It’s late on a Friday and I put on my finest dangly ghost earrings for a night out with some of my very best ghoulfriends.
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Every fall, I set aside a night to go haunted house-hopping with friends. It’s our prom — something that we plan in advance, get nervous and giggly about, and splurge on.
After dinner at Los Arcos (our favorite Mexican restaurant up in Westminster), we head to the 13th Floor Haunted House in Denver for a scary good time.
The author, left, and friends at the 13th Floor Haunted House. (Provided by Brittany Anas)
It all started about 20 years ago, when I started babysitting for a family while I was going to school at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The kids’ mom, Emmy, and I bonded over our shared love for haunted houses. Every year since, we’ve found ourselves bumbling through haunts together, alternating who gets to lead the way and bear the brunt of the jump scares.
“Don’t forget to wear your running shoes,” Emmy chides me over text as I’m getting ready for our annual night out. I’ll never live down the night I was running from a chainsaw at Terror in the Corn at Anderson Farms and I tripped and fell and lost my car keys.
I’d be the first one gone in a horror movie, we joke.
I love that after all of these years, we’ve never laid this tradition to rest. It’s like a persistent spirit. The funny thing is that even though I babysat for Emmy, we ended up developing a kid-at-heart type of friendship. She’s always up for a haunted house, to stay out late for a midnight movie release, and to pop some Dramamine and ride rollercoasters. She even made the trek to my bachelorette party at Schlitterbahn, a massive water park in New Braunfels, Texas.
In the early years, Emmy and I would see how many haunted houses we could fit into one night. But lines grew and haunts became more geographically spaced out throughout the Denver metro, so our new strategy is to pick one haunted house each year and make a night out of it.
We even created staycations around our night out, like watching scary movies at The Catbird Hotel in RiNo, where rooms come with pull-down projector screens. Last year, we booked one of the limited-time rooms at The Curtis Hotel that was decorated by 13th Floor scare actors and set designers. There was an eerie red glow in the room, a literal monster hiding under the bed and a skeleton in the closet.
Haunted houses have become big business, adding more and more attractions every season.
So, this year, Emmy and other scare-seeking friends spent a few hours at the 13th Floor hauntplex. The attraction now has two separate haunted houses, with a total of three chilling storylines: A nautical nightmare, a remote cabin inhabited by a twisted taxidermist, and another storyline involving an evil sorcerer. There are a number of ways you can upgrade your night, from accessing secret speakeasies hidden in the haunt to playing some of the games (like the mini escape rooms, where you’ve got 5 minutes to solve a mystery), to buying a pass so that you can be recorded in the haunted house for your own “fright movie.”
Since we’re pros at this point, we’ve developed a sixth sense for jump scares, but I always get spooked when an actor comes crawling from below or follows me for longer than a couple of seconds. We gawk at the gory animatronics and wobble through the rooms with the uneven floors holding one another steady as it feels like we’re walking through another dimension.
One of the RIP Cabanas at the 13th Floor Haunted House was decked out with ghoulish decor like a skull chandelier. (Savannah King, Special to The Denver Post)
We even have come to appreciate the small details. (You’re not imagining it: haunted houses often have scentscapes like decaying vegetation in a swamp scene or dirt in a graveyard or sugary aromas at a creepy carnival.)
We reserved one of the RIP Cabanas (a riff on VIP) that was decked out with ghoulish decor like a skull chandelier and furnished with a Connect 4 game. The heated space gave us a spot to hang out in between the haunts.
I made it through the haunted house without getting too many goosebumps or letting out any glass-shattering screams. The best scare of the night came from an unexpected cameo by one of the scare actors, a ghoulish fellow in a top hat who popped into the cabana to pose for selfies. I didn’t see him coming, and his sinister smile sent a chill down my spine.
It ended up being the kind of night that Halloween dreams, err, nightmares, are made of.
Brittany Anas is a Denver-based freelance writer.