Why I Don't Do Haunted Houses

When it comes to haunted houses, I am the biggest coward you will ever meet. There is nothing you could do to convince me to go through a haunted house. “Thankfully, I’m always surrounded with a wall of muscular guys that will protect me”, said no one ever. Ryan Gosling would literally have to carry me though a haunted house and I would be in his arms, eyes closed, and probably crying…. And groping his sculpted abs.

Why am I so afraid of haunted houses, you ask? I don’t really know. I like to pin it on this one house I went through when I was in California 3 summers ago….

I was staying with my friend, Erica, and we decided to spend a day at Universal Studios. I don’t know why we thought it would be fun to go through the Universal Studios haunted house, but we did. Well sort of. We never made it through the entire house.

You see, the first thing the house staff told us was, “The scary people might try to split you up, so good luck finding your way through the house together.” Ummm… Like shit you’ll split us up. There’s no way that’s happening. That’s like the cardinal rule in scary movies: always stay together. Nothing good ever comes out of splitting up. Ever. Plus, I have this thing called a death grip, which translates to “you will need a diamond crow bar to pry my hands off of whoever’s shirt I am desperately grasping in front of me.” Last year in the UREC “haunted walk”, my lucky victim was a guy wearing a skeleton sweatshirt who called himself Skeletor. My grip was so tight that I wrinkled his sweatshirt and probably cut off blood flow to his brain. Poor Skeletor.

Anyway, Erica and I were both clutching eachother’s arms as we were forced through this sick joke they called an “attraction”. After we had the shit scared out of us in Alfred Hitchcock themed room, we asked the guy guarding the emergency exit if we could just turn around and go back. Actually, we pleaded with him. I was not above getting on my knees and begging, but he was all like, “hahahahahahahaha… no.” You know that feeling you get when you settle for a parking spot really far away after spending forever looking for one, and then as you are walking through the parking lot, you see someone drive up and find an empty spot in the first row? That loathing you feel for that person? That’s how I felt about that guard, and as much as I’d like to say we suckapunched his throat and walked out the exit anyway, we didn’t. Instead, we pitifully shuffled into the next room.

The second room was “Chucky” themed. If you are unaware of who, or what Chucky is, here is a picture.

Need I say more? Both of us were done. We were not about to have a life-sized Chucky jump out at us. Erica asked if I wanted to just leave out the next unguarded door we could find, and I remember mumbling a practically incoherent yes. We saw a door at the other side of the room and began to make our way towards it, careful to stay away from anything that looked like it could be a real person. We were about halfway there when someone else jumped out. I like to call her white Frankenstein lady because she was wearing all white, had white hair in the same style as Marge Simpson, and was butt ugly. A real life Tim Burton creation.

Did white Frankenstein lady leave us alone after she jumped out? Nope. She screamed at Erica and I, and we ran. Erica was booking it to the nearest exit and dragging me behind her. We had both lost it and were screaming, but you know who else was screaming? White Frankenstein lady. As I was being dragged, I looked to my right to see white Frankenstein lady running beside me and still screaming at me. Out of instinct I was yelling, “STOP IT! I HATE YOU! STOP! PLEASE!” even though I know the scary people never actually listen to you. Shit no one says scary people don’t say, “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. Shame on me.”

I don’t know how Erica managed to finally make it to the door, but next thing I knew, we were standing in the sunlight somewhere backstage of the haunted house, and white Frankenstein lady was no where to be seen. My guess is that she either stayed in the house, or got vaporized by the sunlight. Most likely she was vaporized. We were both glad to be out of that house and swore never to go in again, unless Zac Efron (who I had literally bumped into earlier that day) would be in our group.

I haven’t made it more than 6 feet inside a haunted house since. Please don’t ever try to convince me to go into one because I will probably cry more than a girl watching a Nicholas Sparks film.

As an extra, here's how Erica and I acted in the haunted house. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1VAC5bFN-E