This video is not about a haunted house as
in a house that has a ghost in it.
This video is about the history of
haunted house attractions.
Specifically, American haunted house
attractions.
A form of live entertainment
that simulates the experience of
visiting haunted locations
or storylines typical of
horror fiction.
In this video, I'm gonna touch on three
key moments in the evolution of the
American haunted house attraction:
The Depression
The Mansion
and The Fire
(laughing)
That's amazing!
That's so scary.
I spent a lot of time looking for books,
documentaries, whatever.
But I could not find any long-form
comprehensive history of haunted houses.
There are a ton of documentaries about
individual houses--whether home haunts or
professional ones--along with tons of
promotional videos or fan-made videos
about bigger and more famous attractions,
but as far as I could find, they all focus
on a limited number of houses, with little
attention paid to overall history.
For general short-form haunted house
history sources, the two I saw cited
the most were were a short but dense
section of Lisa Morton's book
"trick or treat: a history of halloween"
and a Rebekah McKendry's article for a
(questioningly) 2013
(normal voice) special edition of Fangoria
After hunting down an archived version
online, I found out later
to my surprise, while at Netherworld
that you can buy it for like eight dollars
at the Netherworld gift shop.
So I did.
Most short haunted house histories
I've found start by talking about
Marie Tussaud and The Grand Guignol.
Sorry for French pronunciation.
I'm doing my best.
Both McKendry's Fangoria piece and
Adam Warner's "The History of
Haunted Houses: A Fight for Frights
as Tastes Change"
which interviews both McKendry
and Margee Kerr, a haunted house
consultant and sociologist who studies
trends in fear, start earlier.
McKendry starts with the
Ancient Egyptians.
"Mazes, moving walls, self-opening
doors, traps and the use of snakes
were commonplace in preserving treasures
and dead royalty."
Outside of maybe some traps
like pits or like
false endings to tombs,
I had trouble finding any evidence
supporting what she's talking about here.
But we can say the myths of these traps
certainly endured
and maybe inspired the moving walls and
mummy scares of modern haunted houses.
Kerr says, "From the beginning,
Greeks, Romans, and other
ancient civilizations created Gods to
speak to their fears of an
unforgiving world.
To bring these fears to life,
they put on plays, spawning theatrical
techniques still used in today's haunts,
like fog, fake blood, and trapdoors."
Again, though
I couldn't find any evidence of use of
smoke or fog effects before the
Globe Theatre, which had occasional use
of cannons or fireworks.
And in reference to the cannons, according
to bardstage.org, "This particular Globe
Theatre special effect, eventually
leading to the fire of 1613
which lead to the total destruction of
the Globe Theatre, within just two hours."
Anyway.
"As civilizations grew and people migrated
a fear of the elements transitioned into
a fear of other people in the form of
ghosts, demons, and witches.
Christians in the Middle Ages traveled
from town to town,
putting on plays and pageants to scare
locals away from sin.
By the 1800s, industry was booming,
and with it the fear of a rapidly
unrecognizable world, one fueled by
electricity and other
mystifying inventions.
This sparked a renewed interest in
ghosts, spirits, and the supernatural.
People paid to watch magic shows, get
their fortunes told, and enter houses
supposedly haunted by spirits."
Horror was incorporated into all sorts
of theatre and attractions.
According to a whole bunch of different
sources, Marie Tussauds