196. Dangerous and Deadly Halloween Haunted Attractions

Explore my Hungryroot Digital Cookbook Kaelyn's Cookbook and get 40% off your first order plus a free item in every box for life at https://hungryroot.com/HSP Open your SoFi Checking & Savings account today - head to https://sofi.com/HeartStarts to get started Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order. Halloween and Spooky Season bring many haunted attractions and events for people to attend and have a little fun, get a little scared. But what if I told you some of those scares aren’t props and dummies after all? In fact, it is way more common than you’d think for real corpses to be mistaken for Halloween decorations. Today we’re digging into some real deadly haunted attractions, from a High School production gone wrong to Disney Paris and a Queens basement the fire department called a death trap; these are the haunted attractions where the horror stopped being part of the show. Love true crime, horror, folklore, and the unexplained? Join us in the Rogue Detecting Society on Patreon. Start for free to stay up to date on all things HSP with our newsletter, bonus content, and more. If you want to dive deeper into a community of fellow darkly curious listeners, upgrade for ad-free listening, monthly bonus episodes with topics voted on by members, merch perks, and Patreon-only group chats. High Council members also get Footnotes, our weekly after-show where Kaelyn dives deeper into the episode, recent true crime news, theories, and other scary stories from around the internet. Join free or go paid: https://www.patreon.com/heartstartspounding

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kaelyn Moore?

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• 0:44Kaelyn Moore?

  built on a reputation for quality and reliability. So when it's time for your next Toyota, you could trade in for more. From a great deal today to a great value tomorrow, a Toyota is right for you. Shop toyota.com for deals and details, or stop by your local Toyota dealer today. Toyota, let's go places. This episode is brought to you by Alma. I'm a big believer in therapy, but finding the right therapist can feel like its own obstacle. Honestly, it can be the thing that keeps you from getting help in the first place. I remember not knowing where to start and feeling so overwhelmed by the whole process. Who takes my insurance? Who's going to be the right fit? And what is this actually going to cost me? Those obstacles usually turn people away from getting help. Well, that's why I want to tell you about Alma. Alma has a network of over 26,000 therapists nationwide,

• 1:27Kaelyn Moore?

  and 98% of them accept insurance. You can browse their directory without even making an account and use filters to find someone who actually fits your needs. Clients with insurance pay $20 on average, and most people find their match on the first try. Seriously, there is nothing worse than feeling so overwhelmed by something that you stop before you even really get started. And that's especially when it comes to mental health. You deserve to find help and to not be exhausted by the process. Get started now at helloalma.com/hartstarts. That's helloalma.com/h-e-a-r-t-s-t-a-r-t-s. Hello and welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kayla Moore.

• 2:11Kaelyn Moore?

  We are really getting close to Halloween, you guys. I hope you all have your costumes picked out. Please let me know what you end up being. I was actually thinking it would be fun to do a horror boy mom costume idea for my son and I, like Pamela Voorhees and Jason Voorhees, Norman Bates and his skeleton mom, Toni Collette and Pymon from Hereditary. Let me know if I'm missing any other big ones. I was actually, the other day, I was explaining this to Matt, and he was like, wait, what am I going to be? And then I realized I just got way too excited and didn't even think about a costume or a way to incorporate him at all. So send me some ideas for Matt. Every year, I ask him to be Slenderman because he's super tall, but he never wants to be, and that's kind of a bummer. Speaking of Halloween, though,

• 2:53Kaelyn Moore?

  this is the time for haunted houses and attractions. And that was kind of the genesis for this episode. I was at Halloween Horror Nights the other night, getting absolutely screamed at by scare actors. And I thought to myself, I wonder if anything has gone horribly wrong in an attraction like this. So I went home, I started looking into it, and oh, boy, has it. So today, I want to tell you some stories, mostly about people who went into haunted attractions and never made it out, and what happened to them inside. And it's got everything from DIY haunted houses all the way to, yep, you guessed it, Disneyland. That dang mouse is still at it. But before we dive in, if you want more Heart Starts Pounding,

• 3:38Kaelyn Moore?

  you can sign up for our Patreon for monthly exclusive bonus episodes and more. And now, you can sign up for completely free. Our free tier gets you access to our book club, monthly newsletter, and old bonus episodes that get released to everyone. If you sign up for three months on the premium tier, you get a free sticker sent straight to you. And if you're three months at the High Council tier, you get a free exclusive Rogue Detecting Society mug. Members also can vote on our bonus episodes, get monthly exclusive bonus episodes, get merch discounts, and more. That's all over at the Heart Starts Pounding Patreon. Sign up today. All right, let's get into it. I'd like to start this episode with a story that honestly feels like an urban legend. But, you know, we did find a Time Magazine article that details the way this story went down, so I assure you, it is real.

