Creating a Haunted House: I
A horror series by Victor Sweetser
This is not a guide.
Find inspiration for your haunted house. Think about its themes and brainstorm some possible names. These may change as you start designing it.
Make blueprints of your haunted house and its rooms. Sketchbooks work well for this purpose.
Determine the materials and cost.
Build the paths for guests to traverse and the rooms and corridors outside the paths for actors.
Build the façade around the paths and hidden rooms and corridors.
If repurposing another building, floor, or room for your haunted house, skip 4 and 5.
Plan out the scares for each room or section of your haunted house. Is there a progression from room-to-room that tells a story? Where will the actors hide, and when and how do they interact with guests? If any props move or change, are they automated or manually controlled?
And here are some rules for guests traversing your haunted house. [Feel free to repurpose these however you like for your own haunted house.]
Don’t leave the designated path.
Walk, don’t run.
Don’t touch the actors or the props. [“They may touch you” could be an option to ramp up the scare factor, but in this case you will need guests to sign a waiver or give some other form of consent.]
No flashlights, use of cellphones, or flash photography. [You may consider prohibiting use of electronics altogether while in the haunted house.]
If you are too afraid or distressed to carry on, or are injured, ask one of the actors to show you to an emergency exit.
I
Inspiration
There’s a myth about a god who drew himself into being using his own blood. But how did he have blood to begin with? It’s like a riddle or a puzzle that needs solving.
I don’t know where I heard it, or which people it’s from, but I’ve retained it long enough that I’m no longer sure whether it’s remembered or imagined. In the end, does it make much of a difference?
Maybe this is a pessimistic line of thinking, but when you’re in a between place found through a portal sprouted from a body buried in your backyard (it wasn’t human) with childhood friends—one of whom was wakened from a fifteen-year coma from a special coffin-treasure chest in the attic of the house from your childhood imaginings (the running theory is that the house was feeding her with nutrients from its victims)—you don’t know what you can hold onto. Surely, it isn’t memory. Memory won’t keep you safe from the weird rain that is probably toxic and a demon colossus glowing like a moon in the dark sky.
Do you hold onto each other?
I tried to remember us back then as kids creating the house to which we were returning. Greg was mostly doing the drawing while we dictated to him, and afterwards he would’ve gone over whatever someone else drew in his sketchbook with his own hand. The messy Victorian that was more our notion of what a Victorian ought to be than what we gleaned from library books. The floor plans we sketched out like mad grade school architects.
We never did give the house a name.
Haunted houses had to have names, Sally insisted once upon a time. The five us were sprawled out on the floor of Jennifer’s bedroom while in the living room of their apartment her parents were watching TV. A sketchbook lay open between us on an empty pizza box. Greg disagreed with Sally about names, while Jennifer, Patrick, and I threw out some candidates. Memory Manor because Jennifer remembered seeing a street while driving with her dad actually called memory lane and she’d learned this trick for memorizing things called Memory Palace. The house would keep its victims’ memories trapped there, she said. Puzzle Place, I said, because all of us were obsessed with puzzles. Haunt Home, Patrick contributed, to which I think I replied teasingly, “In other words, Haunted House?”
“No, like a home where only haunts have lived.”
“Home to Haunts?” Sally said.
“We should make a rule that this house never be named,” Greg said.
“Why?” I asked.
Greg, back against the wall all with all of us disagreeing with him, met with the real likelihood of having to put a name to the house, was struck with terror. His nine-year-old face was contorted into something that belonged to another era. About twenty years later, when we confronted that house together as adults, the very first time the entities—what we came to call priests—hitch-danced like a fever dream into our world while we frantically tried to solve the first floor’s puzzle, that look would return. And only then would the memory of the look surface again for me, but in a way that I wasn’t sure if the memory was real.
He knew something else that we did not know, besides even the secret of his power to make things real by drawing or writing them. The secret of Greg’s power Sally would discover and would lead to Greg imprisoning her in the house because, in addition to whatever that other secret terror had been, he was mortified of the world learning what a freak and a danger he was.
