Old Town haunted house will keep Halloween scares alive
Halloween soon will be a memory for this year, but the haunted-house business will live on at Old Town, the retail and entertainment complex in Kissimmee.
Legends: A Haunting at Old Town, which opened this month, will try to continue alarming visitors with a funeral-home theme year-round, co-owner Dan Carro said.
“It’s like you’re walking through an actual mortuary instead of just going through a haunted house,” said Carro, whose first job wasasanactor at TerroronChurchStreet, a downtown Orlando haunt that closed in 1999.
Old Town’s Haunted Grimm House closed in December. Carro, who had produced Halloween events for the complex, was approached about opening a new haunt in its place. Jim Shackelford and Jay Westerman, who owned an attractionsconsulting business in Dallas, are co-owners.
“We basically gutted the place down to studs,” Shackelford said. Legends took the Grimm location plus a magic store next door, for a total of 6,000 square feet. They kept Grimm’s abandoned-house façade. They would not say how much money was spent on remodeling.
The tour begins on the ground level with pun-filled, deadpan humor.
“You go upstairs, and the tone changes,” he said. Scares are produced by actors and animatronics, gory scenes, jarring sounds, creepy lighting effects and increasingly dark rooms, culminating with intense action in a chapel.
Visitors travel in groups of six andpay$15 per person for the tours, which average 20 minutes.
The attraction’s backstory centers on mortician Archibald Ashdown, who needs more people to die to stay in business. He kills people, but they don’t stay dead — they turn into “twitchlings,” Shackelford said.
The haunted-house attraction has been part of the Old Townlineup since the1980s, said Gary Conroy, president of BEMGLLC, the management company that runs Old Town. He said the Legends owners are a first-class company.
“We really think they’re going to take haunt to the next level on the property,” Conroy said. “They know haunt, and they also know the future of the haunt.”
A haunted-house business need not be restricted to Halloween, said Leonard Pickel, owner of Hauntrepreneurs, a themedattraction design company in Orlando. People are frightened by roller coasters and horror movies year-round, he noted.
“There are places you can go and experience that adrenaline rush of what it’s like to be in a life-or-death situation with a maniac or monster in more times than just October,” Pickel said.
Haunts pop up in tourist-heavy towns such as Myrtle Beach, S.C., Branson, Mo., and Pigeon Forge, Tenn., he said. Strong establishments have diverse offerings and good business sense, Pickel said.
“It doesn’t matter howcool your haunted house is. You have to spend money on advertising,” Pickel said. “You have to balance that.”
Legends will add a ghost tour in November, and the haunt will adds twists and seasonal versions, perhaps tied to spring break and Gay Days, Shackelford said.
“The company isn’t really about scaring people. We’re about entertainment,” he said. “As long as people have been entertained when they leave our doors, then we’ve achieved our job.”