• 4:23Kaelyn Moore?

  It was 1957 in Utica, Kansas, a small town. And when I say small, I'm really not exaggerating. At the time, it listed its population at around 300 people. Late September was always a busy time for the local high school. It was a homecoming party of sorts for the incoming freshmen. This party, which was usually held in the school's gymnasium, often got rowdy, and it led to instances of hazing. And the school faculty did not want to encourage this kind of behavior, so a teacher proposed an alternative. Mrs. Betty Stevens, an English teacher and sponsor of the senior class, suggested that they set up an early Halloween party, a haunted house that the senior class could set up and lead freshmen through.

• 5:05Kaelyn Moore?

  It would be a fun, spooky group project for her 11 seniors. And the school principal, William H. Sally, was apprehensive of this idea at first, but eventually, he came around. His one stipulation, though, was that they had to keep the event safe. He was tired of seniors bullying freshmen and hazing them, and he wanted this to be a safe, fun fall time activity, and that was it. And so, the students promised him that they would do everything in their power to keep the event safe, and they got to work setting it up. The haunted house was set up two miles outside of town in this big, abandoned farmhouse. They had fake skulls and bones, toy snakes, and they scattered the floor with chains, broken bottles, and burlap sacks.

• 5:48Kaelyn Moore?

  It was very makeshift, but that almost added to the scary atmosphere of the house. The plan was that the seniors would be the tour guides. The freshmen would come and be led through by the seniors, with some of them dressing up and being part of the haunted house with their teachers, hiding in the shadows and waiting to jump out and scare the younger students. Principal Sally began to love this idea. Maybe he was just happy that the seniors were going to be on their best behavior, but he started getting really into it. And he decided that he, too, wanted to dress up for the haunted house. So on the night of the event, he took black ash and he dabbed it all around his eyes. He got a bottle of ketchup and he splashed it all over his shirt to imitate blood. And then he got to the house early to figure out where he was going to hide.

• 6:33Kaelyn Moore?

  Now, there were a couple of shadowy corners that he could hide in, but that wasn't enough. Maybe he could fold himself up and hide inside an old piece of furniture? No, he was 60 years old. He was not going to cram himself into a trunk. And that's when he got this idea. In the kitchen of the abandoned house, there was a rope and a hook in the high ceiling. He could string up the rope, climb up this little step ladder, and then slip the rope under his armpits to make it look like he was hanging. But the students were going to be arriving soon, so he had to do this quickly. That night, the haunted house was a huge success. Seniors led each of the 23 freshmen, one by one, through the spooky farmhouse. There were no lights, so everyone had to use these small flashlights to see.

• 7:17Kaelyn Moore?

  Teachers were rattling chains in the dark. They jumped out from behind corners and screamed. It was a good time. And for being so DIY, the freshmen were really impressed with the decorations. Some of them were cheesy, like those toy snakes, but the skulls and bones, the broken bottles everywhere, they all looked so real. But the most impressive thing came when the students walked past the kitchen. There, Principal Sally dangled from the kitchen rope perfectly still. He didn't even open his eyes one single time. One of the first groups that walked past him heard him making these strange groaning sounds, but when they called his name, he didn't even budge. He was really in character. After the entire class had gone through,

• 8:02Kaelyn Moore?

