Once upon a time, there was a freshman girl who worked as a campus newspaper designer. For the first few months on campus, she loved working with the older editors and, of course, wanted to make a good impression. When October came around, the editors invited her to a very spooky haunted house in the far away land of Hendersonville, TN. The girl was hesitant; she hated scary movies and scary rides. She didn’t even like Scary Spice from the Spice Girls (she had some scary hair going on). But she went, and after over an hour of terrifying chainsaw murderers, deranged clowns and zombies, the group lost her in the panic of the haunted circus tent. And she was never seen again.
So maybe that’s not entirely true. Maybe that girl slowly recovered from that emotionally scarring incident and eventually rose to the position of Editor in Chief. But whatever the story, that haunted house was a seriously scary place.
Two years ago, I embarked upon a journey to Monster Mountain in Hendersonville, TN. Why, as someone who had nightmares from the movie “Signs,” would I ever do such a thing? The answer: street cred. That’s right, I wanted to look cool. I was the only freshman who was invited to go, and though I was quite nervous, I decided that I was way too legit to let a haunted house lose me cool points.
Lesson number one: never go to a haunted house to look cool. This sounds obvious, but haunted houses are a proving grounds of sorts. Haunted houses are scary. They are not haunted by Care Bears or bunnies. So if you think you’re earning street cred by going, but know you’re going to be scared out of your mind by the first chain saw wielder you encounter, maybe try to think of another way to rack up the cool points.
Specifically, Monster Mountain is not a brief haunted house that can be accomplished in twenty minutes. It took our group over an hour to make it through all of the scary scenarios that greeted us. This was not so great considering I started asking if it was almost over when we were ten minutes into the excursion. As the haunted house progressed, I felt like I was losing street cred faster than a Gryffindor in potions class. The absolute worst was the haunted kitchen. When we walked in, a chef wielding a meat cleaver and covered in blood jumped out and started chasing all ten of us in circles through this gross kitchen. We looked for a door, but no one could find a way out. Finally, someone realized that we had to crawl through a fridge. Of course, the fridge, the obvious escape route. By the time we were inside the fridge tunnel, I felt like I had lived through a war and I still had at least twenty-five minutes of terror left.
Of course, the Monster Mountain incident wasn’t that bad in retrospect. I got to hang out with a lot of people I’d never seen outside of the newsroom and I must have gotten somewhat of a workout from all the running I did. But since that day, I have not entered any haunted residences and it’s going to take either a really cute date or a prize on the level of Christian Loubiton pumps to make me go back to a haunted anything.
