Haunted
Houses
Michigan has many attractions, appealing to its residents and tourists from abroad. Some of these include sinus-aggravating weather, the Mackinac Bridge, Stix Billiards, Pontiac, and the Lethal Lowz. But none of these compare to Michigan’s prized possessions: the (approximately) 12 million haunted houses across the state! In the spirit of ghosts and shitty costumes everywhere, my ghost hunting posse and I visited three of the finest—and most terrifying!—haunted locations that Michigan has to offer. Read on to learn how I rated these ghoulishly horrific hot spots, but keep your soul at bay!
Realm of Darkness, B-: The Realm of Darkness, located somewhere outside of Pontiac inside a former Farmer Jack (one day, a dozen years ago, under a full moon, werewolves sieged the ‘Jack and killed all of its employees. Legend has it that these werewolves still occupy the deserted hallways, in search of the seven dragon balls), is probably the greatest haunted house I’ve seen yet, excluding a drunken venture to Erebus a few years back. While Realm of Darkness does not yield glorious airborne caterpillars and gigantic attacking crocodiles, it does have many different doorways to choose from and scarecrows on stilts. Also, spikes come down on you in an elevator. Had I not ducked, I’m not sure I would be writing this article right now.. Or maybe I would be, but from within the realm of ghouls and goblins!! The owner of this House clearly has a disturbing fetish for giant aliens and dragons, and you ghost enthusiasts will encounter many of these along your journey to defeat the mighty tower wizard! Yes, you heard right: there is actually a storyline! Unfortunately, Jeff Hynes, one of my fellow ghost hunters, didn’t pick the right doors, so the only thing we found was deep disappointment and the short ride home. All in all, it was a fun little excursion, and I’d recommend it to anyone but the easily-petrified!
Haunted Terror Zone, C: Ah, the Haunted Terror Zone! Located near 26-mile and Van Dyke, this one combines comic relief and sheer terror into a magnificent blend of jawsome! Offering three separate attractions, this place promised to be a good time.. However, in this case, three is far from better than one. I would go so far as to say that it’s worse than one! At the Haunted Terror Zone, you have to wait in three separate lines of equal length. Needless to say, we were not pleased. First, we made our trek through the Haunted House.. Well, we started to, until we heard the startling screams being emitted from one of our own, none other than Sergio Sandoval, our token Mexican! Apparently, the smoke factor was deep into the red zone, and Sergio’s asthma was off the hook. He asked a friendly ghoul to get him the hell out of there, and Sarah and I took the opportunity to have sex in the clown room. Just kidding of course.. It was actually in the Goblin Penitentiary. We were far from the clown room at this point!
After the House, we waited in line for the Haunted Forest. The Pilot and Camouflaged Predator were harassing Sarah and offering her drinks while we waited and she whimpered. Finally, it was our turn. The forest was pretty creepy, I guess, although extremely predictable. Sergio dared go along and was rewarded with an enormous amount of smoke in our faces at the finale of it, where we met Death himself. Death isn’t all that bad. He just followed us around. He was probably waiting for Toni to trip or something, so he could swoop down, snatch her up and take her deep into the forest, probably to make Death babies.
Finally, we had made it to the 3-D maze, which consisted of the Clown House, shrub maze and Strobe Light Hell Tent. Sergio decided to sit this one out. The smoke in the Forest was the epitome of foreboding, and we were in for a lot more where that came from. We wore 3D glasses during our walk through the Clown House, and let me tell you, technology these days is simply amazing. There were rainbows and everything. After we gave our glasses to the Arch Clown, he followed us for a bit and we went through the shrub maze. The shrub maze was like an anti-climax. We could clearly see the route and there was not one little ghoul or devil or undead frog to scare us out of our wits. The Strobe Light Hell Tent was pretty cool. There was lots of screaming and flashing lights throughout the entire structure. Also, a bonus was the faggots in front of us trying to scare us. Toni, Sarah and I morphed into one super-being and waddled our way through the house, finally completing our journey and meeting up with Sergio.
The Other Haunted House I Didn’t Bother To Learn the Name of, D-: The third haunted house we’ve gone to so far is right down the rode from the Haunted Terror Zone. For this endeavor, we brought a drunken Matt Baker with us, sacrificing some horror factor for comic relief. First was the haunted house, which, strangely, was the exact same layout as the 3D house at the Haunted Terror Zone. Knowing full well what to expect, I bravely led the way down the halls of doom. This time, however, the Arch Clown at the end of the gauntlet kept his distance, only directing us to give our glasses back. This we did, albeit reluctantly. Damned clowns. Then it was on to the simplest, yet most complex maze ever. All we needed do was head down the first path we encountered, yet I decided to lead us down every other trail first. This was favorable in that the same characters scared the same two girls over and over again, but it did become quite predictable. Finally we came upon another house, or school, or synagogue; hell, I don’t know what it was, but there was a butcher conducting evil butcher experiments, and a classroom, and some other stuff, like coffins. It was okay. We located the exit and prepared for the second and final trip: The Haunted Hayride to Hell Itself.
The hayride just plain sucked. I liked the stuff they had set up, and the speaker played his role as well as you could expect a young hick to play a young hick, but it was somehow missing something. I’m thinking that what it was missing was originality. Everywhere we went, some clown (not literally this time) would jump out of the bushes and chase us. One guy hit me with a chainsaw and I would’ve lost a leg had he used a real chainsaw, the pussy. No, this part of the Unnamed Haunted Place was an utter failure. If I haven’t made it clear enough yet, I am not impressed, redneck assholes. So that was the end of that place. The only interesting feature, although unintended by the fine men and women who run the place, was the interesting array of black people on the hayride, who made such intellectual suggestions as, ‘COME BACK HERE, YOU CAN SCARE ME BETTA THAN THAT.’ The highlight of that whole place was the group of idiots who wouldn’t shut their fucking mouths on the hayride.