  Mrs. Stevens gathered all 34 students for a photo. There were so many scary parts of the house to get a photo at, but they decided that they wanted to take it with the creepiest prop of all, Principal Sally, who was still in character and still hanging from the ceiling. The kids all gathered in the kitchen, and Mrs. Stevens lifted her camera. "Principal Sally, smile," she screamed. But Sally just kept dangling. She called for him again, but still no answer. So she grabbed one of the students' flashlights and shined it directly at him. And that's when she realized that the rope was not around his arms like he had planned. Somehow, in the chaos of setting up, Principal Sally strung the rope around his neck,

• 8:46Kaelyn Moore?

  couldn't get his foot back on the step stool to help himself, and was strangled to death. Now, I will say, strangulation is one of the most common stories I find in deadly haunted houses. Even researching for this episode, I found another case from 2011 where a 17-year-old girl accidentally hanged herself with a prop noose at Creepy World, which is this haunted attraction in St. Louis. She did survive, but she slipped off of a tub in front of visitors and started struggling. But because they were in a haunted house, they thought it was part of the show. And it wasn't until another employee walked by that they realized something was very wrong. But that is part of the horror of a haunted house. If we saw something happening inside, we just might think that it was part of the show,

• 9:31Kaelyn Moore?

  even if we feel like something was obviously off. And that brings me to my next story. So our second story comes 32 years after the first one. 1987 in Roots Town, Ohio, a township that's a little ways east of Akron. The Woods of Terror was a haunted attraction set up by locals in a nearby forest. The pitch for this attraction was that it was just a local group of guys who decorated their favorite woodland trail for spooky season. Now, one of the guys responsible for decorating the Woods of Terror was 17-year-old Matthew Platt. It was not a great year for him up until this point. He had been nursing a broken heart since that spring. His girlfriend of the last year and a half, Rose Workman,

• 10:12Kaelyn Moore?

  had broken off their relationship and done her best to move on. And Matthew was not taking it well. Now, there are normal bad feelings that are associated with breakups, but Matthew's friends noticed that he was starting to obsess a little too much. He regularly told his friends how much he hated Rose, and even that he wanted to kill her. And his friends just shrugged this off. They figured he was just letting off steam, even when he asked one of them how he could get his hands on a gun. They didn't think he was being serious. On November 12th, the Woods of Terror was still fully decorated. Even though Halloween season had passed, decorations were still up and locals were still walking through,

• 10:54Kaelyn Moore?

  Matthew invited a friend to come to the woods to help him with something. What it was, he wouldn't say. He was going to have to show him. Once they got to the part of the woods where the attraction was, Matthew handed his friend a shovel. "I want to dig a grave," he said. Now, remember, Halloween was almost a full two weeks ago. So I don't know if this friend thought that this was part of the scares, but still, he helped Matthew dig. The next day, more teens went out to walk through the Woods of Terror when they saw this patch of disturbed ground. It was the hole that Matthew had dug, only it wasn't empty anymore. The dirt had been filled back in. If anything, it did look like a shallow grave.

• 11:39Kaelyn Moore?

  There was even a little cross on the site. But again, considering that this was a haunted attraction, no one batted an eye. No one called it in. They just went on their way. They had no idea that earlier that day, on Friday, November 13th, Matthew invited Rose to go for a walk with him. The newspapers described this as a date, so it's possible that Rose was considering getting back together with him, not knowing that he was still hurt by her rejection, that he hated her for dating other boys that whole summer. Matthew brought Rose to the shallow grave that he dug in the Woods of Terror, and he shot her five times, three times in the chest, twice in the head. He buried her there, and to anyone passing through,

• 12:25Kaelyn Moore?

  it just looked like another part of the experience. Now, I don't know exactly how far he planned beyond this. Maybe he thought that when they took down the decorations, they would remove the cross and assume that the shallow grave was just a small patch of upturned earth. But that is not how things went down. The day after the murder, Matthew just couldn't hold the secret in. He confessed to a pair of close friends. Apparently, he just couldn't keep in what he had done, and he gave everyone all of the details. And at first, they didn't believe him. But then he took them to the grave, and even still, they thought it was a prank, just another prop. But that didn't last very long, though. Police arrested Matthew, and he was tried for murder. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 1989

• 13:09Kaelyn Moore?

  to life in prison plus three years with a minimum sentence of 23 years. And since then, it's hard to pin down exactly what happened to Matthew. It seems like he found religion in prison, but he was still behind bars, at least as of 2019. And the last word I found of him is actually a Facebook post quoting from a book that he wrote called "Hope in the Midst of Darkness." Now, I keep coming back to what might have happened if he hadn't had that crisis of conscience and confessed to the murder. Would Rose have ever been found in a town of that size? Would she have been written off forever as a Halloween decoration? Well, that's not impossible to imagine. Ironically, the nicest thing you can say about Halloween decorations is that they look so real.

