on local haunted houses

So Friday night I went to a local haunted house here in Lexington.

It was held in the hallway of the local minor league baseball stadium. The stadium is pretty big, so it worked out well. As always the best part of the experience is almost always the anticipation. The slight jittery feeling - excited anxiety as you stand in line. Something I used to feel a lot more of when I was a kid standing line line for a haunted house. One of the disadvantages of being an adult is that you’re less scared of people in rubber mask hiding around a corner, and more scared of things like bouncing a check.

I was spoiled when I was younger when it came to haunted houses. The local Lion’s Club in the town I grew up in did great haunted houses. They would pick out a new location every year - an old abandoned nursing home or school building. And they’d build their haunted house around the location - creating a narrative and storyline to go with it. Most haunted houses I’ve been to in Lexington skip the narrative bit. There’s no plot to the thing - you just move from room to room waiting to see who’s going to jump out at you. Which has it’s own charm, but can’t compete with a nice storyline.

This year, there were a couple of genuinely scary or creepy moments. One of the first rooms in this haunt featured a girl in really good make-up sitting at a piano and playing (really playing) some strange, eerie tune on the piano. She made eye contact with everybody that walked through the room. She didn’t break character at all when I asked her how long she’d been taking lessons. She just kept on playing and staring. Creepy.

The other scary moment was in the clown themed section. I hate clowns. I think they’re damn scary on a lot of levels. So if you’re haunted house has clowns in it, you can count on me being a little creeped out by it. So anyway, I’m walking through the haunt about five steps ahead of the couple I’m with. I see something that catches my attention and I turn around to point it out to the couple behind me. When I turn around, I see that there’s a clown walking in step, right behind them. I screamed. Totally wasn’t expecting that at all. Apparently, they knew he was there as he’d been breathing heavily on them for the last 50 feet. So I looked like a big girl.

The really funny bit this year was seeing the chainsaw weilding clown at the end of the haunted house take off his mask challenge a jr high kid to a fight. That’s the sort of thing you get in Ky haunted houses