With Halloween right around the corner, many people look to haunted houses for a frightfully good time. McKamey Manor, located in San Diego, is considered to be one of the scariest attractions in the world; so scary that the owner has been receiving death threats. If that sounds like your kind of gig, too bad, because there is currently a waiting list of over 27,000 people. McKamey Manor is best described as "living a horror movie."
According to the New York Daily News, Russ McKamey started and operates the free haunted house and has spent around $500,000 to give fright fans an experience that they can't find anywhere else. Critics have called it "abusive," but people keep coming back.
"I love scaring folks," McKamey told a group from NPR that came to see what the Manor was all about. "Once you scare somebody, the first time—your first boo—that's addicting." He added that with McKamey Manor he likes to "ramp it up about 1,000 percent and put people in genuine panic mode."
This is not your standard haunted house. McKamey Manor is an audience participation event in which up to two guests at a time will live their own Horror Movie. This is a rough, intense and truly frightening experience. A typical McKamey experience lasts anywhere from 45 minutes to six hours, depending on the guests tolerance to fear.
McKamey has been featured on Travel Channel’s "Making Monsters" and "Halloween’s Craziest" due to its unconventional nature. All participants must be 21 years of age or older to enter the manor, and they must sign a waiver releasing McKamey Manor from all liability. Participants are screened physically and mentally before they enter the attraction, but many of the tours are cut short due to medical reasons.
What's so different about this haunted house? They like to blast you with misters, douse you with garden hoses and push your face into kiddie pools. And then they dump gallons of blood on you. The McKamey monsters push you to your knees, shove your face in soiled toilets and drag you around by the hair. But that’s just the beginning. At various times throughout the night, guests shared that they had duct tape over their eyes, wrists bound together and a nasty burlap sacks over their heads.
Guests are stuffed in coffins, freezers, cages, and strapped to chairs with their heads in a padlocked cage. The monsters took turns dumping water (cold), blood, snakes and spiders on the guest's heads before making them eat the green and purple yolk of some nasty egg.
Don't believe me? Check out their YouTube trailer for 2015 below: