Last year, the Pulse was proud to present an article that seemed to make a pretty big splash in the haunted house community. We put together a team of gore hounds and rated each haunt, getting lost in quiet industrial areas and old woods that would make Jigsaw and Jason Voorhees feel right at home.
Being the prettiest one in the group, I managed to survive. It never pays to start doing drugs and having sex when you hear spooky music in creepy locations.
This was a tough list to put together, as almost all of these haunts put forth great effort and really care about scaring the community. Anything above a “C” in the ratings is certainly worth visiting, and keep in mind that there are several haunts we haven’t reviewed. This article will be updated online throughout the month.
Before we push through that first door into the lurking darkness, I’d like to take a moment and thank Mid South Haunts – a mysterious Facebook entity from beyond the grave – which keeps a creeping eye on the rest of the local haunts and helped the Pulse put the review together. You can find Mid South Haunts on Facebook for haunted house news, as well as keep up with the other haunts in the review.
And now… ENTER IF YOU DARE!
The top three:
Monster Mountain. Photo by Melanie Contreras.
Monster Mountain – 1st place
273 McMurtry Rd.
Hendersonville, TN 37075
monstermountain.net/
(615) 338-4632
Price:$15.00
Grade: A
Monster Mountain kept the same approach as last year, and our team feels that it still works. We really do run the gamut here, going through a truly diverse lineup of terrors. I’m not saying anything else, as you should go there to feel the fear for yourself.
Go there, if you dare.
Haunted Hell
Haunted Hell – 2nd place
3930 Apache Trail
Antioch, TN 37103
hauntedhellnashville.com/
(615) 680-9343
Price: $15
Grade: A
From the fine folks who brought you Devil’s Dungeon comes a haunt that came out of nowhere, like a specter in the night. This attraction took a minimalistic approach that actually pays off. It also puts monsters in places you don’t really expect them, so when they jump out you weren’t really able to see them. Its vortex tunnel and maze win points for being unique twists on familiar tricks.
I have never seen so many people run halfway across a parking lot after leaving a haunt. People were legitimately afraid here, adding to how much our team was impressed with this newcomer haunt.
Nashville Nightmare. Photo by Dieter Spears.
Nashville Nightmare – 3rd place
1016 Madison Square,
Madison, TN 37115
nashvillenightmare.com/
(615) 752-5663
Price: $17 for Night Terrors or $23 for Night Terrors and Dark Descent
Grade: A-
Delivering the fear with two haunts at one location, Nashville Nightmare sets the bar pretty high for other haunts.
Night Terrors
Welcome to Hell. You’ve got makeup maestro Rick Prince (Nashville’s hero of Face Off fame) working as a coordinator to “Bad” Brad Webb’s Hellish vision of thirteen different nightmares. Top-notch acting and a great location add to an already well-oiled killing machine. But Webb isn’t done, and his grand design will only be understood in the next few years. Adding 2,000 square feet to an already monstrous haunted house with several great realms ranging from a mortuary to a meat-packing plant.
There are two monsters of note that, without giving it away, remind you why Nashville Nightmare is one of the best.
Dark Descent
Death Yard Dark Amusements brings to us perhaps the coolest idea for a haunted house ever. You have an abandoned CDC facility which received a mysterious container, effectively putting the area on quarantine. Exploring the haunt on behalf of Necrosis Inc., you and crew are given a light bar to protect you not from radiation, but from what lurks in the darkness.
From what we understand, this haunt was an experiment funded in part by a crowdsourcing campaign. Exceptional production value adds to a space that sought quality over quantity. These set pieces are phenomenal, including a chem bath. My problem with this haunt was that the light bar idea felt very underutilized, and the haunt was (in my opinion) more well-lit than it should have been.
Points for originality, Death Yard. You definitely made a haunt worth visiting.
Slaughterhouse
423 6th Ave. So.
