The Greatest Haunted House Ever

When I was 8 or 9 my Dad took us to the greatest haunted house in the storied history of haunted houses. Who'd have believed that it would be in a little town in Indiana, just across the Ohio River from Owensboro? What luck!

The best haunted houses are never just houses. They're set up in buildings that are already creepy to begin with. This one, was in a functional state mental institution. This is where you nod your head and say, "excellent". Thanks.

This looked exacty like what you're picturing in your head. Gothic. Terrifying. Beautiful. Like Bane, if he were gothic, terrifying, and beautiful... instead of fat, lazy, old and ugly. Well... it was old... but I digress..

We waited outside in the fall air for what seemed like days, but of course it was no more than an hour or so. They were taking us in by groups of 10 or so, and finally it was our turn. Now... for the most part this was just a standard haunted house. For the life of me I couldn't understand why so many people were running away so clearly terrified. Some were seriously paniced! I remember thinking to myself.. "what pussies." Little did I know...

After being lead through countless rooms with beasties jumping out... suddenly the guide's walky talky starts chattering and all the lights come on. We're can see now that we're in a small hallway, and a couple of the monsters are walking over to the guide... they've even taken their masks off. All three are acting upset.

Needless to say our group was pretty confused.

Finally the guide turns and says, "People listen up. I need you all to be calm. We have to evacuate immediately. Apparently there's a problem here in the institution and the staff have asked us all to leave so they can handle it."

A problem? What kind of a problem?

The guide is then telling us of how we're going to take the "back stage" route out of the place. We're lead through room after room and all the while we're listening to the guide's walky talky... which is now saying things like "Psychopath has escaped". The guide was totally selling all this. We finally meet up with couple cops who took over to lead us out. They gave us a briefing... telling us all about the bad man who was loose, but it was ok because they had him cornered in another part of the building. Whatever. We just wanted out.

The cop tells us how we're gonna climb up a flight of stares, go down a hall, turn right, then we'll have to slide down an inflatable slide that the fire department has setup.

People in the group at this point were totally freaked out.

The next 15 minutes were the scariest I had ever experienced in my short life to that point.

Up the stairs and down the hall... no problem...

But once in the hall we hear screams. The cops freak and take off down the hall. We follow... duh.. then the cops turn into a room to the left. Inside we see an inmate holding an orderly with a knife to his throat. The cops have their guns out and are screaming at him... Finally one sees us and rushes us out... as he's rushing us out... A group of inmates comes charging from further down the hall.

We were all dead paniced at this point. We ran like hell to the window to get down that slide.

Once down there, we were met by a bunch of firemen and cops who were laughing their butts off.