• 13:54Kaelyn Moore?

  So it's no surprise that people don't always call in these things, even when they feel like something's not right. But what if that suspiciously smelly prop on your neighbor's front stoop wasn't really just a lifelike dummy? I know the hypothetical might sound wild, because we know the difference between a human body and a dummy. It's instinctual. But mistaking human bodies for Halloween decorations is actually way more common than you would think. This episode is brought to you by Kachava. I have a weakness, and it's anything salty-sweet. Ugh, especially with Halloween coming up. That's all my favorite candy, all the salty-sweet stuff. So when Kachava dropped a salted caramel flavor, I took it personally in the best way. I've been drinking Kachava for, oh, gosh, almost two years now,

• 14:38Kaelyn Moore?

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• 15:24Kaelyn Moore?

  It's officially cozy season, and I obviously could not be more ready. If you've never experienced a Minky Couture blanket, you are seriously missing out. These blankets make every other blanket feel like a downgrade. I have my Minky blanket draped over me right now. It's so soft, it's so luxurious, and it's gonna keep me warm all winter. Their original hugs blanket is double-sided, four-way stretch, and literally hugs you back. They've also donated nearly 100,000 Mini Minkies to NIKUs nationwide, which, as a mom, I absolutely love that they do that. And now, we are excited to partner with Minky Couture. Our listeners can get 50% off full-price items with our exclusive code HSP. Just visit minkycouture.com, enter code HSP at checkout,

• 16:09Kaelyn Moore?

  and treat yourself or someone you love to a Minky Couture blanket. Because it's cozy season, people. And seriously, once you have a Minky Couture, you'll understand why people say it's the best blanket ever. Think.

• 16:24Kaelyn Moore?

  While researching this episode, I found not one, but four instances in the last 20 years of this happening. And that's not even including the one that I already covered on this show. From oldest to newest, we have in 2005, there was a 42-year-old woman in Wilmington who hanged herself in a tree in her front yard. Her body went unreported for hours because people assumed that she was a Halloween decoration. Around Halloween in 2009, a man passed away while sitting on the balcony of his apartment in Los Angeles. His body was ignored for days because his neighbors said that he looked like a Halloween dummy. In October of 2015, the body of 31-year-old Rebecca Cade was seen hanging from a fence on a construction site. And people said she looked like a hanging zombie prop,

• 17:09Kaelyn Moore?

  and they did not call the police. She had died from blunt force trauma, and it seemed like she had climbed the fence to get away from her murderer. And her murder remains unsolved. In 2023, Robert Owens was left face down in the front of an abandoned North Carolina home for several days. The gardener was so convinced that it was a prop dummy, he mowed the lawn around the dummy without disturbing it. This also was a home that police would conduct trainings in, so it was, you know, another reason that there might have been a dummy there. And these stories all really get to me. It's not necessarily the bodies that scare me. It's the way in which the illusion of Halloween can hide horrific things that are just in plain sight.

• 17:52Kaelyn Moore?

  And it's not just something that extends to inanimate objects either. If someone dresses up in a mask and a costume near a haunted house, we just assume that that person belongs there, and we assume that they mean us no harm. That brings me to my next story. On October 5th, 2018, a 29-year-old Tennessee woman named Tanya Greenfield was on her way to a venue called The Nashville Nightmare with a trio of friends. Unlike the last couple of haunts that we described, Nashville Nightmare is pretty famous. It's Tennessee's premier haunt event. It's a haunt event that takes precautions to make sure that the attendants are safe. There are employees that work there. You have to go through a metal detector before you can get inside.

• 18:34Kaelyn Moore?

