Spooked - The Haunted Haunted House

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Aspiring filmmaker Chase finds the perfect place to shoot his horror film... the Arx Mortis Haunted House. But beware: inside this Halloween attraction, not all of the scares are fake.Thank you, Chase Barnett, for sharing your story with Spooked! Check out Chase’s podcast Holed Up.Produced by Erick Yáñez, original score by Nicholas Marks, artwork by Teo DucotSpooked has a Youtube Channel! Subscribe now for a new scary story each week.Happy Spooky Season Spooky PPL! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chin Chin. And I'll blow the house in. The Season of the Wolf is at the door. I go to my dear friends, Jim and Kate's house. A little before Halloween to help them decorate to transform their lovely home into a haunted house. Some fake cobwebs here, a few candles, a badly carved pumpkin, maybe a heavy pour of brandy

for Jim and I. And then we're ready to greet the first wave of trick-or-treaters. Now the little, little, little kids come first. Eyes big with fright, walking up the stairs past the candles, still propelled forward by the promise of candy. Trick-a-tree? They make sure they get to kick-cats for their almond joys and watch them. I love that they imagine this is what a haunted house looks like.

I think it brings me a special joy because I've never, not once, gone trick-or-treating as a child. But I didn't need to imagine a haunted house because my grandparents, they lived in one. And I knew the ghost too, because before he became a ghost, he used to give me piggyback rides and bowls of ice cream. Who's my uncle? Lewis And later When he returned to Haunt his childhood home

I knew why he smashed plates on the ground While sometimes he screamed, he cried While occasionally the entire house shook as if in the middle of a maelstrom He was so angry, furious

that his own brother accepted his challenge and finally did what he dared him to do. Would he shouted, what he taught it in the dude, do it. You ain't gonna do it, do it, do it. That day I hid under dining room table, do it! Pulled the trigger, and since then, not only has he haunted that house, he's haunted whole lives.

His fury rattling the windows, cracking the foundation, making the walls bleed, splitting the walls bleed, bleed, splitting my family into pieces. A play act. Every Halloween, pretending that this home of love and warmth and joy of shadow and terror, trick-a-tree.

I give them the candy for their bravery and making it this far. And I hope this lie, this charade, and hope it works. I hope it convinces them that they are close enough. No further.

that you never want to experience a real haunted house. Not because of the haunting. That's just the echo because of what has to happen. Spook star. Thad is a lonely man. He's sitting at a desk, frantically writing a list. Step one. Check the front gate.

Step two. Prepare. He starts boarding up the windows in the door. Somebody. Must be after him. Step three, cut everyone off. Outside his cabin, there's a woman running, screaming, trying to get in, but he refuses her.

Eventually, the beating on his door stops. And lifts his head and suddenly, over his shoulder, there's a story, right? This is a story that rookie filmmaker Chase. He wanted to tell. The thing is, He has no idea where to begin. But Chase does have some buddies.

So he recruits his best friend Tiffany, his old pal David. A few phone calls later, he actually finds his dream location to film his very first short film. A place in the deep south. But just like in the movies, fiction meets reality. It's called the Ark's Mortis Haunted House. So me and Tiffany loaded up the car and drove, to Florence, Alabama. We arrived around 4.35 o'clock.

We are in a more rural part of the town. All we could see is nothing but trees, nothing but trees, nothing but trees, and then boom, there it is. Arks Mortis bright and shiny sitting on top of the hill. It looked like an old-school Transylvania Manor.

