There’s a haunted house tour out in Tennessee that requires guests to sign a 40-page waiver, clear a background check and pass a doctor’s physical and mental exams. Yikes.
And now there’s a petition to close it.
What it is: The McKamey Manor experience, which spans from Summertown, Tennessee, to Huntsville, Alabama, lasts for up to 10 hours, and includes physically and mentally painful experiences that have made people avoid the tour altogether.
- Guests, who are called “contestants” in the haunted house experience, need to be at least 21 to enter.
- Guests must also be insured and pass a drug test.
- McKamey will record each person’s experience on the tour and post them online, showing people quit in absolute hysteria, he told WFLA-TV.
Reward: This is serious business. But it comes with a potential prize. Owner Russ McKamey will award anyone who completes the tour $20,000. No one has ever finished it, though.
What it’s like: “You get a lot of people who think it’s going to be easy money,” Kris Smith, who works on the tour, told USA Today.
Smith tried to partake in the tour years ago. But he couldn’t make it past the waiver since it talked about the potential physical pain and high stakes problems that come from the experience, USA Today reports.
“I read it and I quit,” Smith said. “I got to the last page and turned around and went home. ... There’s so much. You have to pull out your own teeth, there’s a chance of getting a tattoo, a chance of your fingernails getting pulled out. It’s really overwhelming. There’s a chance of death. Accidents do happen.”
Yes, but: A new Change.org petition is looking to have the haunted house shut down, according to NBC News. The petition calls for Tennessee and Alabama state officials to close down the haunted house, which they call a “torture chamber under disguise.”
“They do screenings to find the weakest, most easily manipulated people to do the ‘haunt’. ... Mckamey Manor is a shame to all haunted houses, and needs to be shut down,” the petition reads.
According to the petition, guests who attend the house have been waterboarded, “forced to eat things” and had duct tape put over their heads.
“It’s literally just a kidnapping & torture house. Some people have had to seek professional psychiatric help and medical care for extensive injuries. I propose that all locations where this is happening be shut down immediately,” according to the petition.
The petition has almost 80,000 signatures as of press time.
The other side: McKamey, the owner of the house, told WFLA in Tampa that it’s just a “crazy haunted house” and not a torture chamber. He defended himself and the manor, as well.
“I’m a very straight-laced conservative guy, but here I run this crazy haunted house that people think is this torture factory, fetish factory. All of these things that it’s not,” he said.
“You’d be surprised over the years how many people have claimed something happened to them inside,” he told WFLA. “And I need to go back and show whoever needs to see it the raw and unedited footage, saying ‘here ya go, here’s the complete show.’