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Haunted house project gives good old-fashioned scare By
Tiffany Erickson The wide-trunked elms and ash trees form a thick canopy surrounding the aged brick house as fall turns the leaves from a summer green to a dying brown. Once on the premises, the sound of falling leaves and crackling footsteps are the only noises to be heard, almost like walking into a realm where everything in the outside world is completely shut out. Even so, the dark windows almost look like hollow black eyes, watching and waiting for their next curious and unsuspecting visitor to enter. Living on the same land as this house are three Utah State students who last summer began to take an interest in the old place and, with a combination of boredom and genius, created with a few strings and sound effects a house of horror that has even gone so far as to bring its visitors to tears of fear. Dewey Houston, one of the collaborators of the "house of fear" says the house was built sometime in the 1890s in Benson. His friend's great-grandparents had lived there for decades; then it had random residents in the years since. Now it is almost on the brink of condemnation, if not already there. Houston ascends up the stairs and only hesitates a second before pushing open the reluctant, rusty door and going in. Inside, the house is musty and old, with large chips out of the walls and parts of the floor. Around a corner is a dark hole with steep stairs that lead to the cellar. "We're not going down there," says Houston, and quickly moves on. The staircase is dark and narrow, and creaks with every step, leading to the second floor where there are about four other small rooms. Houston says they have taken around 30 people to the house to scare. "It started out, we had taken some girls in one night just to check things out and I disappeared," he says. He ended up hiding and scaring the girls pretty badly, and from there on the ideas of rigging up ropes that make doors slam by themselves, shotgun-like sound effects and convincing theatrical performances began to form. Houston says it takes about four guys to make the scare completely successful, one to lead the group and three to do the scaring. The path and sequence of rooms in which the leader takes the group is pre-planned in order to enable the other guys to position themselves right. Once the group is taken upstairs, the scaring begins. The sound of a shot fired, a fold-out bed opening by itself and the sound of footsteps downstairs is enough to get the groups in a frenzy of fear. Then, in running to get out of the house, hidden strings are pulled by the behind-the-scene guys and three doors slam, almost in succession, trapping the screaming group in a room where the front door is -- but now mysteriously blocked by a huge bookshelf. Houston says the most important role is the leader. "What it is, is ad-lib theater. You have to pretend to be as scared as they are," he says. . There aren't really any scary, mysterious stories about the house, so the leader has the job of making some stories up as they are going over to the house. The stories they tell aren't grandiose or overly creepy because it's important that the group doesn't think you are trying to scare them, he says. Houston usually just talks about a crazy guy that used to live there and caused a bit of trouble and had to be kicked out, but has come back from time to time. "I just try to think of stuff to scare myself and it makes it easier to act scared," he says. However, Houston admits there was one time while waiting for a group to arrive that he himself got a little spooked. "I had to sit there in the dark so that if the group was already on the way over they can't see any lights," he says. "I started hearing noises all over the house. It freaked me out a little but I just put my head down, closed my eyes and tried not to think about it." Though the fear factor has never really been a problem, not all of the trips have been successful and they have had to learn through trial and error. "We've taken a group out that had about eight people. That was too big, they have strength in numbers and don't get as scared," Houston says. Another problem is when someone has their own flashlight. "It's got to be a controlled environment," says Brad McKasson, another collaborator. If anyone else has a flashlight, they go exploring and ruin it. "We make sure that the flashlight the leader has is really dim and he knows where not to shine the light," Houston says. Also Houston says it is a lot easier to take just girls, because when guys are in the group they get brave and want to go check things out. "It's a work in progress," saysMcKasson. "Every time we do it we add something new." But when they get it right, it can be really scary. "We made one girl so scared she cried. She hated us for quite a while," Houston says. Stacy Shinnick, one of the "victims" of these scaring expeditions, says she was terrified. "It already had an eerie feeling anyway but when they started scaring us, I was about ready to wet my pants," she says. "I was mad at them for a while because they just kept laughing at us." Though it has made some temporary enemies on occasion, Houston says it is a big rush. "It gives us something to do, we^'e not making trouble or hurting anything or anyone, and it's fun." They haven't taken people out for a while, though. This fall they all have gotten busy doing other things. "We were doing it like three times a week. I guess we just got burned out," says McKasson. They may be giving it a rest for now, but McKasson says they have new ideas for the house and may have some plans for Halloween.
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