It’s PEAK haunted house season right now, with Halloween less than two short weeks away. Below, a bunch of haunted house actors shared their best/funniest stories of the things they’ve seen in those haunted houses, and it’s proof that people really cannot handle themselves in a haunted house atmosphere. I’ve never been a diehard fan of haunted houses myself, I probably only make it to one every couple of years (which means I’m due this year). I do however enjoy the reactions of people having the crap scared out of them at haunted houses, and that’s exactly what these stories are about below…The last one’s particularly good, a collection of stories from someone who has worked in a haunted house for 20+ years, so make sure to stick around for that (via AskReddit):
Adam_Barrow:
Standard jump scare scene, a guy with a demon or whatever mask pops out, spooks the tour, then disappears back behind the wall…but I guess the guy got a little overzealous?
Demon pops out: “I’m gunna eat your ass!”
Tour member: “You’re gunna eat my what?”
Demon: Recedes into shadow and myth, leaving more questions than answers
Tour member: “That’s fine, this is fine.”
JustLetMeComment:
I got to work in the special VIP attraction last year at my local place, it’s basically a really dark trail in the woods, but the actors are allowed to touch guests. Grabbing and pulling people off into the woods and whatnot. Hiding kind of sucks, I had to lay in the mud and grab at people’s ankles and then chase after them, but the funniest goddamn thing is the world is the lanterns. We give them little electronic hand-lanterns as their only light source, and two guys have remotes that can turn them on and off. Every time, without fail, the guy’s girlfriend is yelling at him to stop turning the lantern off. It’s even better if you have a really dark costume because then you can walk up behind them, lay a hand on their shoulder and say “Yeah jerk, don’t turn the lantern off!”
VikingRabies:
I was a talking head on a table. A group of five people led by a girl comes into my room and when the get close to me I say “Hello” fairly nonchalantly. The girl in front screams and falls backwards with a domino effect taking everyone else in her group with her.
Mishful_Thinking:
My brother worked at a haunted jail in my town. He said it was all going well until like an hour before it ended. Nobody was showing up and he had to take a leak. So he decides to piss in the corner. As he unzips and starts, he hears talking and commotion. Of course, he couldn’t stop. So by the time that large group of people reached he cell and looked in expecting a scare, they saw a wolf man pissing in the corner. And he says, the only thing he did was turn his head and growl at them while pissing.
Darrenyankj:
Was a faceless hood trying to scare people from behind the curtains, but didn’t hear them approaching, so I didn’t manage to pop out to scare them. They pulled open the curtains and asked me which way the exit was. It was both humiliating and amusing tbh
riotous_jocundity:
My costume was vaguely like the girl from The Ring, a year or two after the movie came out. Pink little girl’s dress, long black wig over my face. I was pretty tiny back then and quite flexible, so I could contort myself in pretty creepy ways. Add a strobe light and you’ve got some terrifying movements. Without fail, it was always the huge football players in letter jackets who would absolutely lose their minds in my room–screaming, trying to climb the walls to get away, breaking and running, the whole works. Usually their girlfriends would be standing by calmly. One guy’s reaction was especially delicious. Once he saw me in the corner, contorted but slowly uncurling to drag myself across the floor, he screamed “Oh HELL no!” and ran through the nearest wall. Just took it right out (made of plywood, plaster, and some dry wall). Someone else ended up having to take him to first aid because even once I was out of character he still couldn’t stand to be near me. I won an award that year for Best Scarer.
brendan685:
I volunteered at one for a few years in high school. The best thing that happened was that I saw a girl from gradeschool going through the room. She obviously couldn’t recognize me so as she passed I whispered her name. She got a huge fright and the next day she asked on Facebook who was working in the haunted house. I never told her who it was. Sorry Jenna.
Scribeykins:
Not exactly an actor, but I was the guy who opened the door when a group went from one room to another. I wore this black cloak that had a hood that almost entirely covered my face (was thin enough I could see through it). These two kids (13-15 years old) came around the corner as I was moving my head back and forth looking at people and one of them said “dude these animatronics suck”. I took a single step forward and he screamed in a really high pitch and jumped so far back he smashed into the wall. His friend stopped moving for a solid minute to laugh at him.
