An Unforgettable Haunted House

One of the best things about being a kid on Halloween was how scared you could get. As adults we can still get startled, still get nervous, still be worried, but it’s difficult to have that kind of fear that comes with a child’s overactive imagination. To a kid, there’s always the possibility, however remote, that things aren’t just make believe, that the next person you see dressed as a witch or goblin might be the real thing, waiting to sneak in through your bedroom window and drag you off into the night.

I grew up in western Maryland, which in its rural sections is creepy enough as it is—lots of ruined barns, isolated farms, and abandoned houses. Just south of the border with Pennsylvania is an especially small town called Leitersburg. Its single main street is lined with old early 20th century houses, their backyards opening up into sprawling, oftentimes abandoned farmland. On one of these neglected plots of land, in the shell of an old World War I era school house, a creepy building if there ever was one, sat the Leitersburg Haunted House. No Halloween was complete without it.

I first went in 6th grade, and to my young mind it was the most terrifying place on earth. Though my conscious brain knew I was dealing with a community spook house run by a bunch of slightly artsy teenagers and others at home in the volunteer-dress-up-in-costumes-and-scare-the-bejesus-out-of-children business, I believed them when they told me the house stood on the gateway to Hell.

Before going into the house, the guests waited in a long (sometimes two hours or more!) line out in front of the old schoolhouse. Teens in various costumes would parade around, trying to startle people who weren’t paying attention and trying to avoid the older, drunker haunted house goers who enjoyed nothing more than tripping, kicking, or otherwise harassing the poor performers. Personally, and in hindsight rather foolishly, I was far more terrified of the performers in hoods than their tormentors.

Waiting outside the house there were a few attractions, like black robed figures digging graves, and a blood filled bathtub that occasionally bubbled up with a loose (rubber) body part or two. To soften the mood a bit there was a trailer where you could buy carnival type food (including my beloved funnel cakes) and Leitersburg Haunted House T-Shirts. Most nights there was also a booth set up for the local radio station to play music and have contests. It was a very festive environment, year after year, even when the house itself stopped being quite as terrifying. It was also, without fail, bitterly cold every single year. In my opinion it's not Halloween if it's not freezing outside--what fun is being scared in the heat?

Once we finally got in the old schoolhouse (after God knows how many hours of waiting—if you didn’t enjoy waiting in lines, this probably wasn’t the right Halloween event for you) we were greeted with pounding bass music and strobe lights (this would become a recurring motif). The music was some vaguely Souixsie and the Banshees or Nick Cave concoction of strange vocals and sternum-shaking bass that I’ve tried in vain for the last fifteen years or so to identify without any luck. Guests were seated on rickety wooden benches in a small black box theater that stank of rot. I’m not sure how they generated the disgusting smell. Perhaps the cast members ran around smearing the place with rancid meat before the show.

Eventually the music died down and the show began. It would change every year, but my first year is the only one I clearly remember. A man dressed as a crazy old person emerged from the darkness and ranted in a terrifying (or, at the least, loud) voice about how the school in which we now sat was inadvertently constructed right on top of the gateway to Hell. This led, in time, to the school children going crazy, losing their hair, mutating, eating each other, and so on. The school was finally closed, only to be reopened for the purposes of allowing us to take a tour. When this chilling revelation was announced, the old man was confronted by a set of evil cultists that wanted to reopen the gateway. He was then put on a rack and tortured in some kind of over the top Alice Cooper manner. Then things got interesting.

The details have slipped away, but there was a severed head, a woman making out with a man and biting off his tongue in the process, a crucifix burned to a ghoul’s face—you know, the sort of things you would expect to go on above the gateway to Hell.

Eventually (and this next part was the same every year, no matter what the show’s theme was) the monsters decided that a sacrifice was needed. Gibbering performers would run around the audience, screaming in our faces in search of an ideal candidate. Eventually, a struggling girl was pulled from the crowd screaming and dragged to a large grate in the middle of the theater. It opened with a terrible sound of rusty hinges, the petrified girl was tossed inside, and the grate was closed again with a thunderous clang.

