I heard the rumor so many times every fall: a 10-to-13-story haunted house attraction on the outskirts of Chicago. You sign a waiver and pay a pricey entry fee. The goal? Make it to the top and win your money back (and sometimes more).
Of course, it wouldn't be easy. Several obstacles stood in your way. Trap doors and breakaway walls. Actors that can hunt you down and remove you from the house. Live insects and snakes lurking in various rooms. Very few, if any, actually made it to the top.
When I first heard about this house as a naive teenager, I wanted to find it. I'm going to sound old as I write this, but back in those days (the late 90s) the Internet was in its infancy and it wasn't as seamless to access a wealth of information as it is today. Today, a simple Google search will dispel a rumor like this within seconds. Then again, with all the misinformation ... ah, never mind. In my case, Snopes broke this fantasy for me while I was in college.
Looking back, there were plenty of red flags. Anyone who spoke of this haunted house had never seen it. It was something a friend of a friend or a distant cousin told them about. I never met anyone who actually found this house and experienced it firsthand. The location was never fixed either. Some years it was close to Chicago. Other years it was tucked away off the beaten path in some small Wisconsin town.
On top of that, no one ever considered the impractical nature of this attraction. Why would any business running a haunted house make it difficult to find? Wouldn't they want to bring in as many customers as possible and turn a profit? What about the liability issues? Sure, you sign a waiver, but that wouldn't hold up too well if several people got hurt visiting this place.
Naturally, I was disappointed when I learned this place wasn't real. I enjoyed haunted houses, but I always wondered what it would be like to navigate a place with those types of challenges. The drawback of a typical haunted house attraction is that the "monsters" can't touch you. For some, that's one of the perks. For me, that new wrinkle, that additional challenge, would create a much more intense atmosphere with no guarantee of making it to the exit. You'd have to be cunning and wise to make it through this place. It would be a unique experience that no other haunted house could rival.
While I can't experience a haunted house like this, I still wondered how it would unfold if I could. Flash forward to 2013 and another thought came to mind while venturing through a haunted house: what would I do if everything in this haunted house was real? And thus, the idea for Legend Has It was born. I took a real-life legend and added a deadly twist.
And if you're wondering how someone would fare in such a situation, I've got a story that's worth reading.
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