  Tanya and her friends had to wait in a long line to even get into the event itself. But once they got in, they found themselves in the midst of a series of carnival-style games outside of these scare mazes. Actors wandered in and out of the crowd. They were interacting with everyone in character. If you've ever been in a scare zone like this before, you know the vibe. It's little spooks, playful taunting. Sometimes they'll run at you with a fake chainsaw. But then, this group was approached by a costumed figure that didn't really look like the other employees. While the other scare actors had in-depth SFX makeup, fake cuts, and elaborate costumes, this one was much more pared down. This man just had a face of skeleton makeup on,

• 19:16Kaelyn Moore?

  like Evan Peters in American Horror Story, I imagine, and a straw hat. Now, Tanya was standing there, talking to her friend James, when the actor approached them and interrupting them. He asked playfully if James was bothering her. Now, these scare actors are in character all the time, and you're allowed to play along with them. So Tanya jokingly said, "Yes, actually, he is bothering me." And that's when the actor reached under his shirt and pulled out a knife. He handed it to Tanya and said, "Well, here, stab him." Tanya turned to James with the prop knife the actor just handed her. And playing along with the game, she thrust it towards James's arm.

• 19:58Kaelyn Moore?

  And instead of it bouncing off of James, it sliced into him hard. Blood started pouring out of his arm, spurting like you see in movies. And in horror, Tanya turned around to scream at the guy that gave her the knife. "Why would you give me this?" But he was nowhere to be found, and no one has ever found this person. The friends all called an ambulance and had James rushed to the hospital. James was all right in the end. He did need nine stitches, but everyone was pretty badly shaken up. James later said, "Keep in mind, we had been chased by chainsaws, all kinds of stuff, all night, and it was all fake. So she stabs me with it, and everything got really black." So who was the guy who had given Tanya the knife?

• 20:43Kaelyn Moore?

  Had he been working there? Or was he just some lunatic person who got into the event? Tanya and James did hire a lawyer to pursue legal action against the haunt and the person who gave her the knife. According to a spokesperson from Nashville Nightmare, they take the safety of their guests extremely seriously, and they had placed one of their employees on leave until they could determine whether he was involved or not. And as far as we can tell, the employee or the interloper has never been publicly identified. Now, what's maybe the most shocking there is that people were supposed to go through metal detectors before being let in. So in theory, this should have never happened. But as we saw in this story, big haunts have problems too.

• 21:26Kaelyn Moore?

  The same year that Tanya stabbed her friend in Nashville, the researcher writer for this very episode, Robia, was working as a scare actor at Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights. Big events like that are deeply invested in keeping everyone as safe as possible behind the scenes. One night, when a rare thunderstorm hovered over LA, they pulled several Michael Myers performers out of the Halloween maze because of the minute risk that lightning would strike a metal pole near one of the actors. There is a lot on the line, reputation and money, when it comes to these big places. However, there's no controlling for every danger in a big attraction, especially when there is machinery involved. So first, let's look at an attraction called The Phantom Manor, an elaborate machinery

• 22:09Kaelyn Moore?

  and special effects-driven haunted house. It's actually in Disneyland Paris. It's their version of the Haunted Mansion, but with a darker storyline than other Disney parks have around the world. The story goes like this. A young woman named Melanie lived in the mansion in the mid 1800s and became engaged to a train engineer named Jake. The house was owned by Melanie's father, Henry, who struck gold in Big Thunder Mountain, another Disney ride. On the couple's wedding day, a mysterious phantom entered the mansion and lured Jake up to the attic where he was killed. His body was found hanging from the rafters. Writers hear this story, and they wonder who the phantom is. Was it Henry preventing his daughter from getting married? Was it someone who was out to get Henry?

• 22:54Kaelyn Moore?

