The History of Haunted Houses

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After hunting down an archived version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