PUMPKIN GUTS: CP Classic Rewind: Hauntings Scarred Me For Life

In honor of the passing of a truly important landmark some years ago, and in honor of Halloween, when the worlds of the living and passed on conjoin, and because it is obliquely about ghosts (both in the literal sense of subject AND in the metaphorical sense of something from one's past that "haunts" us) our Classic Rewind is a reminiscence of young Rook being scared and scarred for life, possibly leading to a number of unhealthy obsessions with the spooky.  Join me as we recall that classic event...

I grew up in the deep south and every year I would venture north, a bit, with my parents to visit Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  Way back then Gatlinburg, while a tourist town, was less flash than it is today, but it had a few landmarks I'll never forget such as a Space Needle (with arcade), Fannie Farkels arcade/corn dogs/funnel cakes, Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum and a little hole in the wall called Hauntings.

Part of the classic tri-fold brochure that convinced me to enter the establishment

Aw hell.
I was young and apparently, foolish.  I would look over the brochures we had collected and see if there was anything I wanted to do.  When I say young, I mean, young.  Not yet even a tween-ager.  My mother counseled against Hauntings, but I had braved the Mysterious Mansion and solved it with skills honed from years of watching Scooby-Doo, so what was this to me?  Obviously if you have live ghost shows "every 20 minutes" then either this is accomplished through tricks and special effects or these ghosts are professional performers.  I had nothing to fear.
Bullshit.
So on the day we decided to go we ate a late breakfast at the local McDonalds (back then you could buy character glasses made of actual glass...I got Charlie Brown) and we went to Hauntings.
Inside the single tiny room there were just us 3 and a young couple.  We were told not to sit on the front bench.  We sat in the dark for what seemed like hours.  I got scared.  I started shaking.  It was obvious because the Charlie Brown glass that I held between my thighs was rattling on the bench.
When the show started I was thrown into a dimension beyond fear and panic.  Looking back from this point it was nothing, but to my little mind it was pure HELL.
Let's have another look at the brochure, shall we:

That wicked cool ghost is what attracted me.  I mean, what does that say about me?  It says I was a little boy and little boys find stuff like the above cool.

This is what I expected, a person wearing a sheet and some glowing items "floating" with the aid of wires.

Yeah.  What I got was a strobe light flashing on a robed and hooded form swinging a chainsaw, smashing into the front bench and roaring "Someone must DIE!"
I recall to this day the words, "Not me!" being screamed by me because, as I've observed, kids are incredibly practical when it comes to such matters.

Oh, was I a wreck.  For the remainder of the trip I would not walk near that place.  I'd walk in the street to avoid it.  If I was on the other side of the street I'd start to get nervous as we got near it.  It was like the obsession people get with shark attacks or germs.  My psyche was scarred.  My father would later say that he felt horrible that they'd taken me and that he should have known better, but hey, I don't blame him.  I wanted to go.
For years whenever we would visit Gatlinburg (every year for Thanksgiving, because we really didn't want to see the whole family twice within 30 days, so we fled the state) I'd get antsy when we came near Hauntings and move as far away from the building as I could when we passed by.  That is AWESOME.  You can't plan for that kind of permanent mental marking.  I firmly believe my love for all this weirdness was born in that incident.  Bless it.

I don't have that Charlie Brown glass anymore, but I'll always have that memory until the day I die.

K.Y.P.L.