Halloween

Saturday night, I went to a haunted house. Cue the anticipation...I bet you can't wait to hear about this. Chris and I went to The Cutting Edge haunted house in Fort Worth. For those of you who drive in Fort Worth on a regular basis, it's the one that you can see off I-30; the one with the big monster on the roof. It's not a great part of town, but luckily there were a bunch of police officers out guarding the parking lots. It made us feel safe leaving the car unattended. So this being my first visit to a haunted house, I had no idea what to expect. I was shocked to learn that the people who pay to go to the haunted house are generally scarier than the people who work in the haunted house. There were some real weirdo's out there. As we were walking to the ticket counter, we passed a doorway with a ton of bubbles and people running out of them soaked. I commented to Chris how stupid they were to be getting all wet like that when it was so chili outside, especially the girls who were dressed like it was the middle of the summer. I guess it's very important to look cute when you go to a haunted house, even if that means wearing a halter top, a short skirt and sandals on a chili October-almost-November night. I'll have to remember this if I go back next year. Anyways, don't forget my comment about the bubbles.

The haunted house itself was pretty cheesy. It's basically a series of dark hallways and spinning tunnels interrupted by low-lit rooms decorated with scary scenes, like a trashed out laboratory or a tornado stricken house. The spinning tunnels were actually pretty cool. For those of you who don't know, there's a bridge that goes through this tunnel that spins around. At each end of the tunnel are mirrors. It sounds silly, but it actually messes with your sense of balance a lot, to the point where it feels like you would fall over if it weren't for the chain railing to hold onto. Of course the railing is not made out something solid, but rather a shaky chain. After walking through the tunnel, you stay pretty dizzy for a few minutes, which can make navigating the dark hallways even more difficult. At one point the hallways opened up into a large empty room that was full of fog and lit only by a strobe light. The objective was to find the exit, which was pretty tricky since the atmosphere was so disorienting. Of course, the whole thing was littered with people in costumes trying to scare you. My personal favorites were all the people with chainsaws! Real chainsaws, only the chain was disengaged. They were actually pretty annoying, and smelly. There were also a lot of guys in all black with painted faces that would hide in corners and then jump out at you. Chris and I were startled a few times at first. About half-way through I started getting real offensive. I was constantly looking for scary guys hiding in corners. When I would see one lurking in the corner, I would shake my finger at them and yell something like, "I see you," like I was teaching them a lesson or something. Sometimes though, they took this finger-shaking as an invitation to get right in my face. Of course, that would incite more finger-shaking and words like, "Shame on you." At one point, the tunnels opened up into a maze. They told us the only way out was to find the door that said "this is it." Of course we never found the door, although we sure tried. I personally think there was no door, but that it was actually a maze with nothing more than dead ends.

The whole haunted house took about an hour to go through. At the end there were two exits, one that said "no foam" and one that said "foam." Chris, being the brave and adventurous man that he is, grabbed my arm without any hesitation and dragged me into the foam exit. Ahhh...now I understood why they half-naked girls were running around soaked in bubbles! Their equally brave and adventurous boyfriends had dragged them through the foam exit. The whole thing looked like an I Love Lucy stunt gone really wrong. The exit was a bubble-tunnel. It looked like someone had filled a whole room with the dish-soap bubbles. At first I was fine because there was a tunnel of air that you could walk through, but the tunnel got smaller and smaller until it was gone. Then all I could see was bubbles, in front of me, behind me, beside me and above me. That's when I freaked out. At that point I lost all sense of direction and decided I was going to be suffocated by bubbles. Panic quickly ensued. I could hear Chris yelling at me to get behind him, which I later learned would have been a good idea because I could have walked in the vacuum of air he created as he walked. But of course I was too freaked out to think clearly. I had one goal, and that was to run out of there as fast as possible so as to get out before I ran out of air. Obviously I made it out, and obviously I may have over-reacted, but it was pretty scary at the time. I really thought I was going to suffocate. It was the first time I have really felt Closter phobic. Chris found it all very amusing...which I chose to ignore. The whole visit was a very interesting experience. I'm not sure I would do it again, just because it was a little expensive, but if I ever go again I will be sure to avoid any exits that involve foam. That was not cool.