It had big fake wooden doors. The walls are painted in this Gothic like purple, but it's set in the sun so long. It's kind of gray. The middle part kind of has that psycho house steeple. And it had this circular window in it. For someone with no budget, I was in heaven. I mean, as a horror filmmaker,

what better way to do that than go into a made-up haunted house? house for your set design, your costumes, your wardrobe. That was all there for me. Me and Tiffany meet up with Howell in the parking lot. He was a family friend who kind of managed Arks Mortis and helped build most of it. I'm talking about the shots that I want to get. I'm telling how the story behind it, because he hadn't really heard it. And that's when I realized I have no main actor. I knew Hal had acted a little bit. So I turned to him and I said, hey man,

instead of just helping me with this thing, do you want to be in this thing? And Howell was gung-ho as Howell always is? He said, yes. David, my producer friend, he showed up with his wife and these two guys I'd never met before

that were also just willing to help. And we're ready to rock and roll at that point. Walking through Arixomortis, was like walking through a horror film. The hallways were cramped and claustrophobic. There were opening holes in the walls where the scare actors would jump out at you.

There was a body bag room and just had these fake chains and these fake body bags like hanging. And you'd have to walk through to get to the next room. We eventually ended up in this hospital. You had the fake flooring, the curtains, the gurne, the gurneys, there were fake bodies there, and they were bloody. I'm walking down this bridge, and I remember it just being so quiet.

And the next thing I hear was blood-curdling scream, like someone was being disemboweled next to me. I immediately turned to my left and jumped back, and I see this animatronic hanging on this fence. It was a guy who had his hands tied up to the top of a chain link fence. He had no legs. His guts were being ripped out. And he was gyrating on the fence. I was told by how that that would happen. We were warned as we were walking to the house that we may trigger some animatronics.

And that some were pressure censored on the floor. It means as you step down, they go off. At that point, I knew we would just have to avoid that guy at all cost. I could not have dreamed for a better place to film a horror film. But Tiffany's getting kind of creeped out. She looks at me and says, I know it's a fake haunted house, but it's still creepy as hell. I reminded her, this is just fake.

Don't let that psych you out. There were some makeup designers there that were fixing up the place for the upcoming Halloween season. They saw what we were doing and got kind of interested. So we let them take Tiffany into their wardrobe room, and they started working on some makeup for her to turn her into this demon, this entity. We started setting up in the haunted library

because it was the only room in the house that we could make look like the inside of an abandoned cabin. There was two bookshelves in the room. It had a desk in there. too. And I remember thinking, it needs to look like this guy's boarded himself up inside. So we need some boards. Howell had told me about some run-down cabins located on the top of a hill in almost like the backyard of Arxmortis. They were being used for storage. And that's where we could find plywood, wooden planks, two-by-fours. So me and David are walking up this hill.

it's gotten dark at this point we're in the middle of the woods and then I see the two cabins inside they had just excess plywood that they need to build stuff inside the house David was shining his flashlight around looking for the perfect

pieces of wood when all of a sudden I could hear this like gravelly noise like someone walking on gravel. It sounded like somebody was close to us. And as I turned to look at where the noise is,

it stops. And was like, you heard that too, right? And David said, yeah, I did. And he had this look of surprise on his face. I'm kind of standing there frozen, wondering if someone from the building is following us. But I know everyone's back there, so this has got to be just an animal. We grabbed the planks that we needed and scurried back down the hill.

In about five seconds in our walk down the hill, we could hear the footsteps again following us. We stopped, looked at each other, and turned around, and just like before, the footsteps came to an abrupt stop. David looks at me and we both kind of have this silent agreement that we're going to hurry down the hill. As we get back to the room, I remember dropping the planks down and seeing David's two friends. And they were kind of shaking a little bit. They were a little pale. They were asking us, were you guys in that other room? Were you in that hospital over there?

I was like, no. Me and David were up on the hill. Is Howell in that room? No. Howell's in the styling area with Tiffany. They were like, well, we heard footsteps in that other room. And then we'd hear scratching on the wall. So we thought you guys were playing a prank on us at first.

I look at both of them and I'm telling them the same thing I told Tiffany. All of this is fake. This is a fake haunted house. Don't let it get to you. When we began filming, it was around 10.30 at night. I had a slip of sticky notes in my sweaty back pocket that had all my shots on them. Different takes of how writing the list. How he was sweating, looking disheveled, close-ups of the pen moving frantically across the list paper.

