Heart condition? No. Pregnant? No. History of epileptic seizures? No.
Medically cleared, I enter Erebus, the Guinness World Record holder for the world's largest walk-through haunted attraction – and asylum for half-wits and hell-raisers.
CJ, a visitor from Lincoln Park, calms my nerves as we wait together in a chilly corridor. "Halloween," the former haunted house actor says, "is my Christmas." His days of hiding in a polka-dot suit in a psychedelic polka-dot room are gone, but never buried. I smile through clenched teeth and approach the entrance. Last chance to change my mind.
I angle through jagged gyrating doorways and sidle along a bottomless pit, the wall squeezing me tighter toward the edge – then monkeys and vines corkscrew onto my head! Instinctively I push forward, my bulging eyes beaming through the filmy dank swamp closing in. I creep out, cry out, weave my way through tight corners, pass cages of bloody victims. "Come into my lab!" a batty scientist wails, waving his weaponry, drawing me towards his gurney. "Come into my lab!" Dizzy and disoriented, I shuffle through body-bending pitch-black corridors, looking up in time to dodge a chainsaw-wielding woodsman! I skitter from the acrid chamber and then … silence rears its ugly head. CJ is gone.
"How was it?" asks Ed Terebus, co-proprietor of this hospice of horrors, from his perch near a hearse. You don't want to know…
But the fatal truth may be dug up at Erebus, alive and well in downtown Pontiac since 2000. The 100,000 square foot brick manse, with 2,189 linear feet of unspeakable terrors spread over four queasy levels, has been named to Halloween website Hauntworld's list of America's 13 best haunted attractions for the third consecutive year (For 2009, Hauntworld ranks Erebus as America's 15th best haunt).
Hauntworld magazine editor Larry Kirchner, publisher of the Hauntworld.com website and co-owner of The Darkness and Creepy World haunted houses in St. Louis, cites the Midwest's abundance of farms, and, especially, southeast Michigan's supply of old, inexpensive brick buildings, as prime places to fear. "Detroit has, by far, more haunted houses in a concentrated area than anywhere in the country," he says. "…There are more haunted houses in the Detroit and Pontiac area than Kansas City, St. Louis, and Indianapolis … combined. It would probably take 10 major cities to combine all the attractions together to equal the amount that are in Detroit."
Skulking for dollars
Hauntworld lists thousands of monstrosities in all 50 states – Michigan is the sixth most trafficked state on the site, which had two million visitors in 2007, says Kirchner. Excluding seasonal set-ups at major amusement parks, Hauntworld reports that this industry built on eerie abodes and phantom farms reaps nearly $300 million annually, much of it in the Midwest. More than 50 of Michigan's 66 spooky spots listed on Hauntworld sit within 100 miles of Detroit, and many are in the Fear Finder, a free Halloween tour guide newspaper and website published by Ed and Jim Terebus.
Mongers of fright for the past 29 years, the Terebus brothers, co-owners of Erebus, started off in 1981, charging $1.50 admission to a 1,200-square foot attraction in Warren. They grew progressively larger until uncovering their latest edifice of evil, which sat vacant for 40 years prior. In addition to their sweat equity, like adding utilities and shoveling 110,000 pounds of pea gravel and tar from the roof (a former parking lot), the cash outlay still totaled in the hundreds of thousands; Jim mortgaged his house while Ed sold his and moved into the building. Now, archfiends to zombies have 40-50,000 square feet to roam.
Not all of the tens of thousands of annual guests paying $20 a head survive; last year, 540 mere mortals took the chicken exits, according to Ed. Business grows a bit every year, helped by corporate sponsorships – currently, from energy drink maker Rip It and Spirit Halloween superstores. "By haunted house standards, Erebus would be extremely successful," says Kirchner, who estimates that Erebus is among the top 5% grossing attractions nationwide, excluding those at amusement parks.
Though most haunted house operators are reluctant to say how many tickets they sell or how much business they bring in, the Houston Press reported that Scream World, a local attraction open only six weeks a year, brought in revenues of $618,000 last year.
Open your mouth and scream: "Ahhhh!"
"When you think about it, movies are more graphic now, so you've gotta roll with the times. How far do you take that edge – to bring back that claustrophobia you didn't know about, bring that fear of spiders out... Over here," Ed says, "you're just not looking at it. You're feeling it, you're touching it, you're smelling it. You can feel the wind of the thing coming at you. Most haunted houses, it stops here," he reaches forward, "and you're safe. I'm bringing it closer, I'm bringing it onto you," he says, stretching further. "We literally have things that grab you, bite you, land on top of you, so now, first time, you go, 'Oh, I'm safe, I'm safe. Oh, shit, I'm not safe!' Now, you've gotta question everything."
Every autumn, 80 paid temporary staffers, including actors, managers, and makeup artists, run the production. Since he swung his chainsaw and missed, I was a bit hesitant to chat with Ryan Ernst, now acting in his sixth season at Erebus, about his grinding finale. "[The chainsaw] is kind of a throwback to the old school… it's so raw and visceral," explains the bearded, longhaired, ripped coverall-clad barnstormer with blood funneling down his bristly face. Working at Erebus is the most fun he's ever had, he adds, mentioning how one guest recently "went into complete turtle mode. She wrapped her legs around [her boyfriend's] legs and was clinging onto him, like trying to shimmy a coconut tree."
The scant few that love this line of work, Kirchner says, are "putting their heart and soul into it. There's only a few employees that do it year-round." From October 31 through October 31, Jim and Ed, along with two full- and six part-timers, revamp their lair. Ed scours different sources for deals; one find netted dozens of speakers and a bank of television monitors from now-defunct electronics stores. And inspired by nightmares and dreams, the skeleton crew designs and builds most props. Or they might surgically attach heads and hands purchased at trade shows to their custom-crafted bodies (or body parts), thus avoiding the scary pitfall of appearing too similar to other venues. It seems that the true survivors in metro Detroit, the nation's fiercest bloodbath, are not the copycats.
But if you must buy the whole corpus, don't count on taking money back with you to the grave. Halloween supplier Haunted Houses.com offers a "Lunging Laundry" water-spewing ghoul springing from a rag-strewn trunk, for $2,495. And a cool $100 grand will score the trappings and construction blueprints (but not building materials) for "Terrortanic" a 4,000 square foot haunted casa.
While money is vital for resurrecting these digs every year, humor gives them a pulse. "I've seen grown men crawling on their hands and knees," says Ed. "You know what, I have a happy job. When the guy gets off the floor, he's giggling too."
Jim recalls a dad with two kids wearing the mask of bravery until he ran into live rats. "So you can see these rats running up a branch," he chuckles. "We had this one fake rat in there and it jumped out of the cage and landed on this guy's shoulder …That's the ultimate! If you can get that person who's not going to let anything affect him – for that moment, it was a real rat."
Given its prominence in Pontiac's downtown and Erebus's decidedly grim subject matter, it wasn't always clear that city leaders would embrace the month-long horror show.
Jim says, "We went from apprehension from the city of Pontiac to them being proud they have the haunted house."
Tanya Muzumdar is a freelance writer and regular contributor to both Metromode and Concentrate. Her previous article was Browsing By DesignPhotos:
Don't be left behind in the halls of the Erebus Haunted House.
All photographs by Marvin Shaouni
Marvin Shaouni is the managing photographer for Metromode & Model D.