Way back when in my wild and wooly days I made a point of getting a group of friends together each Halloween for a visit to Halloween Haunt at Knott’s Berry Farm. Each October as do so many other places now the park would be overwhelmed nightly by demons of darkness dressed in various degrees of gore.
A visit to the haunt required two ingredients for a great evening, a large group of friends and several adult beverages at dinner before crossing over to the other side.
The adult beverages are self-explanatory. A bit of alcohol reduces inhibitions and allowed everyone in the group to more easily buy into the whole haunt idea.
The large group increased the scare factor because you mixed in the added tension created by members of your own group attempting their own scares while at the same time being surprised by the blood covered ghouls inhabiting the park.
Two incidents stand out from my many visits.
In 1984 there was supposed to be a foursome attending, my best friend (bf) and his girl friend, myself and my significant other at the time. A wise man once said that nothing ever goes as planned. I ended up dateless because of the usual game playing that goes on when a relationship has died but does not know enough to give up the ghost. So I invited a friend from work (wf). Which made it the three guys and my best friends date that I had never met.
We went to dinner and than plunged imagination first into the park. Which is when the other shoe dropped. My bf with the date saw that Elvira was appearing and wanted to wait in line to see her.
If you have ever attended one of these events the sole goal is to hit every maze and scare everyone silly. Lines for show tend to be hours long and when you are paying big bucks for the evening you want to get all the bang for your bucks that you can.
My wf and I opted out immediately there was no way we were waiting in line for two hours to see anyone that night. Much to my surprise my bf’s date also opted. She said she had never been to the haunt and that she came to be scared not sit in line all night. Stubborn as always the bf told her fine he would see the show alone and meet up with afterwards.
The three of us hit a few of the lesser mazes building up to the good stuff. At the appointed time we went to our arranged meeting place and the bf never showed. We waited 45 minutes and finally gave up.
At his dates insistence we headed back to the mazes all the while keeping our eyes out for him and periodically returning to the assigned meeting place.
The best part of the evening came within the maze rated most scary. The three of us were walking along getting the shit scared out of us around every corner. The bf’s date kept digging her nails into my arm every time she got scared.
At one point when she let go. I felt a tap on my shoulder and a very realistic looking wolf man signaled that he wanted to take my place. I stepped aside and he moved in. She never noticed. The next time she was scared she grabbed wolfs arm without batting an eye. I was following along behind them laughing my ass off.
This lasted for about two thirds of the maze until she turned to say something to me. Her eyes were bigger than Sunday morning pancakes. She screamed and ran full speed through the rest of the maze without even pausing long enough to be scared. My wf and I must have laughed for an hour after that.
We never caught up with the bf until we got to the car and boy was he pissed.
A few years later I attended with a much larger group. There must have been fourteen or fifteen people and we were all a bit on the happy side. Not enough food at dinner but plenty of beer.
Halfway through the evening I began rambling on about how unfair the haunt was to its workers. Sure they got to spend hours on end scaring beautiful women and chasing them all over the park but that is only half the fun on Halloween. People also have a primal need to embrace fear and they were missing out. Who scares the scarer’s was my question and no one had the answer. For the rest of the evening I kept my eyes open waiting for the opportunity to do some scaring of my own.
My big chance arrived on a ride that had been turned into a moving maze. Or should I say we were moving while the monsters stayed in one place. The ride was called Kingdom of the Dinosaurs and it began in the laboratory of H.G. Wells where he had actually invented a time machine. Before the unsuspecting riders knew what had happened they were millions of the years in the past in the time of the dinosaurs.
The setup was perfect for my plan lots of corners and blind turns where I knew someone would be hiding waiting to scare us. Plus, I had my ace in the hole one of those light up roses that I had purchased for my date. I borrowed it from her and bided my time.
As we neared the middle of the ride I noticed that two cars in front of us the passengers had been scared by someone hiding behind a small wall, the monster had waited until the car was almost past to jump out. If patterns held he would not scare the next car he would wait for ours but the tables would be turned and I would be waiting for him.
Lit rose in hand I waited for my opportunity and for once my timing was perfect. As he prepared to leap I held the rose beneath my face and growled at him. The monster screamed, tripped over his own two feet and landed on his ass. Not only that but to add to his humiliation he dropped his flashlight which rolled down the incline to land at the foot of another beast. What made the scare even more entertaining is that every monster within one hundred feet of us began laughing. All their hiding places were given away which led to even more laughter by the passengers in our car. A scary ending to a perfect night.
Speaking of which I need to scare someone any volunteers?
