Killer clowns and murderous lumberjacks and demonic children inhabit the maze that winds around his home. There are 64 of them, humans creating nightmares between walls of wooden pallets and black plastic.
This is the Organ Trail, a 7,700-square-foot haunt in Keihn’s yard in Muncie, Indiana. Last year, it drew 4,000 people. They’re set to open this year’s haunt, their most elaborate one yet, Friday. The city is trying to stop them.
Keihn sits on his back deck, the maze running flush to its edges. To his left loom a killer lumberjack and a deranged hillbilly. A few feet away stands a half-zombie-half-mannequin. A demonic 11-year-old innocently holds a half-empty bag of peppermint candy.
It feels like a family. The half-zombie calls it her second home. The killer hillbilly lives in the basement.
Keihn needs this place. Without it, he says, he’d be dead.
He’s locked his demons away in the labyrinth.
***
On a summer morning in 2012, around 9 a.m., Keihn put his ear to a door. He heard nothing behind it, and so he assumed his 7-month-old twins, Raigen and Markus, were sleeping. Rule No. 1, he knew, was to never wake a sleeping baby.
Earlier that morning, his wife, Cassandria, had heard both boys crying. She changed two diapers, fed two babies with two bottles and went back to bed.
Around 9:30 a.m., the twins’ godmother arrived.
“Aww, they’re sleeping,” she said as she opened their door. Standing behind her, Keihn noticed something else: Raigen’s arm, limp, dangling out of the crib. He rushed to pick him up. The boy’s body was cold.
When the ambulance and firetruck and police arrived, Keihn was attempting CPR. He doesn’t remember much, but he remembers sobbing and vomiting on the porch. He remembers the hour they gave him and Cassandria Raigen’s body. He remembers saying Raigen’s name over and over again and thinking it was his fault.
He also remembers the $6,000 in funeral costs, how friends pitched in $20 here and $100 there and they still had to empty their own bank accounts. How the “U” in “SUIDS” — sudden unexplained infant death syndrome — stuck out. How a couple of drinks on the weekend turned into three cases of Budweiser and a fifth of Jack Daniels every day.
Jamie Cook, Cassandria’s cousin-in-law, witnessed Keihn’s descent and decided to keep Keihn busy with external horrors. They spent that October building a small haunt in Keihn’s yard and, on Halloween night, Cook turned into a chainsaw killer while Keihn donned clown makeup. Twenty people showed up.
Since then, they’ve amassed a fan base — nicknamed Organ Donors — ranging from Muncie to Fort Worth, Texas, to the United Kingdom. They’ve never charged admission, but this year, they’ll accept donations.
It’s more than a hobby, he says. It’s his saving grace.
***
On nights when the Organ Trail opens, Keihn does his makeup in the same way and listens to the same music — Blue October’s “The End” is a favorite. He gives a pep talk to his cast, they have a moment of silence and then more music cuts through — AC/DC, “For Those About to Rock.”
Keihn’s voice changes to a gravely taunt — his Kreepy voice. He thinks of Raigen.
“Hit the lights.”
Kreepy is Keihn’s killer clown character, a persona with an affinity for crude jokes and candy-colored baseball bats transformed into gnarly weapons. A green bat retrofitted with a circular saw blade is his favorite. He calls it the Giggle Stick.
The Giggle Stick can’t help Keihn in his present battle: a duel with the City of Muncie.
It began in late September with the arrival of two fire marshals.
“We got a report from another home haunt that you guys are opening a haunt and charging for it,” Deputy State Fire Marshal Aaron Elsworth told Keihn.
“No, you can come in all you want,” Keihn replied. “We ask for donations, but we don’t keep it.”
He led the officials through the trail and they were impressed by the haunt’s safety measures. Elsworth told Keihn he’d even bring his family to the Trail. Keihn might only need an entertainment permit.
Two days after their first meeting, Elsworth called.
“The state of Indiana loves what you’re doing, and you’re not required to have a permit,” he told Keihn.
The Trail’s owners thought that was the end of their troubles. As Cook enters the maze, he sees things much as they should be on opening night. There’s the giant clown mouth at the head of the Trail and, just beyond that, the platform where Kreepy will taunt entering visitors.