Of course, local folklore held that the girl was not a plant, that she was actually ripped unsuspecting from the audience every show. It seemed logical in 6th grade. After all, everyone I knew knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who had been tossed in the pit, and they insisted it was for real. Apparently it was as wonderful as being spirited away by the Pied Piper—once underground, the victim was given free tickets to the haunted house, lots of food and drinks, and got to explore the inner workings of the show. I know it was a little rural town in the middle of nowhere, but I have to suspect that the entire thing was staged every night. Imagine the law suits if the performers grabbed onto a girl with an irregular heartbeat. But it greatly amplified the haunted house’s mystique. As a kid, I was fully prepared to believe that no one was safe inside the walls.

Every year the show ended with some sort of demon rising up from the grate and threatening to kill us all. Often he was painted blue with long tentacle arms and a deformed face. His voice (which clearly came from the lighting booth and not the actor) was a deep, warped growl that still sends shivers down my spine when I think of it. I’m not sure why he didn’t simply murder the entire crowd outright, but I’m glad he didn’t. Instead one of the actors warned us to “flee while you can!” and we were led into a dark maze.

Here things became much more like a traditional haunted house, though it was still frightening. We walked through dark hallways and encountered occasional horrific sights –inmates, murderers, and middle aged men with flashlights and black windbreakers that said “staff”. At that time, about 60 people went through the maze in one massive group, all holding on to the person in front of them. Later on they wised up and started holding people in a little room after the show, only letting groups of about ten or fifteen people in the maze at a time. It lessened the conga-line feel, and was probably a hell of a lot safer. Sometimes you were forced to duck under hanging bodies or low doors, and occasionally one of the ghouls would pop out of nowhere and scare the entire party. Fortunately I never had to lead the conga line through the maze—that took way too much courage. Plus you got all the blame if you hit a dead end.

The night ended with a super fun happy slide out of the house. The safety precautions here hurt the illusion a bit, as one of the middle aged “staff” fellows had to monitor the line and make sure no one got on the slide too soon. The slide went through a long dark tunnel with some lighting effects before dumping you out behind the schoolhouse. But the terrors weren’t over. The haunted house staff delighted in torturing children and there were a few performers left to leap out as you walked back to the front of the house.

During that first visit, I was scared out of mind and was having none of it. On the way out a guy dressed in a werewolf mask emerged from a trap door in the floor and started growling at me. Wasting no time, I kicked him as hard as I could in the face with my high top sneakers. He fell back into the pit, and the trap door slammed down on top of him. Like I said, the place was a law suit waiting to happen. If that werewolf guy is still out there, I would like to send my heartfelt apologies for kicking him in the face. If he survived, that is.

I went just about every year from then on. It gradually became less about being scared than about just having fun with a big group of people. By high school, certainly, a big part of the trip was trying to line yourself up so the right girl would be behind you in the maze, holding onto your waist for guidance. I’ve been to a lot of haunted attractions since, but they’ve never held the same magic as that creepy abandoned schoolhouse.


The Leitersburg Haunted House finally closed down in 2007. I imagine the increasing litigiousness of society and growing safety concerns from the century old school house became too much for the youth group that ran it to afford. It's a shame, but it's very understandable. Astonishing amounts of planning must have been involved in putting the thing together every year—each time, the show just got better and better, the effects more convincing, the strobe lights more blinding. After thirty years, it just became too much.

In a lot of ways it was a relic of a more old fashioned Halloween experience, when making sure people felt safe was the absolute last priority. This was a haunted house after all. You weren’t supposed to feel safe or coddled. You were supposed to feel like the monsters could reach out and grab you at any moment, that you might never find your way out of the maze, or that a single false move could send you screaming down some forgotten pit, never to be heard from again.