  It seems really interesting, actually. Let me know in the comments if you've ever been. But like other attractions we've covered on this show, The Phantom Manor was no stranger to sudden mechanical failure. So on April 3rd, 2016, just as the park was about to be opened, the doors closed on The Phantom Manor, and it remained closed all day to the frustration of guests. Many assumed that it was just undergoing repairs, but the truth was far more tragic. Earlier that day, a 45-year-old park maintenance tech named Olivier had gone inside of the manor. Olivier had worked inside of Disneyland Paris for 14 years, and he was very good at his job. He had probably seen every type of ride malfunction you could imagine in that time,

• 23:38Kaelyn Moore?

  and he was not a stranger to having to fix rides. It had been reported that there was some faulty lighting in the attic of the manor, and so Olivier went in to check it out. But hours passed, and he never came back out. His colleagues tried radioing him, no answer. Eventually, park employees, doing their customary sweep of the attraction, found him lying unresponsive in the attic, and he was pronounced dead at 10:00 AM local time. Investigators determined that the death was caused by accidental electrocution. Apparently, Olivier hadn't taken the proper safety precautions. Or at least, that's what the story that was reported said. You guys know me.

• 24:21Kaelyn Moore?

  Of course, I dug a little deeper into this story, and let me share with you what I found actually happened. So this case went to criminal court in France, and a deeper investigation found that the attic was similar to the ride's storyline, a complete death trap. They found a degraded, noncompliant power cable running from a distant outlet, no differential circuit breaker, which is the device that cuts power in a fault, protecting the work area. There was also a cramped work platform about five meters up with poor lighting and inadequate access. There was aging equipment and staff safety warnings that had all gone unheeded. The prosecutor called the failures entirely attributable to Euro Disney. Now, Disney's defense was that the technician forgot to take precautions and didn't confirm

• 25:06Kaelyn Moore?

  that the power was cut. He misjudged the risks, they said. But the court just didn't buy it. And just this summer, 10 years after the accident, Olivier's two daughters were awarded roughly 50,000 euros each in moral damages. And the NSA, Disneyland Paris Union, which joined as a civil party, got somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 euro for harm to collective interests. The union's statement blamed chronic understaffing and degraded working conditions in maintenance. So maybe the real phantom, the actual danger in the manor, is the fact that it wasn't up to code. And Disneyland Paris isn't the only mega park where the machinery behind a haunted attraction turned deadly.

• 25:49Kaelyn Moore?

  Ocean Park is one of Hong Kong's biggest theme parks, and every fall, it throws a massive event called the Halloween Bash. It has multiple haunted houses, and inside, there's hundreds of scare actors. In 2017, one of the headline attractions was a haunted house called Buried Alive. And the premise was pretty much what it sounds like. You climb into a coffin, the lid closes over you, and then the bottom of the coffin drops out, and you slide down into a dark maze below. That whole thing was the gimmick. The moving floor of the coffin was the slide. And then, you would be dropped into a two-story house with eight of these coffin slides that fed into it, and a one-way path through the dark that funneled everyone towards a single

• 26:33Kaelyn Moore?

  exit, where a performer would jump out and scare you through the doorway. On September 16th, 2017, a 21-year-old student went down one of those slides. Security footage showed him walking the maze for about two or three minutes, and then, somewhere in the dark, he missed the exit. Instead of turning towards the doorway, he backtracked down a path that led to one of the other slides. The only thing standing between the guest and the machinery was this warning sign, which had been described as "very dim." He climbed over the stationary base of the slide into the mechanical zone behind the scenes, and he disappeared from camera view. Minutes later, though, the mechanism came down, the moving bottom of a coffin, with

• 27:17Kaelyn Moore?

  him underneath it. Staff found the man unconscious on the back of the slide, and he was pronounced dead at the hospital. At the inquest, a trainer testified that the attraction was designed so that at least two employees would notice and stop anyone walking the wrong way through the maze. But that night, no one did. And Ocean Park did have a pretty good response to the tragedy. They shut the attraction down, and afterwards, they overhauled their Halloween safety protocols. They made sure there was minimum staffing levels, they added more lights, there's emergency stop buttons in the rides now. And that all happened after his family sued the park the following year.

• 27:56Kaelyn Moore?

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• 28:41Kaelyn Moore?

  actually buying your products. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/HSPPod to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/HSPPod. Go to Shopify.com/HSPPod today to hear your first...

• 28:58Kaelyn Moore?