We thought we were taking this between place route back to the house, to confront it a second time. Or a third time. To climb the stairs all the way up to the attic . . . to open the chest containing the treasure, a treasure we had replaced. We needed the evil we had trapped there in Sally’s stead. We were certain we had to have Greg’s power to stop what the house had unleashed on our world in his absence. We thought we could the devil you know our way through. We’d already solved all the puzzles, made it past all the traps, and hoped to go in and climb to the very top. Even if it was that easy, letting Greg out and getting him to work with us rather than taking his revenge would be like defusing a bomb. But we let ourselves dream a little.
Here’s what we had with us:
Sally, who had been in a coma for almost two decades and who, despite recovering miraculously the past year with the help of physical therapy, surgery, and medicine, would be a long time recovering still, riding an undead unicorn named Pete that had escaped from the haunted house we created as kids.
Patrick, who had packed on some muscle since the last time we’d all been together and held himself like he’d taken kick boxing classes, which I knew to be true.
Jennifer, with a pointed shovel over one shoulder, who lately had added construction work on top of medical school, whose busyness couldn’t squash the demons that touched the corners of her eyes.
And myself, with the memory of a loaded gun and the knowledge that my limited firearms training in the interval, even if I still had bullets, wouldn’t do squat against what we were up against.
Here’s what we had against us:
Toxic rain and a demon the size of the moon in the dark sky, it an enormous version of the demon dummy from our fabricated haunted house. Its head ticked on its neck, revolving to a tune beyond our range. Tick, click, a titanic reorientation of the spine. Its claws, the size of mountains coming down, annihilated rather than sheared the foul rain drops.
This was no puzzle.
We fled to the woods.
Trees were uprooted around us, plucked skyward by enormous claws that held them like splinters. The demon peered down into our would-be sanctum with a mechanical grin, its horns curving throughout the heavens.
“All those rules,” Patrick huffed out as he ran, “but we didn’t think to give the house enough rules it had to follow. The house . . . always wins.”
“We don’t know,” Jennifer said. “Might be . . . Greg’s doing, these things getting out.”
Yeah, I thought, maybe he’s already out. “We’ll make him revise the rules if we’ve got to,” I said, “break . . . every finger on his good hand . . . until he does.” To say that I was upset, angry, and a thousand other things besides to discover what Greg had done to Sally and those victims he’d practically hand-fed the house over the years would be an understatement.
“Just don’t let him near anything he can draw or write with!” Sally shouted above the sound of Pete the unicorn’s hooves. “That’s all we have to do!” The strength in her voice despite what she had undergone was like a rallying cry. It pierced through the despair and fear. Sally was alive. She had been all these years, and we got her back.
With her returned, it almost felt like anything was possible. But that could work both ways, couldn’t it?
A clawed hand plucked Jennifer up into the sky. With a thumb and forefinger holding Jennifer as though she were a needle, the demon examined her clinically while the rest of us jerked to a standstill. The shovel Jennifer had been carrying hit the ground with an undergrowth-muffled clump.
“Keep going!” Jennifer roared.
“No way!” Patrick said. He seemed ready to square up to the gigantic demon. “This isn’t going to be one of those don’t let my sacrifice be in vain deals. No way!”
“The house!” Jennifer yelled. I could just make out what she was saying as she went further away from us towards one bright yellow eye of the demon. “I can see it from here! It’s on the other side of the forest!”
Something happened then that I’m still not sure whether was at the command of Sally. Pete the undead unicorn charged the giant demon. I was certain that at best the rest of his broken horn would be torn off. At worst, his neck could be broken, and who knew what that might do to something already dead.
Pete bearing Sally disappeared through the growth, and for the first time I realized as the branches whipped around Pete’s desiccated hide, with nothing illuminating us but that demon and its steady glowing eyes, that the species of trees surrounding us seemed entirely foreign. Some of their leaves had too many points, their branches too many bends. And there were darkly flowered vines on the trees that had giant petals with egg-like things at their centers. Shapes beneath the thin, membranous shells twitched, and it reminded me of the fruit from what had sprouted from that grave I’d made of one of the entities in my backyard. But this was different.
“Jack,” Patrick said to me. “Over here.”
“Yeah, sure. What’re we doing?”
“Getting ready to catch Jennifer.”
“Huh?”
“If she’s dropped.”
“Yeah, the likelihood of us being in the right place at the right time is zilch.”
“We have to do something.”
I recognized the expression he gave me. That feeling of powerlessness.
“Okay,” I said.