We were speeding through the shots pretty quickly, but I was getting so many because I was so amateur. Everything was coming out blurry or out of focus. David is, he's in educator mode. He is helping me the whole way through. And Howe was, he just had to. look nervous, anxious, and depressed, and scared. That's all he had to do, and he did that. Fine. He was okay.

At 2 a.m., we finally get Tiffany back in. She's in full makeup. They airbrushed her face to make it seem very pale and gray, like she'd been dead for a very long time. And they accented her veins with this hint of navy blue. She looked like a tortured, demon that was coming back from hell. Everyone else has left at this point.

It's just Tiffany, me, Howe, David, and his wife. We were all in the room finishing the final shots of the night. I was preparing for the climax of the story. We were setting up the camera to shoot a wide-angle shot of Howe with the door in the background. We'll see Tiffany's hand come through the door and slowly open it.

I'm about to yell action when all of a sudden, the lights go out. My first instinct was to look into the hallway that goes to the haunted hospital, and I see it has power. I think we've blown a fuse. We can't trust this outlet,

and we need to start looking for another power source. David runs the extension cord down the library hallway. He plugged the extension cord to another. outlet. Plugged in all the lights and we begin filming again. We were now moving on to our main shot. The shot where Howe looks up from his paper and the demon is right over his shoulder. I'm peering down my camera about ready to call action again and then all of a sudden

the lights go out again. I can feel this faint. gas behind me from Tiffany. David looks at me with this peering glare, so I said I'll go see what's going on. And I walked down the hallway, but as I'm walking, I could feel the air change.

I could feel the chills with every step. It almost felt like there were eyes on me. I turned around to see if someone had joined me in the hallway, and no one was there. So I kind of made a hurry walk and that's when I noticed that the plug had been ripped from the wall. It is a commercial grade extension cord.

It is a hundred feet long. For that to happen, someone had to use force. Maybe someone kicked it, but there's no way someone kicks a cord 50 feet away and it comes straight from the wall. I'm trying to repeat in my head

what I've been telling everyone else all night. It's fake. It's fake. It's fake. I remember plugging it back in. I made sure that there was plenty of slack. I moved quickly down the hallway. And I just said, let's keep shooting. I grabbed the camera.

started rolling. Tiffany puts her chin on Howell's shoulder at the segment where she is supposed to scare him and as Hal turns to look at her, the lights go out again. At this point, no one's making a noise. We're just kind of looking around in this dumbfounded state.

We're running out of explanation. and there's only so many times you can tell yourself it's fake. So we all start walking down the hallway together and we're walking briskly. We arrived. The extension cord was plugged in. Howell didn't say anything. He was calm, cool, and collected. But David looked at me and was like, what the hell?

David plugged in all the lights again and they were up and running. We got back to the room. We only needed 30 seconds of a shot. We filmed it as quickly as possible. We started packing up the equipment. Howe was on a knee putting his camera in his bag. The girls are standing in the corner wrapping the extension cord. David is to my right standing in the hallway.

When all of a sudden that damn animatronic. starts screaming. I felt this massive chill in my bones. I was frozen in that moment because I knew how it was set off. And this time, there was no logical explanation on that. Howe looked at me and said,

what the hell set that thing off? Mr. Calm, Cool, and Collected was no longer calm, cool, and collected. We packed our stuff up in silence, threw it in the back of the truck as quickly as possible, and got out of there. I woke up late in the day. We still needed to pick up the outdoor shots

so we can finish the whole shoot. We get there and we finish filming. As we're wrapping up, some of the makeup artists from the night before were coming back. They were asking us how the shooting went. They asked Tiffany how the makeup worked out. And then Tiffany brought it up.