  This episode is brought to you by Hungry Root. I love to cook, but what I don't love is the 45 minutes before cooking where I'm cycling through, what sounds good? What do we have? What's going to expire? That is exactly why Hungry Root works for me. It's not just a meal kit. It combines meal kit convenience with the variety of a full grocery store. It learns what you like, what you're working towards, and it recommends groceries and recipes tailored to you. I even teamed up with Hungry Root to create my own digital cookbook. In Kalin's Cookbook Now, you can find things like shrimp and veggie Alfredo with broccoli florets, grilled peach and prosciutto pizza. There's also roasted salmon Caesar salad with baby spinach, a chicken and waffle sandwich. And it also comes with some of the groceries that I like to order from Hungry Root, like

• 29:43Kaelyn Moore?

  fresh avocado, seedless red grapes, and a snack pack of cuties. Explore my digital cookbook, Kalin's Cookbook, for free at HungryRoot.com/HSP. And for a limited time, get 40% off your first order, plus a free item in every box for life with code HSP. This episode is brought to you by SoFi, the everything app for smarter money. SoFi brings award-winning banking, investing, borrowing, and more together in one place, so every dollar's working. Your money's a lot less mysterious when you can see it in one place. With SoFi checking and savings, earn up to 4% savings APY for up to six months. Pay no account fees, no minimum deposit to open, and get a bonus of up to $400 when you sign up with eligible direct deposit. Terms apply.

• 30:27Kaelyn Moore?

  SoFi Bank, N A Member FDIC. When you're ready to invest or pay down debt, it's all right there. SoFi members can also access SoFi Wealth's world-class financial planners. Get started at SoFi.com/HeartStarts. This is a paid advertisement by SoFi Technologies and is not intended to be financial advice. Now, our next story takes place in another haunted house. A smaller production, but one that was also not up to code. So, deep in Queens, Hollis specifically, at the corner of Hollis Avenue and 212th Street, there's a two-family house that doesn't really look like much from the outside.

• 31:06Kaelyn Moore?

  But every October since 2002, it becomes what its owners bill as the number one haunted house in New York City. It's known as a Haunting in Hollis. And this is a surprisingly massive production. There's three floors of scares, including the basement. There's 20-plus actors, two pitch-black outdoor zombie mazes where all you get is a flashlight to go through it. And the house also has three escape rooms. They even offer overnight stays. You do have to sign a waiver before you go in. And if it does get to be too much for you, there is a safe word: peanut butter. The attraction comes with its own in-house lore, too. According to the official backstory, the house is haunted by three children who started

• 31:50Kaelyn Moore?

  a fire in the attic and by a haunted toy rotary phone that mysteriously calls the fire department. In the story, the fire department arrives on time and saves the house. Now, A Haunting in Hollis is run by Jeanette and Latia Carter, and after two decades in the neighborhood, it is completely beloved there. The reviews are really good. Their own Instagram calls the haunt "a staple here in the community." And with 22 years of doing this under their belt, you would think that they had things pretty figured out. And well, you would not be exactly right. See, inside the house, there was this one giant slide that they had, and they called it Satan's Slope.

• 32:30Kaelyn Moore?

  On Friday, October 13th, 2023, a 33-year-old woman from Jamaica, Queens, paid the $30 to enter, and she walked into the house. This was two weeks after her wedding, actually, and it was part of her honeymoon. At one point during the excursion, she went over to Satan's Slope. Now, if you look down the slide, you can't see anything. It's just pitch black. You don't know if there's a ball pit at the bottom, if there's water. You just have no idea. But there's also no warning signs at the top of the slide, so how bad could it be? Plus, there's no attendant there, so you can't really ask about it. So, this woman got onto the slide and pushed herself through. But the slide proved to be longer than she thought it was going to be.

• 33:14Kaelyn Moore?

  And soon, she lost control of her speed. All of a sudden, bam! The woman slammed feet-first into a concrete wall. Both of her ankles shattered. The woman had to be rushed to the hospital, where she needed surgery. And ultimately, she needed physical therapy to learn how to walk again. A year later, she still had problems climbing stairs. But yes, it turns out that at the bottom of this slide, there was a concrete wall. A concrete wall that the owners knew about, too, and others had already been injured on it. So, the slide is actually 20 feet long, which is about twice as big as a slide that you would find at a playground. And from reviews, it looks like it was on the stairs of the house, I'm guessing going

• 33:55Kaelyn Moore?

  into the basement, where it probably butted up to the concrete wall of the basement. The New York Post confirmed that at least one other person claims they also broke their ankles on Satan's Slope. Another plaintiff, who was a man who declined to be identified, said that he got hurt on the same slide. He described the exit of the slide as sitting so close to a wall that you basically launched straight into it. He hit it, quote, "very hard with my knee, fracturing it and suffering a compression fracture on his spine." By the fall of 2024, the Carters were facing five separate lawsuits over injuries that happened inside of the house. Four of them were filed in 2023 for injuries that happened in 2022 and 2023.

