The first recognizable modern haunted house is often said to be the “Haunted Cottage” constructed by fairground manufacturers Orton & Spooner around 1915 for a fairground in Liphook, England. Though pretty tame by today’s standards, audiences of the time loved winding their way though the dark on moving floors, feeling cold air blasts and listening to recorded screams. Amazingly, the attraction can still be visited: After a 2017 restoration, the ride opened for visitors at the Hollycombe Working Steam Museum in Liphook.
Yet the standalone haunted houses we know today really go back to the Great Depression. In the 1930s, American parents and authorities were eager to distract kids from more troublesome Halloween traditions involving pranks and property destruction. Groups of Depression-era parents would create “trails of terror” so that kids could go house-to-house experiencing DIY haunts, often in basements. These productions frequently featured tunnels or mazes, perhaps lined with strips of old fur and raw liver on the walls or hairnets dangling from the ceiling like cobwebs. One 1930s handbook for
creating these haunts even suggested theming different parts of the maze as the “Ghouls Gaol,” “Mad House,” and “Dead Man’s Gulch.”
By the 1960s, civic organizations such as the United States Junior Chamber (or Jaycees) had realized that haunted houses were a good way to fundraise. In fact, these haunted houses became such a lucrative strategy that one chapter head in Bloomington, Illinois formed the “Haunted House Company” and wrote a manual to help other chapters — becoming America’s first haunted house expert in the process.
Like the phantasmagorias of old, many of these haunted houses included Gothic elements drawn from literature, like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Dracula, alongside creepy creatures like spiders and bats, plus spooky music and mist. Usually, there was no overarching narrative thread — just a trip through a building guaranteed to shatter and splatter your nerves.
Media Release/InterestingFacts.com