If the Organ Trail is a band, Kreepy is its flamboyant frontman. Cook is the twisted technical genius, who orchestrates the audience’s ups and downs. He recognizes the nuances — the way trapdoors conceal sound systems, the way monster-free hallways prime visitors for the next scare, the avocado-green vintage refrigerator cementing the 1960s vibe of one scene.
But he also sees what’s lacking: barrels yet to be welded together, prosthetics yet to be installed and, littering the back deck, lights and fog machines yet to provide a spooky aura. With four days’ worth of building left, they’re stalled.
Soon after Elsworth’s call, Keihn heard from city building commissioner Craig Nichols, who he says ordered him to acquire a zoning permit, which the zoning office then told him he didn’t need. The city nevertheless ordered him to halt construction.
As they tried to resolve the issue in a meeting with Mayor Dennis Tyler, Keihn said, Nichols questioned the safety of the haunt and compared it to the 2011 Indiana State Fair stage collapse that killed seven people.
“That was a slap in the face,” Keihn said.
Keihn said Nichols has offered the haunt a city-approved space — a field at 1008 E. 20th Street — but it’s unusable, riddled with syringes, used condoms and ammunition. Even if the space weren’t so unsafe, they couldn’t move the maze in time, Keihn says.
Keihn and the city continue talks. Meanwhile, the Organ Trail is in purgatory.
***
In the maze, Cook passes the carnival with its hall of hanging stuffed animals, the meat locker with its melted garbage bags covered in hair like human pelts, the junkyard with its car parts and spray-painted plea: “LET ME OUT.”
“Hey, Little Bear,” he calls to his 4-year-old son, Dallas, who scampers by in camouflage “Duck Dynasty” pajamas. Cook predicts Dallas will inherit his part of the Organ Trail.
Keihn can also imagine a son taking over for him. He says Raigen’s twin Markus, now 3, is next in line for Kreepy. Markus’s favorite movie is “Killer Klowns from Outer Space.” Plus, Markus and Dallas have already formed a fraternal bond — Keihn calls them the “Brothers of Destruction.” They have a penchant for holding older kids against the wall and pelting them with Hot Wheels.
Keihn appears now from the corn maze, followed by a placid pit bull whose owner, Skylar Timmons, is recovering from brain trauma from a motorcycle accident. Trail donations will help with her medical bills.
Moving on, Cook passes the spider web-covered “riverbed” and 11-year-old Dalton Stevenson practicing his “demonic child” act on a playset, laughing as he swings back and forth. He passes the “kid’s bedroom,” where his daughter will bounce on a bed, screaming.
Near the end of the maze, he arrives in the snake charmer room, where Keihn’s snakes — two ball pythons, two California kings and a rainbow boa — will make an appearance.
Keihn has another stereotypically spooky pet, a tarantula named Morticia.
When tarantulas grow, they molt and shed their exoskeletons and wriggle free. Once, when Keihn went to check on the spider, he saw a molted exoskeleton and mistook it for Morticia. She was hiding elsewhere, but upon discovering what he thought was his spider, dead and still, Keihn wept.
***
An online petition supporting the haunt has 769 signatures. One of the Trail’s events won’t change even if the haunt can’t open: a marriage of two Organ Donors, officiated by Keihn in full character as Kreepy.
Keihn says only two neighbors have complained about the haunt. One called them devil worshippers.
A couple drives by in a white Chevrolet van. The driver, a bald, middle-aged man, slows down and leans out the window.
“I seen you guys on the news,” he says. “They gonna get that stuff worked out?”
“I hope so,” Keihn says.
And if not, Keihn has a plan. They’ll still light up the Organ Trail, and the actors will stand out front in full costume. What’s the worst they can do — have him arrested for being a public nuisance?
“They’d have to arrest me in clown makeup,” he says. “That’d hit media — that’d be a perfect promo for next year.”
The thought reminds him of a mugshot of Captain Spalding, the psychopathic clown character in “The Devil’s Rejects.” The film features Captain Spalding and his family of bizarre, sadistic killers as antiheroes. It ends with its protagonists refusing surrender and riding into a police barricade, a family of monsters fighting to the bitter end.
