- Mar 22, 2023
- 6 min read

The Origins of the Haunted House

We all know and love a good haunted house. Theme parks all over the country set up their own versions around Halloween to treat guests to a pleasantly terrifying experience. I mean, what could be better than walking blindly into a dark building, strobe lights flashing, with literal strangers dressed up in horror costumes and makeup jumping out at you from all angles?

Here in Florida, the most popular haunted houses can be found at Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights. Typically there will be a few different haunted houses with their own themes, so the people visiting can pick their poison or try them all.

As you probably have seen, it has even become a trend among even talk show hosts and their guests, making for some great content.

But where did the idea for haunted houses come from? Who began the tradition and why? These are all questions I ask myself every year around Halloween. It wasn't until recently though that I decided to do some research. The stories I found were extremely interesting.

Marie Tussaud’s Wax Museums

Have you heard of Marie Tussaud's wax museum or wax figures?

The first ever museum was really something. Marie had made a full exhibition of wax sculptures that closely resembled French figures like King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. People who saw the exhibition described the sculptures as being so remarkably accurate in the features of each person’s face.

How did she make them look so accurate? During the French Revolution, she was spared from execution after agreeing to make death masks of any famous people who died by the guillotine. One of these famous people was Maximilien de Robespierre. It is said that after his execution, Marie picked up his head from the basket and sculpted the likeness. She took the original with her when she went to London in 1802. From there, copies were made.

After creating a decent collection of these sculptures, Marie opened her exhibition permanently in London and named it the "Chamber of Horrors" which some people still call the wax museums to this day.

French Theater

Yet another contributor to haunted houses as we know them was of course, you guessed it, French theater! A theater in Paris called the Grand Guignol oftentimes would have macabre themes. Shows would include depictions of graphic dismemberment. Max Maurey, the theater's director, even stated at one point he “judged each performance by the number of people who passed out” in the audience.

The First House of Horrors

The first house of horrors popped up in Liphook, however. It was probably the first true form of commercial horror attraction. It was then that people began to crave more experiences like these. More and more houses like this one popped up all over the globe. It became a form of recreation for the most daring and brave individuals. And later, it would become a solution to an ongoing problem, as well.

How it Caught On - The Great Depression

By the 1930s, American parents were fed up with the mischief and trickery that would ensue every Halloween night by young kids - especially teenage boys. Kids would run havoc on the town, stealing fence gates and putting them high up in trees, trashing gardens, and even somehow stopping trains by putting fake straw-stuffed bodies on the tracks.

Halloween was a night night run by kids. Parents needed a way to get their kids out of trouble. Basically, cities were desperate, and what they came up with was essentially bribery - or what we now call, trick or treating. If kids went door-to-door in their neighborhoods, they would get FREE CANDY! Some home-owners took it a step further and made the earliest form of the modern haunted house. They would decorate their basements with all kinds of spooky decorations, in which kids would walk through for a good scare and a piece of candy.

A 1937 party pamphlet even described to parents how to make a "trail of terror" for their kids. The pamphlets instructed, “an outside entrance leads to a rendezvous with ghosts and witches in the cellar or attic. Hang old fur, strips of raw liver on walls, where one feels his way to dark steps....Weird moans and howls come from dark corners, damp sponges and hair nets hung from the ceiling touch his face....Doorways are blockaded so that guests must crawl through a long dark tunnel....At the end he hears a plaintive 'meow' and sees a black cardboard cat outlined in luminous paint…”

Disney’s Influence

The haunted house as we know it today, however, didn't really become popular until Walt Disney brought it to life in the Disneyland park. His take on the haunted house drew inspiration from the Evergreen House and the Winchester Mystery House.

The Evergreen House is a huge mansion built in the mid 19th century, and now functions as both a museum and a library. The house is located in Baltimore, Maryland and features luxurious amenities including a bowling alley, a gymnasium, and a billiards room. There's nothing scary about this house, except for the idea that some people might consider its halls to be haunted.

The Winchester Mystery House might ring a bell. It's a home originally owned by Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Wirt Winchester. ‘The longest home renovation,’ people often call it. Because of her inheritance of the Winchester Repeating Arms fortune, it is believed that Sarah was haunted by the spirits of those who died by the “Gun that Won the West."

Sarah allegedly never stopped building and adding random additions to the home in order ‘allegedly’ to confuse the spirits that haunted her. Some say the spirits forced her to never stop building until finally she passed in 1922. The home is now complete with 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 160 rooms, 52 skylights, 47 stairways and fireplaces, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens. The entire home totals 24,000 square feet. At the time, the price tag was $5 million dollars. In today’s money, that's equivalent to $71 million.

So Disney took inspiration from these homes, and after two decades The Haunted Mansion finally opened. Its main feature is a 90-foot long ballroom sequence complete with “dancing ghouls at a birthday party.” Not only was the attraction sensational - and sensational as in on a single day after launch, 82,000 people walked through it - but it was also revolutionary. Disney utilized state-of-the-art scare technology. Ghosts no longer were just a hanging white bedsheet. They were complex illusions formed by refracted light. This light was projected to make ghost-like images. And what's more, these images could move, speak, and sing.

Smaller Organizations

From then on, haunted houses became a part of the culture. Some organizations would run their own versions of a haunted house to raise money. It became popular for theme parks and farms to host their own Halloween haunted house events, which blew up so much that it became a several week long event.

Even Evangelical Christians made their own anti-Halloween attraction, which were specifically designed to show people the consequences for sinning. Among these, introduced by Liberty University and Jerry Falwell in 1972, was one of the first 'hell houses.’ In 2015, 27,000 guests attended one of today's most popular versions of the 'hell house' called Scaremare. 4,000 of those people supposedly responded to the gospel.

Hollywood’s Influence

As Hollywood began to embrace the slasher genre with movies like Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th, the haunted house industry continued to boom. Of course, this is how the movie-themed houses began.

Tragedy at the Haunted House

It wasn't always all fun and games, though. In 1984, a fire broke out in a haunted house at an amusement park in Jackson, New Jersey. Eight people were killed and seven were injured as a result of the incident. After this, stronger safety regulations were put in place for haunted houses and walks. And as advertisements grew to be a bigger and bigger part of these attractions, volunteer-based attractions struggled. It was an impossible competition. Thus, 'professional' haunted houses erupted.

Conclusion

Throughout 2014, approximately 2,700 haunted houses were operated. The industry as a whole is worth $300 million dollars, according to an NBC report.

Today, we know the industry has evolved even further. There are now zombie runs, escape rooms, and other fright games. So whatever kind of scare you’re craving, there’s an attraction to satisfy it.

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