Nightmare in KC: Local haunted houses provide enough scares for the entire season

I’ve never been one for fear, plugging my ears and crying during “The Conjuring” and clenching my eyes shut inside of my neighbors haunted garage in second grade.

Even though being harassed by men with fake bloody chainsaws isn’t the ideal way to spend my Saturday night, my friends still drag me to the same two downtown haunted houses every October: The Beast and The Edge of Hell. Since I still can’t get through those two without running out of the house screaming and more often than not crying, I’m forcing myself to discover some lesser-known haunted houses around Kansas City to hopefully impress my friends with less screams and dry cheeks.

An eerie, vacant warehouse sits in the West Bottoms. It’s dark, five stories tall and boasts the name Macabre Cinema. Each room inside this house is based on iconic horror movies and it’s owned by Full Moon Productions — the same company that owns the Beast and Edge of Hell.

As I entered the house, I was prepared to handle any goblin or ghoul that came my way. The first thing I saw was a room full of faux spiders and cobwebs. I giggled to myself: this can’t be that bad, right?

My confidence dissolved almost instantly — the first room was not an equal measure of how frightening the rest of the house would become. Every five seconds a killer clown taunted me with a bloody knife or a psycho orphan demanded to play a game with me. When they jumped out, all I could do was shake in fear and run away from them as fast as I could — which they took as an invitation to chase me.

And if the bloody zombies following me weren’t scary enough, the house was impossible to navigate. The nauseating strobe lights, dark rooms and hidden doors made it difficult to make it from one room to the next without running into something. I couldn’t even tell that each room was based off of a horror movie. All I saw was darkness and sadly, no visible means of escape. 

The 45 minutes I spent dodging mummies and running into doors was scarring; I won’t be back next year.

After Macabre, I strayed away from the traditional indoor haunted houses and visited the Exiled Trail of Terrors, a one-mile outdoor haunted hike in Bonner Springs.

My palms were sweating as I waited in line, distant screams were echoing from the forest. As different ghouls and zombies taunted me in line, I was already on edge for what the actual haunted experience would bring. 

Once I was in the forest, I was most concerned with how I would find my way through. The trail wasn’t lit, and no phone or outside flashlights were allowed. All they gave me was a small, red LED flashlight that did nothing to help me navigate. But shockingly, the trail was actually easy to follow — with ropes along the sides to prevent you from straying off. 

There was also a ton of variety — with tents themed like abandoned hospitals, narrow tunnels to crawl through and even a bus that you could climb over. 

The beginning of the forest wasn’t too bad. Zombies and psycho priests were jumping out at me, but it wasn’t anything abnormal after my nightmares following Macabre Cinema. I found myself actually enjoying it.

But this confidence didn’t last long: a dense fog engulfed me, making it impossible for me to see anything in a five foot radius. A man kept banging on a metal barrel, demanding that I continue moving.

Just as I was taking my sigh of relief after making it through the fog, a chainsaw scraped across my leg. I looked down, which only made it scarier. A man with bloody eyes was laughing hysterically with the chainsaw in his hand, saying he wanted to chop my head off. This was when I decided it was my time to go.

It may take a lot of convincing, but I’d go back next year.