The demon didn’t roar, didn’t utter a syllable. It was not something cut from the same cloth as creatures in our world. We’d imagined it, true, but there was something else we were missing.
The gigantic demon swam back out of our skyline, and I could only guess that it had been struck.
If it dropped Jennifer, that was it. The impossible moment of being there to catch her falling body was over. I was horrified of having to find her broken on the ground.
For one miserable minute, Patrick and I stared at each other.
Then Sally came thundering through the trees towards us on the back of Pete. Jennifer was behind her, her arms wrapped around Sally like the two of them were riding a horse or a motorcycle and not an undead unicorn.
Pete’s horn was completely gone, and more.
It cost us, saving Jennifer, and every time Pete crumbled further, it ached deep in my guts because I’d been taking care of Pete in my garage and backyard—walking with him out late at night so the neighbors wouldn’t see him—since his escape from the haunted house we’d created. I played with him like he was my pet.
But he was still going. Alive? Probably never had been. We would put him back together alright, either way. We just had to get Greg out and his powers in our service. Easy, right?
There were things starting to hatch from those egg flowers by the time we made the other side of the trees, I could hear them breaking wetly out and scratching along branches, but we were so close now we could almost smell the house and its freaky, born-and-twisted-from-imagination smells. I can’t speak for the others, but I didn’t look back as I ran. Didn’t look down.
The rain had stopped when the demon left. The stars had come out of their hiding places, and that and our cellphones gave us enough to see by. Receiving any kind of signals out there in that between place, though, was not a fantasy worth entertaining.
We increased our pace.
But in front of us was a puzzle we could not solve: The house was wider, brighter, and differently styled.
It was not the right house.
With its sloping roofs and chunky shingles, and exterior galleries and projecting eaves, it looked more like—
“A cacophony of storybook, Italianate, and another style I can’t pick out,” Patrick, who being in real estate knew houses better than the rest of us, said.
By that time we were close to the structure, having been sure to put enough distance between ourselves and the trees.
“Could be that Greg did some redesigning,” Jennifer said. She stepped down off Pete. She no longer had a shovel, but I bet she would’ve used it on Greg.
“I do remember now,” Sally said, “how Greg once asked what if the house we were creating was part of another.”
“Like our house was covering up a different house?” I said.
“Maybe he was thinking the house we imagined was a piece to a puzzle," Sally said. "Imagination is something that goes on in the human brain, right? We’re only a small piece of what’s around us, though.”
“Well, we could do a deep dive right here on the front lawn,” Jennifer said, “which is sloping at a painful angle by the way, on Jungian collective unconsciousness or whatever that psychic sphere surrounding the earth is called. But a simpler explanation is that Greg was an idiot and a sadist. Like I've been saying, why didn’t he simply make the house not alive to begin with?”
“No more playing by its rules,” Patrick said. “Not this time.” He strode towards the painted wooden door. The more I peered at it, the more it was this deep, dark red. Maybe it was blood, but did it need to be? When I sprinted up to Patrick and grabbed him by the shoulder, he pulled away and then wheeled on me. “I refuse to be afraid anymore," he said. "We imagined this thing. We created it. I don’t care about Greg’s powers. It should do what we say. Not the other way around.”
“Patrick,” Sally said.
He stomped up to the door and started shouting at the house like an irate neighbor. “Hey! I know you can hear me. You come out here this time! You wanna change your looks, fine. But this go around we are not heading inside. Send someone out or we burn the place down from out here.”
I chuckled darkly under my breath, thinking Patrick was bluffing, but then wondering. I recalled last time we were in the house wanting to play what’s in my pockets because Patrick had seemed to be hiding something on him. Did he have a lighter and lighter fluid in his pockets?
Sally said, “If it can be burned down, Greg would be killed too. If he’s in there.” Pete was starting to get antsy, shifting around on his hooves.
“Good,” Jenifer said. “Let him burn along with the house.” She gave a firm nod to Patrick.
“He was our friend once,” Sally said, so quietly that it might have been carried off with the wind, if there was any in that between place. Instead, it hung in the air around us.
“How can we speak his name and that word in the same sentence,” Jennifer said, “after he kept you in that house all these years?” She spat in the direction of the house in front of us. It may’ve missed the mark and landed in some bushes that were a sickly brown, like they were rotting or covered with weird hair.