Also the amount of appreciative looks I got from guys whose girlfriends got scared and clung to their arm was far higher than I expected. Except for the one guy who was making comments about how this place wasn’t THAT scary and he would protect her, only to scream like a girl as soon as he turned the corner. His look wasn’t so appreciative…
instamatical:
I work at a haunt in PA that is part of a multi-attraction location (there’s a haunted house, hayride, and corn maze. I work the house and we are generally the crowd favorite). Last year, my job was to sit in a shed where the exterior had been modified to look like a small mausoleum in the graveyard portion of the haunt. Thanks to a relatively simple system I knew the names of at least three people in each group that would come through. Into a mic connected to wrap around speakers (the sound followed the guests) I’d sing “Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies…” and then pick a name and ask “Why won’t you play with me, (name)?” and people would lose their minds; part of the “lore” for the house was that a young girl had died on the grounds and she was buried in the graveyard.
Well, one night mid-season, I did this to a poor, unsuspecting soul named Tiffany. And Tiffany’s reaction was to scream, at the top of her lungs, “Y’ALL MOTHERFUCKERS NEED JESUS!”
Without question my best story of the entire season.
Last but not least…
Edymnion:
Oh a great number of things, as I’ve worked and ran haunts for nearly 20 years.
Some of my favorite moments:
1) Four gangsta wanna-bes, late teens or early 20’s. Acting all big and tough, we let them on through into the haunt. Minute later when they hit Regan’s Room (we had a lifesize doll of Regan from Exorcist that would spin it’s head and then squirt water on you from it’s mouth) and we hear a bunch of 12 year old girls screaming.
“I didn’t think there were any girls in that group?”
“There weren’t…”
“Oh shit, come on, we’re missing it!”
These four gangsta wanna-be’s screamed like little girls the entire way through, and by the end were running out of there all back to back to back to back spinning like a gawddam top so nothing could sneak up behind them.
2) Little old lady, had to be 80 dragging her two 60 year old sons by their hands into the haunt, telling them in the sweetest little old grandma voice you can imagine “Now now boys, don’t be pussies.” She gets into the last room which was dressed as a movie theater where the entire screen would break open as a giant monster jumped out. She sat front row center.
My friend literally got his phone out and dialed 911 and was waiting to hit Send. Monster jumps out 2 inches from her nose, she shrieks, and then just collapses. We all rush in, she turns and looks at us and starts laughing. “We have movement!”
3) I was dressed as Death, big antique scythe and everything. This little boy, like maybe 6-7 years old got it in his head that I wanted to personally kill him. He’s crying like a baby, I get yelled at to take my mask off.
So I take my mask off, everybody turns around to look at him going “See? He’s not going to kill you.”
I on the other hand am furrowing my brow, nodding my head, and mouthing “I’m going to kill you.”
He starts shrieking “He’s STILL going to kill me!”
4) Family of five pulls up to the haunt one year when me and a buddy are working the lines. Mom, dad, middle sister, younger brother all get out. Oldest daughter refuses to leave the SUV. Dad comes up to us, hands me the keys to the car, and says “Go get her and bring her in.”
My friend and I look at each other, back at him, I stop and take my mask off. “Excuse me, I just want to make sure I heard this right. You are giving me the keys to your car and telling me that you want me to go drag your daughter out of your car, kicking and screaming?” “Yup.” “YES SIR!”
We both jog over there, she sees us coming and locks the door and looks all smug. I hold up the key fob and click unlock. Her eyes go wide as she hits the lock again. We do that a couple of times before I walk up and put the key physically in the hatchback lock (auto lock won’t function if the key is physically turning the lock to open it). We start crawling into the SUV over the back seats as she is scrambling reverse crab walk over them up between the bucket seats, where she actually goes into full blown hysterical paralyses and completely loses the ability to move or do anything.