• 34:39Kaelyn Moore?

  So, this was a pattern that was happening for a long time before the city took notice. And you might be wondering, how come no one came to shut it down? Well, three days after the woman from Queens filed her lawsuit, a member of the New York Fire Department happened to come across the attraction. Literally was just walking through the neighborhood, saw it, and was like, what's this? And when he went in, he said there were about 40 paying customers inside of the house, which, remember, it's not that big of a house. He went ahead and he called the fire department, who came over. And what they found in that two-family home was that it had been illegally converted into a commercial amusement park. They saw garbage bags taped over the windows to use as blackout material. There's also plastic sheeting hanging everywhere, which made the whole place super flammable.

• 35:23Kaelyn Moore?

  They also found exposed defective wiring, an illegal smoke machine. There were holes in the walls and in the floors, piles of combustible debris kind of sitting everywhere. Set decorations were blocking the exit routes, fireproofing material that had been removed, and three illegal staircases. The fire commissioner, when told about the state of the house, said that he thought it was a death trap. The Department of Buildings issued a full vacate order and three violations. And you know, you gotta kind of hand it to these women. 13 days after the raid, on Friday, October 18th, 2024, A Haunting in Hollis reopened with the Department of Buildings blessing, and it was fire-rated. It had sheet rock installed. The flammable materials and window garbage bags were all gone. They hung up exit signs.

• 36:08Kaelyn Moore?

  They fixed everything they needed to fix, basically, and they hired actual safety personnel. And Satan's Slope, they removed it entirely. And they've kept this operation going since. There's a five-star review from 10 days after the reopening and actively well into this year. So, if you live in New York, you can still go to this house. You just won't be able to ride Satan's Slope. And remember, in the house's own fictional lore, the fire department saves the building. And in real life, the fire department is the one that shut it down so that it could bring itself up to code, probably also saving the building. If you enjoy going to Halloween attractions, I don't blame you. I do, too. I've already done Horror Nights this year and the Queen Mary, and I'm just getting started.

• 36:52Kaelyn Moore?

  But it's worth remembering that sometimes these attractions are put together really fast, and in an attempt to scare the audience, they can actually hurt people. Though, if there's one thing that I've learned from doing this episode, it's that honestly, the most dangerous role inside of the haunted attraction is being the scare actor. Those poor people get punched in the face and kicked a lot. Robia, who helped research and write this episode, I already mentioned, was a scare actor and was telling me all about that part. Now, if you want to hear about some haunted attractions that didn't make it into the episode, you can join me on the High Council tier of Patreon for Footnotes, our weekly after show, where I go over some stuff that didn't make it into the episode. Otherwise, I'll see you here for another episode next week for spooky season. And until then, stay curious.

• 37:41Kaelyn Moore?

  Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional writing and research by Robia Teamstra. Sound design and mix by Redrum Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jordan again, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request, check out hearts start pounding.com.

• 38:05Kaelyn Moore?

  This episode is brought to you by our partner, Vistaprint. If you run a small business, you know that there's a moment where you go from just doing the thing you love to realizing you need stuff, like physical stuff. Custom merch for an event, branded apparel for your team, business cards that actually look professional. That was definitely me with Heart Starts Pounding. What started as a podcast I made in my closet turned into something that had merch, had mugs, had stickers, had all of this stuff that I needed to get made. And Vistaprint made it so much less overwhelming. They are a true print expert. Premium quality products, fast turnaround, and design tools that actually make sense. I actually got custom mugs made from Vistaprint, and they are gorgeous and very, very good quality. The quality feels expensive without having an expensive price tag.

• 38:50Kaelyn Moore?

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