The night has taken over on the Friday before Halloween. The season already festive with spooks. I’m heading over to the haunted old gym, where Last Passage Haunts exists, to meet the Wrangell Sentinel’s reporter, Jonathan Dawe. We decided it would be a good idea to really immerse ourselves in the community – with the living and the…
Chamber music seeps outside whenever someone opens the doors to enter or exit.
“I’m normally scared in Wrangell on a Friday night,” Dawe said. “We’re gonna see how this compares to other weeks.”
We step inside, the door slams behind us. A creepy blown up organist with a top hat and long grey hair greets us. Next to him, a skeleton Minnie Mouse with flashing lights. Then Count Roher, our guide, appears in his velvet overcoat after we pay our donations.
Fog hangs low in a graveyard with a towering skeleton, a man’s voice narrates the scene while the chamber music continues.
As we walk through the dark, I see someone familiar, from my childhood. I think he’s a shorter version of Jason, from Friday the 13th. I think, so I ask.
“Who are you?”
“I’m not allowed to say,” the young Jason said.
I ask, “Who are you dressed up as?”
“I don’t know,” he said, without any care.
I’m thinking this isn’t so bad. My nerves are steady, for now. But a woman with a flickering candle appears.
“This way…,” she melodically said.
She leads us through another room filled with an upbeat, yet eerily song. There’s a spooky kind of crow human here. Actually very impressive. She’s about my height, 5’5”, and is flapping her long wings slowly around me.
(Ok, although I love what I’m seeing, I don’t like it when these creepy creatures are circling around me.)
We end up in a dark maze tangled with cob webs. Then, a clown honks from the shadows while a waltz fills the air.
As we move through, another creature walks by, holding a platter, offering it to the passers-by. Her voice breaks the silence.
I bravely ask, “Hi, what is this?”
“A plate full of brains,” she responded
“Delicious,” Jonathan, the reporter, said with a laugh, keeping the edge off of the waltz tunes.
Once I realized my own brain was spared, we exit into the cool night air.
Count Roher, or Damon Roher, followed us outside. He is the organizer of Last Passage Haunts.
“I’ve been doing the large scale haunt for two years now,” he said. “But I got started doing home haunts, I want to say about four years ago.”
He said around 30 volunteers made this happen and all proceeds go to the Salvation Army youth programs.
Outside, I see a crowd of excited kids. Ten-year-old Lilly Edens will be dressing up as Iris the Goddess of Color from the Percy Jackson books. She tells me how Halloween is festive for her.
“The fun and the scares and dressing up and the candy,” she said.
Nine-year-old Bo Ritchie said he’ll be ketchup, his friend will be a French fry. But for him, Halloween has a deeper meaning.
“It’s kind of cool, because I guess you can kind of remember the people that you lost, like my grandma (who) passed away,” he said. “So when Halloween comes, I can kind of remember.”
He said he’s gone through the haunted house twice.
“It’s pretty scary,” Ritchie said. “The first time, I almost fainted, but I was all right. And then the second time, there were some new things. As I came out, I was really scared about those ones, but after that, I was all right.”
As for my reporting friend Jonathan’s favorite part?
“I think it was a girl in a black outfit with a plague mask,” he said.
I asked him, “Did you survive?”
“Barely,” he responded as we heard screams from inside the haunted old gym.
