Nightmare in northern Michigan

BY MARTA HEPLER DRAHOS

October 22, 2007 04:00 am

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Donna Peterson may work on God's side, but that doesn't mean she can't enjoy a little devilish fun.

"I like scaring the bejeepers out of people," said Peterson, the secretary for Holy Rosary Church in Cedar and a member of the Galla family whose backyard "Horror Manor" is legendary in the community.

The Halloween haunt takes visitors through a 350-foot indoor-outdoor maze where live horror scenes play out -- accompanied by fog and eerie lighting and music that's piped into the street. By all accounts, the scariest part of the experience is the "black maze" that can only be negotiated by touch (spoiler: stone "walls" aren't the only things they feel).

"The teenagers love it. They tell us that it's the best," said BJ Christensen, director of the Cedar Area Community Foundation, a non-profit group that helps support the haunt by handing out candy on Halloween and donating funds toward its updating. "Some people will go through it two or three times in a row. I only went through it once and that was enough for me."

The manor is one of several haunted attractions in northern Michigan this year and a symbol of the rise in Halloween popularity that now has 63.8 percent of all consumers celebrating the holiday. According to a 2006 National Retail Federation survey, more than 17 percent of them visit a haunted house.

Opening Friday for a three-night run plus Halloween, Horror Manor centers around legends like Bloody Mary, the Cedar Swamp Monster and The Sanitarium, Peterson said. In addition to the usual mazes and a haunted cemetery complete with coffin, headstones and ghosts, it features a new haunted forest stalked by northern Michigan's "Dogman," a legend created in 1987 by local radio station WTCM as an April Fool's prank.

"We've been planning on having him for three years," said Peterson, adding that artist Brian Rosinski is creating a special mask for the mythical half-man, half-dog based on his prize-winning drawing for the station.

Also new this year: night vision cameras to capture the reactions of those going through the attraction for broadcast to those waiting in line outside.

The haunted house traces its roots back several years to when Peterson began decorating the hallway of her parents' 1800s home at the edge of the Cedar swamp for Halloween and dressing in costume to pass out candy. But the seeds were planted even earlier, when her dad, Tony Galla, scared trick-or-treaters by talking to them through a giant pumpkin via a hidden tube passed into it from a nearby window.

It blossomed into a full-fledged haunt about five years ago and now attracts some 500 people over four nights. In some Leelanau County circles, it rivals the elaborate Maple City Christmas display of Sonny and Bernie Czerniak.

"We knew we hit the big time when they came to check out our house," Peterson said, with a laugh.

Planning for the haunt begins in July, followed by construction at the end of September. The whole family is involved, from patriarch Tony on down to 4-year-old Tayler Schwartz.

"It's neat to have that kind of project to work on together," said Peterson, an art and theater devotee who handles multiple duties with sisters Jeanette Theisen of Clare, Bonnie Schwartz of Traverse City and assorted husbands, children and cousins.

Unlike big-city attractions, the haunt relies on mostly homemade sets and props. Mazes are constructed of pallets covered with roofing felt or, in the case of the forest maze, old wooden snow fencing studded with saplings. Special effects are low-tech, like the motion detectors that cause lights to go on and off, the oscillating fan that turns a witch's head and the windshield wiper motor mounted under a rocking chair that causes a skeleton to rock.

But it's the realistic -- and often gory -- tableaus using family actors in costume and makeup that seem to delight people the most, Peterson said.

In one year's "floater" scene, cousin Lindsey Brzezinski played a drowning victim in faded life-vest and "dead-eye" contact lenses, long hair tangled in "seaweed." In another's "the blade," son Chris, a 20-year-old Northwestern Michigan College student, posed as a murder victim with bloody abdominal wound oozing "intestines" -- sausage casings stuffed with oatmeal.

"We got one little girl who got halfway through and she couldn't go any further," Peterson said. "She got to the hallway where you had to push all the (hanging) bodies to go through and that was the end of her."

Extreme reactions also are common at The Nightmare at Challenge Mountain, said Terry Baker, creator of the Boyne Falls haunt with her husband Jim.

"We have had a grown man soil his pants. We have had a woman abandon her children and run out. We had one little girl faint," she said. "The dad was ready and caught her and went out the door laughing. He said, 'We'll be back next year.'"

The haunt got its start in the 1980s after the Tylenol poisoning scare, when the Bakers started a neighborhood alternative to trick-or-treating in an abandoned house on their property. Now it takes place every Friday and Saturday in October at Challenge Mountain, an adaptive recreation area where the couple are long-time volunteers.

"We haunt the whole upstairs, the whole downstairs and the handicapable trail as well," Baker said, referring to the rustic lodge and an outdoor trail that's lit for the occasion.

This year the lodge is transformed into a medieval castle complete with keep, courtyard, dragon room and sewer drains, where three different paths -- with real dirt, rocks, trees and stumps -- lead to disaster.

In the PG-7-rated basement haunt, visitors are guided to five spooky "floors" via a stationary elevator that vibrates and "descends" with the help of a lightbox. Among the scariest, said Baker: floor number 666, inhabited by bats and a vampire; the "spider" floor, where arachnids of all sizes run, jump and skitter with the help of puppeteers hidden behind black boxes, and the stone-walled "H" floor, where bodies are caged, cooked and chased by an eight-foot-tall devil.

Outdoors, the wooded, winding trail takes visitors through the Grateful Dead Cemetery, populated by skeletons of dead musicians posed in ways that suggest their identities, and the Grimm Forest, with representations of the famous fairy tales.

Figuring out the stories is only part of the thrill, Baker said. The rest?

"It's suspense, anticipation, little noises ahead of time," she said. "You're being set up constantly to know something is going to happen."

The haunt, a fundraiser for Challenge Mountain, attracted about 1,000 people last October, she said. But the couple works on it all year long, building and collecting props at home.

They don't do it alone.

"It takes 38 actors and puppeteers to put this show on," Baker said, adding that volunteers come from as far away as Levering and Kalkaska. "Every year we seem to collect another person or two."

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