“So right here, give out a signal’,” Shayne explains, businesslike. “Like, ‘oh. I can’t find my phone!’ One of us will come from this door-” he indicates the heavy industrial door, “-and grab ‘em, drag ‘em back here.”
It’s Friday the thirteenth of October, a half-hour before Erebus Haunted Attraction will open its doors. Shayne has been tasked with showing new hire Desire how to play a victim in that night’s walkthrough, and I’m along for the ride.
“Some people will fought for the door to be opened, or they won’t react, or they get a really strong reaction and start running,” Shayne continues.
“I mean, some people don’t care,” Rosie laughs. Rosie, at sixteen, is one of the youngest employees of the haunted house, and a veteran “victim”— a t
eenaged actor who is placed among the customers and who goes through the house disguised as one of them, until she’s yanked away by Shayne and his associates.
“Some people just look at you and just walk,” Aurora— a cheerful blonde art student in combat boots— agrees.
Shayne goes over the rules of “getting snatched”. You have to speak loudly, so that whoever is about to snatch you can hear the code phrase— tonight, the three victims are pretending to have lost their phones— and you have to stand in a specific spot, so you don’t get pancaked by the heavy door that Shayne’s going to be swinging open.
“So, live demo,” he says. “One of you guys-” he indicates Aurora and Rosie, his experienced victims, “-are getting snatched.”
“I’ll get snatched,” Rosie says casually, as they walk back to the chainsaw portion of the haunted house. As Desire and I stand in the shadows observing, the girls come back around the corner feigning the genuine terror that Erebus’s customers usually find themselves in. “Where are you?!” Rosie shrieks. “Where’d you go?! I can’t find my phone-”
And here’s Shayne, slamming the door open to grab her from behind as she shrieks. As the door swings shut, they start to giggle in the back room.
“Very realistic,” Desire says appraisingly as Shayne and Rosie reappear, in high spirits.
“So, we also do something called ‘double trouble’,” he starts.
“Oh, that’ll be fun!” Aurora grins. Rosie had told me about ‘double trouble’, their newest scare tactic in which not one but two of the victim actors get snatched away. The girls come around the corner again, feign terror again, say the code phrase again, and Rosie is snatched again‚— but this time, Aurora bangs on the door until Shayne grabs her, too.
They laugh as they come out, going over the technicals of their performance. Did it look too friendly when Shayne snatched Aurora up? Was she sufficiently caught off-guard?
“How much time do we have? Can we go over it again?”
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Rosie came to Erebus as a volunteer through Bloomfield Hills High School, and liked it so much she basically never left. She was here so often she got hired as an actress, even though she’s two years under the 18-year-old minimum employee age.
“I just like acting!” she says. “I love performing!” She tells me that her role as a victim lets her get in a lot of acting practice. “Things change on the fly. I mean, we just came up with ‘double trouble’,” she says.
Her fellow actor Aria agrees. Although he had no performing background, he applied to work at Erebus on the recommendation of a friend, and is having a fantastic time.
“It’s been an absolute treat to do this, it’s a very unique experience,” he says. “A lot of the people here are very friendly, very collaborative with you on… making the character your own, and letting me take my own creative twist on the general theme— and find a new joy in acting, which is something I‘ve never done before.” He says he has a fair amount of flexibility in his role, and has fun using his space and continually challenging himself to find new ways to scare people.
“I’ve been working here for two weeks. I live next door, and thought it’d be fun,” scare actor Stacy says. “I’m a retired nurse, and I thought it would be exciting.” She says that her naturally animated and dramatic personality has helped her in her role. “I play Miss Patty, and I make meat pies out of human flesh. Have you ever seen Sweeney Todd? I’m Helena Bonham Carter. It’s fun!”
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Ed Terebus (yes, Terebus like Erebus, a name he found in an old vampire novel) thinks it’s fun, too. That’s the whole reason he and his older brother Jim got into the haunted house business— as a hobby, something to do when Ed wasn’t locksmithing and Jim wasn’t publishing magazines.
Their first haunted house was more of a haunted trailer, set up at 13 and Van Dyke in front of the Walmart. Over the next twenty years, the Terebus’ Haunted Gallery grew into several trailers, and eventually the brothers realized that they might be able to make a real business out of their haunted house gig. They found the perfect location, too— an abandoned parking garage on Perry Street in Pontiac, the perfect blank canvas to create something truly terrifying.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t for sale. So they went back to the drawing board, which didn’t yield any promising results, so the Terebus brothers tried a new tactic— delving deep into Pontiac’s public record to find the building’s owner, and making him an offer. Jim had to mortgage his house, and Ed sold his, but they got it.
Years later, Erebus is still going strong. Jim’s two sons are in the business now, along with six other full-time team members who help keep the four-story haunted house in operation— and help reinvent it every year,
“We change it about 20, 25 percent [every year],” Ed says. “Sometimes it’s harder than other years to change it up, but we always manage to pull it off.”
The Terebuses and their colleagues get new inspiration from all over. “Bottomless Pit, that was from a puddle. The swamp came from a drawing that one of the guys did. Buried Alive came from a conversation I had with somebody,” Ed says. “Downstairs is a moving room. The inspiration was— as you’re driving you ever see the car next to you roll forward a bit? You think you’re moving backward and you slam on the brakes? I thought about that for five, six years, How do you duplicate the natural scare?”
He says they’re already brainstorming for next year— but declines to tell me their plans. It’s 6:45 anyways, fifteen minutes to open, and he’s got last-minute stuff to handle, so with a final handshake, we part ways, his young daughter Tori trailing after him.
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Once they’re satisfied that they’re ready to be snatched, it’s time for Aurora, Rosie, and Desire to head outside and get in line with the other customers, where they’ll blend in until they “lose their phones”. I ask to follow them outside, and they look at each other, before Rosie says “sure, but you can’t give us away!”
I follow them into the waning Pontiac sunlight at a distance, out the back door and around the corner to the back of the line that’s already snaking down the block. Some folks wave at me, nervous or excited or genuinely scared. Down the line, Rosie, Aurora, and Desire are chatting, waiting to go on.
