Vampire Manor haunts for a good cause
Haunted house in Bel Alton opens Oct. 12
Frights and spooks abound at a haunted attraction volunteers have been diving into for almost three decades.
Vampire Manor has haunted Charles County since 1989 when it began as a fundraising effort for the then newly formed Charles County Dive Rescue team. The haunted house has since turned into the organization’s largest fundraising effort and a consistent Halloween fixture in the county.
William “Skeeter” Porter, dive team chief, has been with Vampire Manor since it began. With previous experience as a teen actor for the Waldorf Jaycees haunted houses in the 1970s, Porter said he was selected to lead the haunted operation.
“I just knew how to say ‘Boo’ and scare people, but I don’t back away if I’m asked to do something,” Porter said of the task. “We put together a program and found a house in Indian Head to do this. It turned out to be pretty successful for us and we’ve been doing it ever since.”
The manor has operated out of five different houses over the years. After the original house in Indian Head was burned down by arson, it moved to one in Waldorf that was also burned down by arson. It then moved to a vacant home in La Plata before the dive team acquired its current home in Bel Alton.
“Rumor has it that a crazy family lived in this house a long time ago and locked their kids in a closet,” Ron Thornton, a dive team member and haunted house volunteer, said while touring the building recently. “We don’t know if that’s complete bologna, but every year older people who have lived in the county come up to us and say they remember this house scaring them back then.”
The two-story house contains narrow hallways, bloody mazes, a moving bridge and themed rooms featuring iconic horror scenes from “It,” “The Ring,” “Dawn of the Dead,” “Saw,” and characters like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. Ghoulish guides lead groups of visitors from room to room telling stories that distract visitors from the monsters about to jump out and scare them. But Porter said the guides also tailor their haunted trips to the sensitivities of those in their group.
“The people on our team are very family oriented so when you get a group of teenagers coming through we’ll really lay it on them, but if you’ve got a family with a 6-year-old then we kind of dial it back a little bit,” Porters said. “You work with that to make sure they know we’re here to have a good time.”
Porter’s daughter, Tammy Porter-Wilmot, was born a year after the manor started. She’s grown up with Vampire Manor and has volunteered since she was a little kid. Now, she and her brother Kyle oversee the manor’s operations and decide the various themes each year.
“I love doing the decorations and designs,” Porter-Wilmot said as she toted daughter Emily, 1, a third-generation Vampire Manor volunteer, around the haunted house.
For about six weeks throughout August and September, dive team volunteers work on the weekends to prepare the house for its spine-chilling season. Masked monsters are placed, trap doors are set, severed body part props are built, hair-raising sights and sounds are prepared to frighten visitors.
“It’s work,” Porter said of putting on the haunted house every year. “We all have jobs, this is a volunteer service. I have a 40-hour a week job to get to, we’ve got calls and training with the team and then we’re down there running this program until midnight sometimes, so it’s work. [But] I always enjoy seeing the reactions, dealing with the crowd and seeing the joy we bring to them.”
Porter said between 30 and 40 volunteers help run the manor throughout the month every year.
One hundred percent of the proceeds from Vampire Manor go to the dive team, the Bel Alton Volunteer Fire Department and local high schools that provide many students to be volunteer actors.
An actors meeting will be held at the house Tuesday, Oct. 10, at 6 p.m. and will accept volunteers on a first-come first-served basis. Vampire Manor is located at 9410 Irving Road, Bel Alton, and will run from Thursday, Oct. 12, until Tuesday, Oct. 31.
For more information about Vampire Manor, go to www.vampiremanor.com.