Local Travel Tip

Baton Rouge, Louisiana is the home of the #1 rated haunted house, called 13^th gate.

Literally, your worst nightmares will come alive as you crawl through a crematory oven, get lost in dark underground tunnels and find yourself standing on a rickety bridge overlooking hundreds of live snakes.

Hauntworld Magazine has named this 40,000-square-foot attraction the #1 haunted house in the nation for the second year in a row.

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Take a trip to Kansas City, Missouri, to go to one of the nation’s best haunted houses. The Beast is truly a brute masterpiece of fear.

The key scaring secret (not anymore…) to this haunted house is that they train their actors to read the body language of each visitor and time their scares accordingly. The result is literally a scared out-of-your-mind, wet-your-pants experience like none other you have experienced.

Thirty-five years ago, they added an accompanying haunt, called the Edge of Hell.

Since then, the Beast has been hell-bent on making sure the actors understand that haunted houses are another form of theater. “We have to anticipate the timing and people’s reactions so we can move the visitors from point A to point B. We spend days and weeks to get this right. It’s not about the gore element, but the theatrical element,” Amber Arnett-Bequeaith, the owner says.

Hauntworld Magazine calls The Beast “one of the biggest and best indoor haunted attractions in the nation.” The house spans five floors and features elaborate set design and Hollywood-like ghost illusions.

The Edge of Hell features a real 24-foot python residing in the place. Larry Edgar, the snake’s handler and Edge of Hell’s general manager, believes the snake is the biggest living snake in capacity weighing in at 300 pounds, and is planning to apply for a Guinness Record come Spring.

The Beast and The Edge of Hell are open to those who dare to enter on Fridays and Saturdays in September and Thursdays through Sundays throughout October. Single passes are $20, or get a combo ticket to both attractions for $33.

Looking for a haunted thrill this Halloween season? Head to San Jose, California, to visit the Winchester Mansion mystery house.

William Wirt Winchester was dead to begin with.  He was a gun tycoon, who died along with their only daughter, leaving his wife Sarah as a lonely widow in 1884. Sarah believed that the house was haunted by those who had been killed by the company’s rifles that were originally owned by her husband.

Sarah reported seeing a spirit that told her she had to build a house for herself and all the spirits. She was required to keep building and building as long as she could. As long as she kept building and adding on to the original home, she’d live… but if she ever stopped building, she’d die.

And so on went the construction and on and on it continued, to appease the lost souls who died at the hands of a gun. The construction was continued up until her death in 1922, the construction went on for nearly 38 years.

The rooms go from a normal size to being teeny tiny, haphazard floors, stairways lead up to ceilings and go nowhere, random windows, hallways come to dead ends and doors open to nothing … it’s been said Sarah commissioned the builders to craft the home this way so the spirits couldn’t get to her.

Today, Winchester Mystery House is a tourist attraction, where people are taken on a walkabout through the house to see some of its stranger and creepier attributes. You have the option of taking a regular daylight tour, or they have special tours on Friday the 13th and Halloween that are done in the dark…watch your step…(imagine a creepy laugh and organ music now.)