We decide thats enough and go give the keys back to dad with “I think we broke her.”
5) Any of the boyfriend/girlfriend couples where the boyfriend starts yelling “Take her! Take her!” or literally throwing their girlfriends at us so they can get away. It has become our standard response to catch the girlfriend, make sure she’s steady, then yell after him “Dude, you’re not getting any tonight after that stunt!”. They suddenly look mad, and she usually starts yelling “Hell no you aren’t, you threw me at the monsters!”
6) Happened just a couple of weeks ago. I was taking the girlfriend down to Netherworld in Atlanta just because their haunt is one of the best in the country. We had gone through, had a great time, and were in the gift shop when this girl, maybe 11 or so, comes tearing in there. She had clearly been running away from one of the line worker monsters. I’m about 6’2″ and without thinking I run over and tell her “Its okay, you don’t need to be afraid of the monsters…” and then dropped into my crazy psycho voice I use in my haunts “…its the rest of us you should be scared of! Eh hehehehehehee!” Her eyes go wide as saucers because at this point I’m looming over her, my girlfriend grabs me, pulls me away and just goes “Honey, we talked about this, you’re not allowed to do that to the normies!”
Girl ran out faster than she had ran in, and even the gift shop employees were going “That was awesome, good on ya!”
7) One year I’m doing the autopsy room. Body parts everywhere, a basket of intestines hanging from the ceiling, blood everywhere, you know the normal stuff. One night early on I had missed dinner, so I raided the candy bowl and grabbed a bunch of those fun sized Snickers and hid them in the gut basket. Group comes in faster than I expected just in time to see me take the candy bar out of the basket and pop it in my mouth.
A woman screams “Oh my GOD HE’S EATING SHIT!”
She swears she saw me squeeze a big old lump of shit out of one of those intestines (which can’t be true, they were made out of expanding insulation foam and painted, they were all solid). After that I started working that into my routine. Made more than one person vomit that year…
8) The scare in the final room of the haunt one year was a big stone looking room with my friend in monk’s robes who would stop the crowds and do a quick bit about how “The Master demands a sacrifice, one must stay so that the rest may leave”. So the group would pick a sacrifice, who would be left alone in the middle of the room as I in a Headless Horeseman costume (with flaming jack-o-lantern head) would burst through the giant hidden hinged doors that made the entire false wall crash open at them, with my giant two handed axe in order to claim their heads. You know, normal every day stuff.
Except one group of all white guys and one black guy came through, and the group voted to put the one black guy up for sacrifice. My friend is just going “Really? REALLY?!?” but shrugs and does his summoning of me. I’m wondering what I’m going to do, but acting quick I barge out of the doors, then stop dead in my tracks. I make very exaggerated head movements (to be seen through the mask) of looking at the black guy, at the white people in back, back to the black guy, then I just throw my hands up and yell “Ah hell nah!” and storm back into my hole, closing the doors behind me.
Black guy is laughing his ass off going “I told you so! Even the monster thought that was crap, I TOLD YOU SO!”
9) Stupidest “What the hell is wrong with you people?” bit though was the play sand. Had a section of the dark maze (a totally pitch black maze you have to feel your way through) ended up going out onto the grass at one point, and there was basically a pothole in the ground. We were afraid people would trip in it in the dark and break an ankle, so we filled it with a bag of kiddie sand from the hardware store.
By pure happenstance, that spot was EXACTLY where the majority of the people would put their foot down while rounding the corner. We constantly heard “EWWW! What did I step in?!?” and “I just stepped in shit!”. All the work and planning we put into that haunt, and the biggest reaction we got was the damned pothole sand. Couldn’t do that again if we tried…
Bros, there are many more of these stories over on the AskReddit thread and you can read through ALL OF THEM here. If you’ve ever worked in a haunted house and want to share your funniest stories we’d love to hear them, and you can just hit the comments below or the ‘TIP OFF’ form on the top right of this page!