October 31, 2023 • 9 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Halloween expert Lisa Morton is going to be unpacking the history of the Halloween Haunted House, which is directly tied into today’s practice of Trick-or-Treating. Lisa is the author of Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. By the turn of the 20th century, Halloween in America was nothing more than a day of pranking—kind of like April Fools' Day.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Today, Lisa is
going to be unpacking the history of the Halloween Haunted House,
which is directly tied into today's practice of trick or treating.
Lisa is the author of Trick or Treat, A History
of Halloween. By the turn of the twentieth century, Halloween
in America was nothing more than a day of pranking,
(00:33):
kind of like April Fool's Day. Here's Lisa Morton with
the story.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
So it was all good fun at first, but then
by the twentieth century, as America is becoming much more
urbanized and more populated, these pranks move into the cities,
and when they move into the cities, they become much
less nice. Now they are about destroying things, about shattering
glass bowls and windows, They are about setting fires, tripping pedestrians,
(01:05):
and by the thirties they are causing millions of dollars
of damage. And this is also during the Great Depression,
when a lot of these cities don't even have the
money to pay for all of the damage that's resulting
from this vandalism, and a lot of cities at this
point considered dropping Halloween or trying to ban it. But
(01:26):
fortunately there were a few places where cooler heads prevailed
and said, you know, maybe we can buy these kids
off instead of trying to ban this holiday, because that
could backfire on us, which it would have. And they
got together and they actually put out little pamphlets in
many of the cities that would tell homeowners how to
do this. So these little pamphlets would suggest that the
(01:50):
homeowners get together again. We're still during the Great Depression.
A lot of homeowners don't have money to spare for
parties and so forth. But if enough of the houses
got together and street, they could put something together for
the kids. And these were called house to house parties.
And the way they would work was the first house
might give the kids a very simple costume, probably just
(02:11):
a sheet with two holes cut in it. The kids
would get to be ghost. The next house would give
the kids maybe a little spooky entertainment, like they'd have
the basement the lights shut off, a little thing where
the kids would have to go through the basement, somebody
might jump out and frighten them. This becomes kind of
the very earliest version of our modern haunted attraction. And
(02:33):
then the next house would give the kids a little
treat trick or treat fortunately did not go away because
it remained something that was such an important part of
the sort of psyche of so many baby boomers, and
they wanted to share that with their kids. But they
also wanted to continue their love for Halloween, so they
started decorating their yards extensively. And this really picks up
(02:58):
speed in the eighties and the nineteen nineth and we
start to have also huge scale professional haunted attractions emerging
in the nineties. The haunted attractions had originally come, as
we mentioned earlier, from things like basement parties and so forth.
And there were early things called trails of Terror which
(03:20):
were held outdoors, and these were things where kids would
have to make their way through a little forest area
that had been set up to scare them, with people
hiding behind trees or spooky things draped in the trees.
And in the seventies we started to get two nonprofit
groups that realized they could make a lot of money
(03:41):
with haunted attractions. The first one was the j c's,
the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the second one was
Campus Life, which was a Christian organization, and Campus Life
kind of took the haunted attractions from the Jac's which
had been fairly innocent, and added whole new lag of
gore and violence to them, and that really became the
(04:04):
model for the haunted attraction moving forward from there. So
by the eighties we start to get the big amusement
parks in southern California mainly who realize that they have
this dead spot in their calendar every fall and maybe
they can take this model of these haunted attractions and
turn a serious fall profit from that. Knots is the
(04:26):
first one that tries it, turning knots Berry Farm of
course into not scary farm, and it becomes gigantic for them.
It began in the mid eighties, it picked up speed
now of course, it is a gigantic thing that Knots
does every year with something like a dozen different mazes
and scare zones, and it's become a huge part of
(04:49):
their yearly business plan, and it's spread of course to
other amusement parks, and it has now even spread to
amusement parks outside of the US. There are amusement parks
in Europe especially that are now holding Halloween celebrations. One
of the other amusement park haunted attractions that contributed gigantically
(05:11):
to the growth of the modern haunted attraction industry was
the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. It is just incredibly influential.
It cannot really be understated what an important part of
the development of hanted attractions that was. It had been
conceived early on at Disneyland when Walt was still alive.
(05:31):
It was something he always wanted to do, and for
years his imagineers debated how to put it together. They
considered originally doing it as a walk through attraction, which
of course would be even more similar to modern haunted attractions.
Walt's idea was always to take the old dark rides
that you could find at carnivals and sort of upgrade them,
(05:54):
make them much more technologically savvy and much cleaner and
more involving, have an actual story throughout that kind of thing.
