping up, and they quickly made it really difficult for homegrown charity haunts built on meager budgets to even operate. There are certainly still charity haunts to be found, and people putting in a lot of time and effort to make them scary and fun and unique experiences for visitors. Those regulations may have temporarily paused some commercial enterprises, but the haunted house industry has only grown in the years since then. Universal Studios Theme Park in Orlando, Florida held its first Freight Nights event, which has since grown to be a massive, weeks long event called Halloween Horror Nights. It takes place in Universal Parks around the world. The ongoing popularity of horror movies and explosion of the genre has also contributed to the growth of the haunts sector, as haunted attractions replicate moments or places from those films. Today, the range of haunted attractions is massive, encompassing everything from those fun neighborhood homemade yard haunts and then escape rooms and some attractions that rely more on the concept of torture than anything ghostly. According to trade organization American Haunts, there are more than twelve hundred paid admission haunted attractions in the US, three hundred amusement facilities with Halloween themed events, and more than three thousand charity attractions that opened briefly for the Halloween season. Yeah, I am. I was looking for kind of revenue information and the things that I found were kind of old, because nobody has been doing those sorts of ooculations the last couple of years. That's why we're not including that, because it's a little bit of a difficult time to really judge the trajectory of things. But that that is a very brief overview of haunted houses in the United States as attractions. And now I have a listener mail related to our Todd Browning episode. This is from our listeners Cyrus, who writes, I just recently listened to your two part episode about Todd Browning. I've been a fan of Todd Browning's films, but had not had any insights on his past, so thank you for doing an episode on him. Furthermore, I was quite intrigued to hear about his circus in vaudeville life and how that inspired his films such as Freaks and The Unholy Three. I myself am a professional sword swallower and have performed in a couple of circuses and sideshows alongside some pretty remarkable people, namely the Freaks of the natural borns. Working with these professionals and some long time show owners came with some lessons in history in itself. I appreciate you mentioning the bit of out exploitation, how some felt that Todd Browning's Freaks was exploitation of the performers, and how some played the superhero by claiming the exploitation people most definitely did feel that sideshows exploited these different individuals, even to the point of getting the sideshows shut down and the natural borns then being put on welfare. This, however, ended up hurting the natural borns more than helping them, because their quote differences actually made most of them unable to work a typical day job outside of the circus. The natural borns were also most often the top build acts in the side show, and some would become so wealthy that they became owners of the side shows. This does not go without saying the exploitation against the performers wishes did happen in some instances, which is definitely not okay. But to quote famed magician and sideshow historian Todd Robbins no relation to author Todd Robbins in reference to exploitation quote. That was the exception, not the rule. I cannot speak wholly for how Todd Browning treated the performers on set of Freaks. However, I have a gut feeling that he had a respect for them because he has been on that side of the tent flap, so to speak. Thank you so much for your show. It's one of my favorites. UM, thank you for sending this because it's a great unique perspective that um, you know I had not had not had to include in that that episode. UM. And it's just I'm I'm always glad for more discussion of that whole topic and how it's handled both of them in the thirties and today. UM, So thank you, thank you. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History and if you would like to subscribe and you haven't gotten around to it yet, no time like the present, you can do that on the i art radio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.