The man offered me a warm smile and leaned back in his chair. He gave me a moment. Which was a relief—I needed to prepare. This was it. I took a deep breath, stepped forward, raised my arms, and…
"Raaarrraaarrrgh! GET OUT OF HERE!"
A decade ago, I was between major life events and desperate for a temporary job that didn't involve fast food. With limited qualifications, I interviewed to be an actor at an open-year-round haunted house attraction. I arrived to the audition with amateur scare tactics, all culled from a lifetime of horror movies. The manager asked me to growl, so I growled. "Can you do it angrier?" he wondered. Yes, I could. With a snarl and a few animalistic syllables, the job was mine—and it still haunts me today.
For four months, I dressed entirely in black, coated my face in half-assed ghoul make-up, and spent eight hours crouching behind trap doors and screaming at tourists for $6.25 an hour. My haunted home was located in San Antonio, Texas, right across the street from the Alamo. Sneer at planting a tacky strip of entertainment venues right across from a sobering historical monument dedicated to one of America's most famous battles all you want, but its effectiveness was indisputable. Hapless tourists and drunk locals dropped twenty bucks a pop to enter if they dared. No one needed an overpriced Davy Crockett mug when they could recreate Halloween in July in a darkened maze full of young people leaping out from the shadows.
Those pro-scarers were your typical motley crew of slackers. Some were students looking for weed money, others were actors padding their resumes. Faces came and went. There was Matt, the thirty-something community college student who dreamed of making Flash animation on the Internet. Rex, a sweet, slightly dim amateur wrestler and comic book nut, towered over us as he displayed techniques for disabling human beings. Eliza was the resident goth chick who named her cats after Transformers characters. Richard, the part-time bartender, swore he was going to leave and never did. As the youngest member of the cast, Tony, a 15-year old aspiring magician, was the butt of every joke. He took it like a champ, wanting to fit in with a crew of wayward elders.
Ranking above us all was Ben, the "lead actor" and the only person who actually took this job seriously. While the rest of us showed up to work in black jeans and black t-shirts, he brought his finest 19th century suit and top hat. Our lazy makeup paled next to his. Ben was extravagant and friendly—until he wasn't. No one had a temper like our star. When one hapless tourist bopped him on the nose, he proceeded chased her throughout the house, breaking character and shouting "Do not touch the actors!" When the nose-bopper outpaced him, he used one of the many secret passageways to cut her off, throwing himself out of a trapdoor to chide her some more.
To a visitor, the house appeared like a winding maze of dark hallways dressed in animatronics, blood splatters, and gross props. Only the performers knew about hidden doorways and secret passages that led to a central corridor. From this corridor, an actor could cross the entire maze in seconds. On slow days, the entire operation could be manned by two actors without either of them ever missing a scare. It was dark enough that the visitors wouldn't realize they were being worked over by a skeleton shift. On especially dull days, the crew would issue challenges, like "you are only allowed to scare people by shouting the names of food products." To my knowledge, no one ever complained about ghosts yelling "hamburger!" and "taco!" at them.
Scaring people for a living gets really old, really quickly. We filled the down moments with hours and hours of talking. The actors spent most of our time in the "blue room," named for the black lights that kept the area illuminated and our eyes adjusted to the darkness of the actual maze. On busier days when, when there were no big breaks between groups, we would hang out in the central corridor, swapping stories as we ducked in and out of trap doors. Keeping one eye out a victim-detecting peephole, we'd pause our conversations just long enough to burst "out of nowhere" and shout at the most vulnerable person in the group (you'll never learn more about body language than at a haunted house). We'd retreat, head to the next trap door, Rex would continue recounting his last wrestling match, Eliza would groan about her boyfriend, then it was on to the next scare. Rinse, repeat.
Like the cast of any production, we became a unit. We watched each other's backs. If a group was proving susceptible to a certain kind of scare, we'd share tactics and tips. We got to know each other, if only to stave off boredom. There were darker times. On Friday and Saturday nights, the bar-dwellers came out. So did their inner-demons. The first time I was ever punched in the face came courtesy of a frat bro. One group was so rowdy, so loud, and so itching for a fight that Rex and Richard asked that the younger actors hang back in the blue room while they ran through the scares as perfunctorily as possible, rushing them through the house just to get them out. It remains, to this day, one of the most noble gestures I have ever encountered. The scariest thing in a haunted house is often the people who visit it.
Except for the house's actual ghost. The only member of our cast who never quite fit in was an invisible presence who made itself known at inconvenient moments. On one slower afternoon, Matt and I found ourselves running the whole show on our own. I had finished my scares early and had retreated to the blue room, when Matt stumbled in. I would say he looked "white as a ghost," but his make-up ensured that. Instead, he just looked terrified.
He had seen a girl. A young Hispanic girl, to be exact, in clothing that he described as "old-fashioned." The most recent group had already left when Matt spotted her. He broke character and asked if she was okay. She didn't respond. A few seconds later, she turned away and walked around a corner. He gave chase, but the girl had vanished into thin air.
We swept through the maze, checking every corner and every secret passage. We found nothing. The radio squawked. The next group was ready. Matt looked me in the eyes, his eyes filled with a terror I have never seen matched: "Please don't make me go back in there alone. Please." From that day on, Matt refused to go into the haunted house by himself. I saw my fair share of weird shit in the weeks that followed (doors opening and closing on their own, special effects acting up) to convince me that maybe he was right. Maybe the ghost of a young girl, killed when General Santa Anna's forces descended upon the tiny mission fort at the heart of the San Antonio in 1836, had taken up residence in my place of work.
No one else believed it, but they also didn't see the panic in Matt's eyes like I had. But we were a crew. We had each other's backs. So someone always accompanied Matt as he finished he scares, even if it meant putting down our shared, tattered copy of Wizard magazine or missing out on Eliza's relationship gossip.
I left the haunted house in August to continue my education a thousand miles away. I never saw any of my haunted house co-workers ever again. I can't even tell you what they look like—so much of my time with them was spent in make-up that I can only picture a bunch of pale-faced monsters, not people. I could literally bump into them on the street and not realize I had spent hundreds of hours in their company.
But I think about them often. I wonder if Richard managed to escape, to find a job that would allow him to leave the service industry and the scare industry behind for good. I wonder if Rex is still working the local wrestling circuit. I wonder if Eliza's relationship worked out and if she ever grew to regret naming her cat Optimus Prime. I wonder what became of Tony's magician career—the magic shop he called part-time gig number two closed down ages ago. I wonder if Ben is still commanding the ship, still screaming at the occasional tourist. I can't help but think, "Of course he is."
Most of all, I think about Matt, an artist, a career man, and the guy who came face-to-face with a ghost. I hope he graduated. I hope he found work in a spirit-free environment. And I hope he—and the rest of the haunted house crew—get as much mileage out of our stories as I do.
