The Business of Haunted Houses

used to haunt our house on Halloween night,” says Joey Adams of Amarillo. “It’s just hard to get your fill of it in just one night.”

Joe and his wife Vona have two buildings in Amarillo that are designed to scare people. One build- ing is a series of escape rooms. “Basically you put a group of people in a room that has been themed out. They get clues and solve puzzles and work their way through the room and have an hour to escape. If they don’t make it we may have to go find them.” Their other building has four haunted areas. “We call it the Scaregrounds. We’re the largest haunted attraction in town. It’s more of a scream park. We have The Insanitarium.

We have Terror. We have the B Trail, which used to be the Blackout Maze that now has things that reach out and grab you.

We also have The Basement that includes a Coffin Ride. People actually get in a coffin and ride on a little rail system that takes them to a haunted house.” They’ve been in the business of scaring people for twenty years. “The first year we married Joey told me he wanted to haunt the front of the house,” says Vona. “All the little neighborhood kids world come out there and watch and we’d put all kinds of scary things out front and soon we had everybody watching. You couldn’t go up and down our street; it was full of cars. That’s when we decided we needed to get into the business of haunted houses.” Their haunted house had a fire-spitting dragon. When their son was in high school Joey and Vona used to have dinners for athletes in a building they had purchased. “Then afterwards we’d run them through a little haunted house,” says Joey. “We had a blast doing that, so next year we had a haunted house in that building and opened it to the public.

People liked up to get in and it got so crowded we eventually moved into this bigger building.” The haunted building is open on weekends in October. “The first night is sort of a practice night for us and is a fund raiser for the Student Crime Stoppers.” In addition to Crime Stoppers a portion of the proceeds from the Scaregounds goes to a food bank. Joey and Vona are serious about the haunted house business.

“We went off on a haunted house convention and we brought all kinds of ideas back that we put into operation. We attend those conventions and workshops every year now and always meet people who are in the same business. All of us just love haunting things and we always come back with a bunch of new ideas. It’s really fun to scare people.”