Courtesy of Netherworld Haunted Home
The primary time he grew to become a monster, Ben Armstrong was in elementary college. His mother and father take him to a jesus haunted home and lose him in a darkish maze. The gargoyles and clowns scared Armstrong foolish and he needed to return on the present. He placed on the googly-glasses and vampire enamel he introduced from residence and screamed within the nook, scaring the opposite children and his mother and father.
Armstrong caught the bug. For her subsequent monster, she selected a gargoyle, wings, and a rubber masks to assist her mother and father run an elementary college Halloween haunted home. Armstrong led his classmates to a fridge, the place they dipped their arms right into a bowl of spaghetti brains.
Fifty years later, Armstrong performs the identical gargoyle and plenty of different monsters in his personal creation—the Netherworld Haunted Home at Stone Mountain.
“I am sorry for the mess,” she tells me, stepping over a zombie head and vampire costume that also wants glue. We stroll by means of one of many highlights of this season, wake the lifelessthe place apocalyptic warriors should seal the netherworld from element-stealing demons. The Netherworld haunts change yearly, constructing on many years of proprietary lore. “A profitable haunted home is all about novelty, and rides on a razor’s fringe of Halloween and concern,” Armstrong says. “I keep away from human gore, however I really like the supernatural: monsters and cosmic horrors past our understanding.” We stroll alongside the sinking ground till my tour information disappears in entrance of me, partitions of shifting arms reaching in the direction of us. As I flip the nook, a zombie princess flies over my duck’s head on a zipline. “I needed to,” Armstrong stated.
The urge to chase hasn’t left Armstrong, who had a childhood membership Filmland’s well-known monster. For years, he held a “real-world job” as a tv studio supervisor — first in Tallahassee, then at Fox 5 in Atlanta — but additionally labored at haunted homes throughout the season. Whereas serving to with the nationwide hunt chain Silo-X, Armstrong met Billy Messina, a particular results artist; In 1996, when Silo-X closed its Atlanta location, the pair teamed up with a number of others to launch Netherworld. The unique location was a 4,000-square-foot area in Kennesaw that they may use for the season.
After 20 years of success, in 2017, Netherworld bought a 10-acre property in Stone Mountain that operates year-round. 5 escape rooms that includes aliens and Bigfoot are all the time open; For the Halloween season, Netherworld created two haunted sights in a 70,000-square-foot warehouse, with a walkway between them for visitors to breathe. The expanded operation requires extra workers in each the sights and “entrance worlds,” managing new options resembling on-line ticketing and timed entrances.
On opening evening, Armstrong attire in plain garments and joins one of many first teams by means of the haunted home to ensure the fog machines are flying and no actors miss a beat. He finds out the place it ought to be scary. “Then I throw on my swimsuit, normally one thing vampire, and go hang around,” she says. “Then I take off my masks, all scorching and sweaty, and I am going again to the true world to order a pizza from the workers.”
This text appeared in our October 2024 situation.
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