Local haunted houses elicit screams, terrors

With October come haunted houses, and with haunted houses come stained underwear. 

“We don’t think it’s a good haunted house ’til someone pees their pants,” said John Baker, owner of Baker’s Junction Haunted Train.

Baker, an avid train enthusiast, has lived in the train cars that populate his property since 1976. Although it used to be a railroad museum, Baker’s Junction was forced to close for violating zoning laws. However, every October, he opens his Haunted Train anyway.

“We’re a non-conforming business,” Baker said. “Which means we won’t close just because they want us to.”

The remaining relics of the railroad museum now serve as instruments of terror, alongside amputated doll parts, black lights and cobwebs.

Saturday night, scare-seekers Jeremy Byerly and Suzanne Probst wandered through the train cars, jumping at a sudden bang, knowing something was probably sneaking up on them. Turning a corner, they encountered parts of a skeleton floating in a bucket of blood.

“It looks like a big stew of bones,” Probst said. “A pot of people,” Byerly replied.

A bit of real, live gore is preserved in a display case at the train’s entrance. In a clear plastic container floats the mummified tip of Baker’s right index finger, which was severed when he slipped using a skill saw last year. 

“They said they couldn’t sew it back on so I just put it in my pocket and took it home,” Baker said.

Another haunt, the popular Harrodsburg Haunted House, also causes a lot of involuntary urination.

On Saturday alone, more than 800 people braved the elaborate labyrinth of horror, and four of them confessed to staffers that they had wet their pants. Along with wet pants, there is the inevitable vomiting, drunken punching and of course, ear-splitting screams of genuine terror.

Horror entrepreneur Brett Pittman, who supervises the operation of this year’s haunted house, also plays the straitjacketed outside character Cousin Lunis, who heckles people waiting in line with his twisted, humorous antics.

Pittman’s character functions as the first layer of security for the house.

For children who become too scared, Cousin Lunis punctuates the horror with a little humor to get them comfortable. If an intoxicated adult is going to take a swing at someone, he said, “It’s best they do it outside.” 

The level of horror treads a delicate line between adult and family entertainment. 
“We could always go more gore and more scare,” Pittman said. “But we’re playing the middle of the road.”

The house uses sight and sound to disorient and fool the audience. After a brief safety check — “Don’t touch it, and it won’t touch you” — groups of four to six people are led into an elevator, which shuts before shaking and tumbling for 30 seconds.

When the door opens, a false wall has shifted, and the audience faces a new level of frights. In previous years, the house has used unnerving scents such as rotting flesh to disturb its patrons, but it has cut back this year to tone down the vomit factor.

Security is always the main concern for the crew of about 25 who work the house. In one moment they may be doing a “jump scare” at a group, but if they hear a code word — “bat loose” means problem person — out come the flashlights and out goes the problem person. 

“Fear is the funnest primal instinct to tap into,” Pittman theorized about the appeal of a haunt. “Once a year, people like to test their limits.”

For the unfortunate few every October, testing those limits results in a wet pair of pants.