“Did you hear me!” Patrick shouted at the house. “Come out here, right now!”
We all jerked our heads the same way as the front door started to open.
Patrick spread his feet a little.
Something was coming out and my stomach lurched, nerves blazing upon seeing it, like an automatic response kicked into overdrive.
I fought to keep my sights on the thing as it came out of the house. Its skull was like folded origami with brain showing through the indentations. It had no feet. It was cloaked in black with the hood thrown down like a grim reaper ready to feast. It slammed through Patrick, shimmering like it was partly insubstantial, sending Patrick a couple of feet into the air before he slammed down on his back.
It went for Sally. Pete reared up, kicking, but the thing was not discouraged. Jennifer leaped across its path. It grabbed her by the head with bony hands that had a plasticky kind of flesh. She cracked it across the skull, but whisps darted and enclosed around her fist and her hand was trapped in the thing’s origami head, like that old fable about the kid who tries to fight a clay or wax figure and gets stuck.
I sprinted at the figure, but then I tripped and fell.
My torso clung to the thing’s body. I screamed, unable to move. I managed to tilt my head enough to look into its face, and it was screaming right back without a sound, coming out of a mouth that was creased back upon itself.
When my head went into its origami skull, I got this sensation of our brains touching and folding into each other.
Then all my senses popped out like a lightbulb. I woke up elsewhere. I thought maybe I’d been deposited in a room inside the house. I was lying on what felt like a hardwood floor that was cold. Everything was very quiet and very, very dark.
#
“Jack, you going to get some sleep?”
“Hm?” I closed the yellowed, heavily creased composition notebook I had been reading.
My husband was on the basement stairs, leaning precariously over the railing.
“That’ll break, you know,” I said.
“I’ll count on you to catch me.”
I snorted. “You’re much too far away.”
“How’s it going, anyway? The haunted house?”
I leaned back in a creaky old eyesore of wooden chair Luca and I had hidden in the basement. A pile of similar composition notebooks to the other was on the craft table I was sitting at. “It’s going. It’ll be a little while before we actually started building it. Just trying to find some inspiration, you know?”
“What’re you reading?”
“Greg’s old journals from when we were kids. They’re quite old, but he has to have made some changes. I wonder when he did. He’d be a lot better at taking the lead on this.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s nice what you and your friends are doing, trying to bring the haunted house you made up as kids to life. I’m sure he would’ve loved to see it real.”
“Yeah, real.” I laughed. “Real is a lot of things we hadn’t factored on we were kids. It’s not gonna be a Victorian mansion. We’ll be lucky if it’s a cacophony of boards, PVC pipes, and plastic sheets that barely resembles a house. It’s going to have to be wide. Trust me, coming up with rules for this thing is going to be the easy part.”
“Are you set on opening to guests outside of Halloween?”
“Yep, as one of my friends and co-conspirators said when were kids, haunted houses, the real ones, never sleep.”
“Alright, but you’re not a house. You’re a human being, and you’re working tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I felt my grin retreat into something more wistful as my husband went back up the basement stairs and shut the door behind him.
I would be seeing them all again tomorrow for the first time since Greg’s funeral. At the funeral, Sally sitting in her wheelchair far back in the shade of a cypress tree had seemed to belong to another place. I considered that maybe she was having survivor’s guilt from surviving the wreck when Greg, who she had reunited with after all these years and had started dating, hadn’t. What do you say? But that was no excuse. I lacked whatever it took to approach her then, and it had been eating me alive.
Something rattled among the spray paint cans on a plastic shelf, and one of them fell to the ground.
It hit nozzle-first, red paint spraying out from the pressure.
The paint found some cracks in the concrete. Together, the cracks almost resembled writing, or something drawn. I tilted my head and then got up from my chair. Kneeling, I could make out a shape that had a playful, rough quality, but whose form was easily recognizable.
It seemed to be an arrow. It was a couple of inches long and pointed back where I had come from, away from most of the shelves with paint, storm supplies, and tools on them and back between the craft table and basement stairs. It curved slightly, so I don't think it was pointing directly at the south-facing, plaster-covered brick wall that wasn't any different than the others. We'd had this house for a year and a half, and as far as we knew it was about eleven years old and we were the second owners.