And he unfortunately passed away before the Haunted Mansion was completed,
but his imagineers continued with it. They always had a
little bit of a debate about whether to go more
(06:14):
scary or more whimsical with it, and in the end
they kind of compromised. They gave it the best of
both worlds. When it opened in nineteen sixty nine. It
was really a gigantic explosion in terms of haunted attractions.
I mean, no longer was it something you might find
it a carnival where you're in a rickety car and
(06:36):
there's a nasty old skeleton on a string overhead. They
used both some very modern technology and some old technology
that they repurposed in such brilliant ways. The whole idea,
for example, of when you go past the haunted ballroom
and you see the whirling figures, uses an old technology
(06:56):
that dates back to the nineteenth century called Pepper's glass,
which is a special kind of mirror that is positioned
in such a way or special glass that it reflects
the images and makes them look translucent and so forth.
The whirling ghosts are actually figures that are below you
when you are going along in your car, but the
(07:18):
glass is tilted and positioned in such a way that
you're seeing the translucent figures in front of you. And
of course the design of the Haunted Mansion was sheer genius.
And it's interesting how many professional haunters, because yes there
are professional haunters, will point at the Haunted Mansion as
the seminal thing that they saw as a child that
(07:40):
made them want to pursue this as a career. So
this big scale professional haunt spreads to independent haunts as well.
There are now around three thousand professional independent haunts that
are set up every Halloween throughout the US. That again
is another idea that is spreading around the world, and
(08:01):
these haunts created an entire industry. The Haunted attractions industry.
Estimates of their net worth now run as high as
a billion a year. They have taken some of the
revenue that used to go to film industry and are
putting it into these haunted attractions as they are using
(08:21):
a lot of the film technicians. People who used to
work in special effects are now finding that there may
be out of work in Hollywood because of CGI and computers,
but they can go to a haunted attraction and they
can get employment there, and in some of these cases
they're getting employment all year round from this. So the
haunted attractions become gigantic and are now such a huge
(08:45):
part of our modern Halloween. The haunted attractions kind of
sit right alongside trigger treating for the kids, haunted attractions
for the older kids, and for the adults.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
And great work is always by Greg Hangler on the
storytelling and production and thanks for the least. A Morton,
author of Trick Retreat, go to Amazon dot com to
find her book, The Story of the Haunted House, and
so much more here on our American Stories
And we continue with our American stories. Today, Lisa is
going to be unpacking the history of the Halloween Haunted House,
which is directly tied into today's practice of trick or treating.
Lisa is the author of Trick or Treat, A History
of Halloween. By the turn of the twentieth century, Halloween
in America was nothing more than a day of pranking,
(00:33):
kind of like April Fool's Day. Here's Lisa Morton with
the story.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
So it was all good fun at first, but then
by the twentieth century, as America is becoming much more
urbanized and more populated, these pranks move into the cities,
and when they move into the cities, they become much
less nice. Now they are about destroying things, about shattering
glass bowls and windows, They are about setting fires, tripping pedestrians,
(01:05):
and by the thirties they are causing millions of dollars
of damage. And this is also during the Great Depression,
when a lot of these cities don't even have the
money to pay for all of the damage that's resulting
from this vandalism, and a lot of cities at this
point considered dropping Halloween or trying to ban it. But
(01:26):
fortunately there were a few places where cooler heads prevailed
and said, you know, maybe we can buy these kids
off instead of trying to ban this holiday, because that
could backfire on us, which it would have. And they
got together and they actually put out little pamphlets in
many of the cities that would tell homeowners how to
do this. So these little pamphlets would suggest that the
(01:50):
homeowners get together again. We're still during the Great Depression.
A lot of homeowners don't have money to spare for
parties and so forth. But if enough of the houses
got together and street, they could put something together for
the kids. And these were called house to house parties.
And the way they would work was the first house
might give the kids a very simple costume, probably just
(02:11):
a sheet with two holes cut in it. The kids
would get to be ghost. The next house would give
the kids maybe a little spooky entertainment, like they'd have
the basement the lights shut off, a little thing where
the kids would have to go through the basement, somebody
might jump out and frighten them. This becomes kind of
the very earliest version of our modern haunted attraction. And
(02:33):
then the next house would give the kids a little
treat trick or treat fortunately did not go away because
it remained something that was such an important part of
the sort of psyche of so many baby boomers, and
they wanted to share that with their kids. But they
also wanted to continue their love for Halloween, so they
started decorating their yards extensively. And this really picks up
(02:58):
speed in the eighties and the nineteen nineth and we
start to have also huge scale professional haunted attractions emerging
in the nineties. The haunted attractions had originally come, as
we mentioned earlier, from things like basement parties and so forth.
