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So Good, It’s Scary
Ohio Haunted House Packs Them In
by Jay Copp
Nearly 30 years ago the Broadview Heights Lions in Ohio hastily converted an abandoned home into a haunted house, purchased some rubber masks and halfheartedly leaped out of dark corners in a lame attempt to scare patrons who had forked over $2. The club hoped to get five years or so out of the fundraiser. But the Lions themselves were the most scared when the final numbers came in: after expenses, the club lost $1,000.
Flash forward to today. The Bloodview Haunted House is a Cleveland-area institution; more than 570,000 people have cowered their way through the house. Some 22,000 patrons are expected this Halloween season. They tiptoe through an elaborate, clever, hair-raising haunted house that the club designed and built. Hiding in nooks and crannies to scare them (and sometimes even waiting for them in the back seat of their cars) are members of the professional Legion of Terror. (Lions park cars, sell tickets and otherwise manage the event.) The Lions’ haunted house is so scarily good that it was featured, along with Disneyworld’s Haunted Mansion, in a national magazine that covers the haunted house industry.
“It’s really very satisfying especially because we started with the idea that this would be a short-term endeavor. We thought we’d get tired of it or we wouldn’t make money,” says Ken Marshall, who founded the haunted house along with John Bingham. Making money has not been a problem. Proceeds from the 20 to 22 nights the haunted house is open in September and October have enabled the club to provide $1.5 million for such charitable undertakings as eyeglasses, eye surgeries, scholarships, hearing aids, libraries, youth football and even a water system for impoverished Haitians.
The haunted house is a triumph of perseverance. And a lesson in learning from mistakes. Marshall and Bingham scouted local haunted houses in October 1980 and came to the same conclusion: “We can do this.” Actually, they were not impressed by the amateurish productions they visited. “We can do better than this,” they thought.
Ah, the innocence of first-timers.
The Lions thought they were ready for their opening night in 1981. They had spent three months rebuilding the floors and walls of the abandoned home they took over. They modified the floor plan to accommodate 12 sets. They added a 600-square-foot maze onto the side of the house. Conscious of safety, they even installed a second exit stairway from the second floor.
The club also bought airtime from a local radio station, designed newspaper ads, found a concessionaire to sell hot dogs and converted a Pepsi trailer into a ticket booth. But the coup de grace, or so they thought, was recruiting members of the high school drama club to help Lions with the scaring. The Lions assumed teen-agers would put more oomph into pouncing, shouting and general mayhem than middle-aged Lions.
The first sign that things wouldn’t go well happened in the opening minutes. “An actor ran out and said the walls of the maze were falling over,” recalls Jack Morabito. “The first thing I did was panic. Then I ran for the hammer, nails and two-by-fours.”
It was not so easy to fix other problems. The newspaper ads contained incorrect times and prices. The rest rooms lacked toilet paper. As for the teenager actors, their enthusiasm was overshadowed by their unreliability: only half of them showed up.
So the club took stock of the first year’s shortcomings and set to work. They eventually called in the Knights of Fright (who later renamed themselves as the Legion of Terror), ordinary folks who get their kicks out of scaring the wits out of other ordinary folks. It was a match made in hell (that’s a positive thing in Halloween-speak). The Legion asked for only a small cut of the proceeds; they funneled their take toward charitable causes. Even more important, they eschewed rubber masks in favor of realistic horror makeup. With their frightening mien and acting skills, the Legion of Terror lived up to its name.
The Lions also learned a few things about planning and publicity. “ You only have so much money to spend on publicity. I think it took us 10 years to determine what works and what doesn’t work,” said Marshall, retired from his tire researcher job at BF Goodrich. “A great thing we did was exit polling. The most important question we asked was how did you hear about us. We discovered the best thing we could do was advertise in the Friday entertainment section of the local newspaper.”
Finally, the club significantly upgraded its haunted house in 1989. When its abandoned home grew increasingly rickety, the club purchased land and built a 6,000-square-foot haunted house. Lions did the plumbing, carpentry and electrical work. They carved out a parking lot, constructed a ticket booth and generally transformed a rundown site into a haunted house with all the spooky amenities.
But first Lions had to clear the muddy property. They used chainsaws and brush hogs one wild, wet and nearly mythical weekend. “We did it in two days and we nearly died,” said Morabito, who owns a financial planning company. “The mud was up to our knees. It used to be a cow pasture, so this was not just good old Ohio clay we were stepping in.” One disgusted Lion stripped off his clothes after his labors and drove home au natural to protect his car seat from the stench.
The new house fit in with the Lions’ strategy of competing for customers. “This is a highly competitive market. There are 20 to 22 other haunted houses,” said Morabito. Keeping up with the Munsters is why this year the Lions put on an addition to their house and built a graveyard. They also recently invested $30,000 in a sprinkler system to comply with new state requirements. Not every haunted house opted to make the safety investment. “There could be five to eight less haunted houses this year,” said Morabito.
Editor’s note: A source for this story was “Bloodview: Still Haunting After All Those Years” by Jack Morabito in Haunted Attraction magazine.
Membership Not a Grave Concern
The rousing success of the haunted house of the Broadview Heights Lions Club also has been a boon for membership. The club has 64 members, and many joined because of the fundraising project. “People join the club just so they can play in October,” said Jack Morabito. Knowing they can help others with the proceeds also draws in new members. “A couple of people joined the club just because they wanted to write checks,” he said.
The haunted house also has the advantage of motivating members. “The old rule of participation is that 20 percent of members do 80 percent of the work. We get a 90 or 95 percent participation [in the haunted house],” added Morabito. “It’s fun. You get to stand outside in October watching kids run around getting scared by other kids. It charges your batteries.’
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