Wv Hopes To Give You A Creepy Feeling

Perky and smiling, Angie Hughes is pretty much your typical usherette of doom.

Something of a cross between a really good salesperson and Bela Lugosi, the West Valley High School mom has already developed a slick little patter to lure people inside the school’s Halloween haunted house.

“Oh, yeah, this used to be where they killed cows,” Hughes says to four people waiting to enter the old meat-packing warehouse. “There’s old blood, dried up all over the walls. We even found some bones.”

Sheri Davidson of Mead, one the folks waiting, laughs incredulously.

She laughs, that is, until the state trooper standing quietly at the door adds, “Some of the bones were even from animals.”

It was raining and a stiff breeze was blowing up from the rail yards to the north on Monday night. Still, it seemed that nothing could dampen the spirits of Hughes and the other volunteers at “The Slaughterhouse.”

Ever since his daughter attended West Valley seven years ago, Larry Lenz has organized this annual school fund raiser. This year, the haunted house benefits the class of 1997’s graduation night party.

Judging from the look in his eyes, Lenz is a man who may have seen too many horror films.

“I rented one movie with Freddie Kruger in it, then ‘The Swamp Thing,’ and then Science Fiction Theater this year to get new ideas,” Lenz said. “In my mind, this is going on all year-round.”

The last two years, the haunted house was staged at Walk in the Wild zoo. But things there became just too frightening for even the high school kids. Enter Greg Windsor, who owns the old brick building on East Mission Avenue where he operates a food service company and the Virtual Assault paintball battleground.

Windsor had his own haunted house in the warehouse last year, but barely broke even with the project. This year, he decided to offer - perhaps “sacrifice” is more appropriate - the place to the WV seniors.

For six weeks or so, students and their parents have been setting up in the basement, building electric chairs, a brackish pond, and debating the finer points of chain rattling.

You know, the usual stuff.

Well, not just the usual stuff. Lenz, who according to some WV parents is more the haunted house’s “mastermind” than its organizer, said there are enough new attractions to surprise even those who’ve come in years past.

Just inside the doors on Monday night, hordes of teenage goblins - all actors in the haunted house - were racing frantically in circles around a very intense young man inexplicably shrieking “Norman! Norman!” over and over again.

WV senior Bonnie Krouse, who lurks inside as Jack the Ripper, says the actors are always striving to improve.

“Compared to when people went through the first time tonight, I’ve gone from one stab to four,” she says, meaning it.

Derek Mattingly, a sophomore who’s helping out, hears this and admits he’s afraid to go back inside. And he helped set the whole thing up.

A pair of Centennial Middle School eighth-graders, Craig McIntyre and Graham Oswald, are still out of breath from being chased around by Ken “I’m the chain saw guy” Oldmixon, a senior. They are adamant about what part of “The Slaughterhouse” was their favorite.

“It was pretty good,” McIntyre and Oswald admit in unison, even though they are far too cool to ever be scared. “The best thing about the haunted house this year was …”

Hey, did you really think we were going to give it away?

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Scary stuff “The Slaughterhouse” is at 4103 E. Mission on the west side of the Virtual Assault building. It’s open through Oct. 31, from 6 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and from 6 to 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and on Halloween. Admission is $4 for students and $5 for adults.