Yeah, we had some weird stuff happen last night. We briefly told a little bit about what happened. And next thing I know, when the makeup artist is like, yeah, that's just old Joe. I looked at her like a dog trying to understand

a human voice and said, what do you mean it's old Joe? She said, yeah, old Joe. He's a janitor that used to work at a flea market. When the flea market closed down,

he had nowhere to go, so he hired him in Arks Mortis. He was quite the prankster in the day. He would come in and scare the staff, He would wait till the actors were in place and no one was around and knock on the walls. He would yell at the top of his lungs when you thought no one was around.

And then he passed away from a heart attack. They claim he's still there pulling his pranks to this day. I don't react. I'm zoning out because I can't believe what I'm hearing. and it's tying so much together, I was completely dumbfounded. But all that kind of went by the wayside because my career in filmmaking had just begun.

And I was super excited about it and also completely wiped from the night before. I think it was the fall of 2022. I finally went back to Arks Mortis as a guest. Screams had filled the air. The fog machines were on. The crowd was heavy.

We're going through the haunted hospital. Howell was in his dentist costume telling people he's going to rip their tongues out. And we round the corner of the library. And as I'm walking down the bridge, that same animatronic got me this time like it did the last time. and I just remember smiling because it brought back so many great memories. I hope old Joe is scaring the new guest like he did me.

And as for the finished product, I do watch it occasionally if I'm ever in the need of a good laugh. The film itself, it sucks. But hey, at least for now, I have a great story to tell. Thank you, Chase, for sharing your story with the spook. Be sure to check out Chase's podcast, Hold Up.

A show where Chase and his friends review movies from the 80s, 90s, and beyond to see if they still hold up. You'd find a link to the show in this episode's description. The original score was by Nicholas Marks. It was produced by Eric Yonnius. A 10-year-old boy sits in a dentist office reading a comic book. Then, according to witnesses, the book suddenly burst into flames. And over the course of the next few days, this boy set several objects ablaze apparently with nothing more than the power of his mind.

He ends up in the hospital with burns on his body, fearful, where he confesses that I don't want to keep setting things on fire. But what should I do? Doctors, the nurses, no one knows how to give him aid. He's entirely on his own. But eventually, after many struggles, he gains control over his power. And he recedes back into anonymity. And that's the story.

This is what's in the books. You can Google it yourself. But of course, I gotta wonder, if some kid in Italy has power over fire, why, like, he's the only one? Why not someone else? And if you know someone else, or if you yourself are someone else, we sure love to know about it. Spooked at snafjudgment.org. Spooked at snafjgment.org.

Spooked is brought to you by the team that when approaching the same, we're doing this. Spirit World will gladly take no for an answer except for Mark Ristich. Uh-uh. It's not good enough for Mark to simply play with the Ouija board. No, you've got to argue with it. There's Davey Kim, Zoe Frigno, Anne Ford, Eric Yanyas, Teo de Kott, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Doug Stewart, Elliot Lightfoot, Paulina Creeke, Juan Diego Belchran, Sasha Wilson, Dan Yosinski, the spook theme song, is by Pat McCutney Miller.

My name is in Washington. Now, exploring questions of shadow. The formulation is often, is the other world a reflection of us. Are we a reflection of it, or are there two distinct landscapes that have little to do with each other? I guess I'm a practitioner of the unified Holbeery. Now, we don't know what's going on over there, but we don't have any idea what's happening here either. Because maybe, maybe there is no here and no there.

No one understands where they are on this map. We're all lost. So instead of trying to figure out what's going on out there, perhaps our time is better spent, delving into what's going on inside us. What's happening with the person we're sitting next to? Who is the last loved one we looked in the eye when they spoke to us? Maybe consider that instead.

And leave the shadow to work itself out. Truly, as a public service, when I hear the icy breath begging me to come to provide companionship to the darkness, I tell it no. No, I'm busy. No, the best I can do for you, Dark Specter, devil wrath, murky, malefactor, all I have for you today to never, never, ever, not ever, not never, never, ever.