And there were early things called trails of Terror which
(03:20):
were held outdoors, and these were things where kids would
have to make their way through a little forest area
that had been set up to scare them, with people
hiding behind trees or spooky things draped in the trees.
And in the seventies we started to get two nonprofit
groups that realized they could make a lot of money
(03:41):
with haunted attractions. The first one was the j c's,
the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the second one was
Campus Life, which was a Christian organization, and Campus Life
kind of took the haunted attractions from the Jac's which
had been fairly innocent, and added whole new lag of
gore and violence to them, and that really became the
(04:04):
model for the haunted attraction moving forward from there. So
by the eighties we start to get the big amusement
parks in southern California mainly who realize that they have
this dead spot in their calendar every fall and maybe
they can take this model of these haunted attractions and
turn a serious fall profit from that. Knots is the
(04:26):
first one that tries it, turning knots Berry Farm of
course into not scary farm, and it becomes gigantic for them.
It began in the mid eighties, it picked up speed
now of course, it is a gigantic thing that Knots
does every year with something like a dozen different mazes
and scare zones, and it's become a huge part of
(04:49):
their yearly business plan, and it's spread of course to
other amusement parks, and it has now even spread to
amusement parks outside of the US. There are amusement parks
in Europe especially that are now holding Halloween celebrations. One
of the other amusement park haunted attractions that contributed gigantically
(05:11):
to the growth of the modern haunted attraction industry was
the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. It is just incredibly influential.
It cannot really be understated what an important part of
the development of hanted attractions that was. It had been
conceived early on at Disneyland when Walt was still alive.
(05:31):
It was something he always wanted to do, and for
years his imagineers debated how to put it together. They
considered originally doing it as a walk through attraction, which
of course would be even more similar to modern haunted attractions.
Walt's idea was always to take the old dark rides
that you could find at carnivals and sort of upgrade them,
(05:54):
make them much more technologically savvy and much cleaner and
more involving, have an actual story throughout that kind of thing.
And he unfortunately passed away before the Haunted Mansion was completed,
but his imagineers continued with it. They always had a
little bit of a debate about whether to go more
(06:14):
scary or more whimsical with it, and in the end
they kind of compromised. They gave it the best of
both worlds. When it opened in nineteen sixty nine. It
was really a gigantic explosion in terms of haunted attractions.
I mean, no longer was it something you might find
it a carnival where you're in a rickety car and
(06:36):
there's a nasty old skeleton on a string overhead. They
used both some very modern technology and some old technology
that they repurposed in such brilliant ways. The whole idea,
for example, of when you go past the haunted ballroom
and you see the whirling figures, uses an old technology
(06:56):
that dates back to the nineteenth century called Pepper's glass,
which is a special kind of mirror that is positioned
in such a way or special glass that it reflects
the images and makes them look translucent and so forth.
The whirling ghosts are actually figures that are below you
when you are going along in your car, but the
(07:18):
glass is tilted and positioned in such a way that
you're seeing the translucent figures in front of you. And
of course the design of the Haunted Mansion was sheer genius.
And it's interesting how many professional haunters, because yes there
are professional haunters, will point at the Haunted Mansion as
the seminal thing that they saw as a child that
(07:40):
made them want to pursue this as a career. So
this big scale professional haunt spreads to independent haunts as well.
There are now around three thousand professional independent haunts that
are set up every Halloween throughout the US. That again
is another idea that is spreading around the world, and
(08:01):
these haunts created an entire industry. The Haunted attractions industry.
Estimates of their net worth now run as high as
a billion a year. They have taken some of the
revenue that used to go to film industry and are
putting it into these haunted attractions as they are using
(08:21):
a lot of the film technicians. People who used to
work in special effects are now finding that there may
be out of work in Hollywood because of CGI and computers,
but they can go to a haunted attraction and they
can get employment there, and in some of these cases
they're getting employment all year round from this. So the
haunted attractions become gigantic and are now such a huge
(08:45):
part of our modern Halloween. The haunted attractions kind of
sit right alongside trigger treating for the kids, haunted attractions
for the older kids, and for the adults.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
And great work is always by Greg Hangler on the
storytelling and production and thanks for the least. A Morton,
author of Trick Retreat, go to Amazon dot com to
find her book, The Story of the Haunted House, and
so much more here on our American Stories
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