Clown House

In the spirit of October, Halloween and all things Spooky, I decided to tell the tale of my most terrifying Halloween Experience I've ever had in my life.

So this took place about 9 years ago now back when I was 16. I had gone to one of those haunted theme parks with my mom and my best friend at the time. The one we went to is in Tucson AZ, known as ‘Terror in the Corn”. The Halloween theme park is big with multiple haunted attractions to give visitors a thrill, one such attraction is a haunted corn maze.

I can remember being terrified to go into the maze even though I played it off fairly well for my mom and my friend. Now, I have a DEEP fear of clowns. I know I know why even go to a haunted house of any kind then because there is always clowns, wishful thinking I guess that there wouldn't be any inside this maze. I even remember going up to the one of the girls who worked at there at the end of the maze and asking her to tell me the truth if there were clowns in there because I was afraid of them. She assured me that there wasn’t any, and that she had been through it herself and that she was afraid of them too, etc.. Well she lied.

When we first got in line for the next group to go through the maze we were at the front, this already made me nervous. I didn’t know how I felt about being the first ones going through the maze, this meant that we would get all the “good” jump scares from the actors in the corn field. While we were standing in line I looked over the fence and down the line a bit to see one of the workers dressed in a creepy costume trying to scare some of the people waiting in line. I pointed him out to my friend and now we were both watching him to keep an eye out for when he would creep over to our end of the line. At some point he noticed us watching because he looked over to the side and locked eyes with us. Here's where I made a rather foolish mistake, I yelled out to him saying something along the lines of “we’re not afraid of you”. Instant regret. He then proceeded to slowly walk over to us and mess with us specifically the rest of the time we waited in line. Then the gate opened and the next group of about 10 people including the three of us were let inside. Immediately we were loaded into what felt like a shipping container that was pitch black on the inside, we couldn’t see anything. I think this alone was meant to scare us because when everyone inside had little to no reaction to the dark room and actually started laughing at my nose ring glowing in the dark, they stepped it up a notch. The shipping container started to violently shake which gave us all the scare they wanted. The container stopped and opened on the other side after about a minute of the shaking and we all walked out to begin the corn maze. Weird way to start I thought to myself.

For the most part it was a pretty standard haunted corn maze aside from the fact that each one is a little unique. It was definitely a good one, all the actors did a great job of scaring us. Only a couple of them were truly terrifying to the point where even though you know they’re just actors, the level of fear you feel is real. One of the guys was in a creepy insane asylum doctors costume with a deformed and bloodied face and he was carrying a bone saw. The reason he stood out on the scary factor was something that I actually find quite strange looking back on it. He actually left his post and followed us when he saw how sacred we were of him, and I don’t just mean followed for a little bit, no he followed us for about 5 minutes way beyond his section of the maze. He just wouldn’t go away. The scariest part was that he was walking so close with us that his mask was only about a foot away from our faces the whole time, trying to force us to look at him. He eventually backed off and walked back in the direction of where he came from.

Some time along the next part of the corn maze we ran into the one and only, it was the actor from the gate. As soon as he saw us I knew he recognized us by the way he paused and just stood there staring for a moment with his head tilted creepily to the side before walking towards us. Clearly it was personal for him now by me telling him I wasn’t afraid of him, well I was now. He went from walking to full on running straight towards us, machete in hand. With nowhere to run we just stood there frozen and screamed. We all flinched as he stopped mere inches from us and darted off to the side disappearing into the corn field. We stared at the wall of corn he had vanished into as we slowly started walking again only to have him run out from the opposite side of the corn field right at us again before disappearing into the corn maze once more. It was the jump scare of a lifetime I've got to hand it to him, thankfully it was his last for us. I was thus far pleased with the lack of clowns I had seen in the maze, I was actually starting to believe that girl at the gate.

As we went along we came up to this part of the maze where you had to crawl through a foam pit with a black netting above it to get through to the next part. While trying to crawl through it my shoe fell off into the foam pit. Of course. I was frantically trying to find it as the rest of the people in our group were catching up and I was causing a mini people pile up. I was apologizing for it taking so long to find it and they all laughed and agreed it was fine because everyone needed a break from being scared for a minute. After me and my friend finally found my shoe we continued through to the last part of the corn maze. I had been doing okay handling the maze up until now, but this is where shit hit the fan for me. Remember that deep fear of clowns I mentioned, well it’s time had come.

We rounded the corner to see some sort of fun house looking building we were meant to walk through and I froze, stopped dead in my tracks. My mom and my friend were forced to stop with me as I was holding onto their hands one of them on each side of me. They just looked at me confused because they hadn’t yet seen what I was seeing. Up ahead of us sitting on top of the archway entrance to the fun house was a tiny clown about 3-4 feet tall wearing a purple tattered suit and a really tall top hat. At this point I still thought that it was just a prop and I was already paralyzed in fear by it. They followed my gaze and saw what I was looking at. Being that the only way out of the maze was through it they started pulling me forward again. As we began to approach the archway I was already starting to cry and I really REALLY did not want to go inside. I kept my eyes locked on him and as we went to walk underneath of the archway he started thrashing back and forth while screaming and laughing maniacally, revealing that it was not a prop but an actual person. I lost it. I was screaming and bawling my eyes out begging to be let out of the maze but they just kept pulling me through.

Inside of the fun house it only got worse, there was typical circus music and maniacal clown laughter filling your ears and strobe lights making it harder to see where you were going in the already dark room only lit up by glowing red lights. Have you ever been to one of those fun houses with the rooms filled with the hanging punching-bag-like things you had to push through to get through the room? Yeah, well it was that inside except they were not punching bags, they were clown bodies in clear body bags hanging by their feet. So there was no avoiding it, you had to push through them and actually TOUCH them to get out. On top of that already being something straight out of my nightmares, there were also actors dressed as clowns randomly popping in and out of the body bags to jump scare you or grab your arms while you tried to find your way around. I was dying inside, I'm certain I came the closest I've ever been to having a real heart attack. The panic attack that I was having wasn’t helping either as I was hyperventilating and crying so hard I could no longer breathe. The sound of the carnival music and my heart pounding blurred into one big disorienting mess and I nearly collapsed right there inside the fun house. I cant remember how long we were inside or even how we got out really, but eventually, out we were.

I immediately ran over to the side of the exit and threw up. After composing myself from the aftershocks of the worst panic attack of my life, still shaking, I made eye contact with the employee that lied to me about the clowns. It took the strength of my mother and my friend combined to keep me from ripping her face off. The poor girl actually took a few steps back as they pulled me away. On the very long walk back to the car I realized that at some point during the maze I peed my pants from sheer terror, so I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t confront anyone. At least I saved myself that embarrassment, as the scene I made inside the maze was quite enough.

This will always go down as one of the worst days of my life and remains the reason that I will NEVER enter another haunted corn maze again.

Happy Halloween!