House of Horrors and Haunted Catacombs Haunted House

October 5th, 2009

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House of Horrors and Haunted Catacombs was my second stop of the night. The haunt is owned and operated by Tim Bunch and is located in huge building. The three Haunts inside provided plenty of twists, turns and scares for everyone.

I got to the House of Horrors early so I was able to chat with Tim a little as well as walk around and take some photos. It takes a long time to go through these Haunts and a couple of them have some maze-like features to them so I tried to memorize the correct path so I could cheat when I walked through in the dark.

Once the event opened and the crowds started building, I decided to go to Haunted Catacombs first. Two young girls were nervous about going in so I suggested we go through together. The Catacombs has a nice variety of sets – some a couple stories tall and at other places you crawl through a pipe – I’m a big fan of changing the customer’s perspective like that. The Haunt is also pretty effective at scaring. It has some nicely lit scenes but also a good dose of dark spaces (along with some shock panels!). One of my favorite spots was a series of rooms with doors that were painted with blacklight paint in chaotic ways. You leave one room and end up in the same room – or a room that looks just like it – you are never quite sure. Tim told me a funny story about how he knows the path when he goes in from the front, but gets confused himself when he is working on the Haunt and cutting through and entering from the other side. I also like the drain pipe we had to crawl through – it’s not high-tech stuff, but it’s a nice change of pace.

The next Haunt we went through was House of Horrors. We got 20 feet into the Haunt and found two people huddled in the corner afraid to go any further. So, we told them to come with us and we moved on. This is also a big Haunt and features a similar design philosophy of mixing lit scenes with dark ones, changing the elevation of the guests and a short maze-like room. It’s a great combination and produced a lot of scares. It also features an outdoor scene with a shack, well at least I thought it was a shack, it was actually an outhouse and because I was leading the group, when I walked past the outhouse, I got nailed with what felt like five gallons of water. I’ll admit that sometimes when I get a spray in the face from a spitter prop or something, I get kind of annoyed, but this was such a deluge, I could help but lmao.

The last Haunt was the Asylum. As you guessed, a mental hospital haunted house. This one is smaller than the others but still chock-full of scare – once again, we picked up three folks who were too scared to go past the second room. The blood scenes looked great (nice wet looking blood) and the most memorial scene was the bathroom with what was hopefully just brown paint smeared on the walls. The scent that was in the room really added to the effect and the actor smeared with brown makeup freaked the girls out.

I enjoyed the haunted houses a lot. Tim provides a nice variety of scenes, scares and props and definitely puts on a good show. Tim, thanks for the show and have a great season!