Nashville, TN 37203
slaughterfest.com
(615) 248-0019
Price: $15
Grade: B
Nashville’s longest-running haunted attraction just so happens to still be playing some of the best music outside. It also has the coolest outside mascot (we don’t want to give it away), a Michael Myers who plays to his true nature as The Shape, and great use of fog. Of particular note was its “Voodoo Witch Doctor” and the incorporation of the infamous Captain Spaulding’s Murder Ride. Both win points with me, but I feel that both could have been used to a much greater degree. A fun time.
Devil’s Dungeon
510 Davidson St.
Nashville, TN 37213
devilsdungeon.net
(615) 256-0053
Price:$15.00
Grade: B-
Our host opens with a joke about masturbation. We move to an aborted baby hanging out by an umbilical cord, later to arrive in a room with a gay male stripper that would be a Room 101 for any homophobe. I’m thinking back to my review last year, trying to justify my comment about the haunt not being that controversial. But I’m jaded, so maybe that’s why I feel that way. The 3-D portion of the haunt was used much more effectively this year, and that damn maze came back to bite us all in the ass…
Also, “The Diddler” may be the best chainsaw scare this year.
Gore House
Gore House
118 Mid Town Ct.
Hendersonville TN 37075
gorehouse.net
(615) 530-4673
Price: $13
Grade: B-
Wes Cornwell, the bloody boss man who oversees the operate of Gore House, seems to be the original misfit. Realizing that the Middle Tennessee haunt community was being strangled by the Bible Belt and not by himself, Wes and crew seemed to push the envelope in ways both shocking and subtle. This feels very much like a similar haunt experience to last year, and, since I commended Gore House for its secret passages and unique layout, that’s not a terrible thing. The maze is also pitch-black this year, and took me forever to get through. It’s not a huge issue, but I do feel like the narrative of Gore House (the story of crazed film set designer Martin Cato) could have played into this more. I mean, imagine a David Lynch approach to a haunted house. That’s just too good to pass up . . .
Nightmare Hollow
Nightmare Holllow
2595 New Hall Rd.
Greenbrier, TN 37073
Website:N/A (Check their Facebook page)
Phone: N/A
Grade: C+
It pains me to give this score, because I know in my heart that it should have been higher. But, having cut my heart out a while ago, I am now free to be as wicked as I wish.
This is an amusement operated by a super-friendly manager with some of the freshest ideas Middle Tennessee has seen. He makes excellent use of spaces and does a pretty good job of throwing you off-kilter several times in your trek. There’s a great aesthetic that feels organic here, especially with his Spider’s Den and Demonic Attic Space. The only reason why this score wasn’t higher was because of the Friday the 13th bad luck: it’s an outdoor haunt which faced a storm right before we got there, and some of the lights/ terrain had been exposed to the elements. There was also a great deal of . . . dead space.
So, I’m going to go ahead and tell you—on faith—that this is a good haunt with a lot of work thrown into it that you’ll appreciate. I can only assume that whatever warts we saw will be fixed by the time you visit, so please do not take our experience as being typical for this attraction. This is really a haunt worthy of a “B” grade, so please visit and tell us what you think.
Death Row
Death Row – Sanitarium of Slaughter
418 Harding Industrial Dr.
Nashville, TN 37211
deathrowhauntedhouse.com
(615) 833-1433
Price: $12
Grade: D
Like a horde of zombies, the problems with this haunt are overwhelming, relentless, and they infect the whole experience. In this case, the patient zero is a lack of vision.
Starting with the title, you have “death row” and “sanitarium of slaughter,” components of a title that feel as clumsily cobbled together as Frankenstein’s monster. Entering the haunt, the majority of the tour is a medical hospital, and since these scenes don’t really fit the title and become quite repetitive after a while, this seems like a poor decision. This lack of vision becomes more visible when you take an extensive look at the set, which is neat to look at because of how multi-textured and busy the experience can be, but ultimately not very rewarding. This over-reliance actually removes you from the experience, particularly when you consider that the majority of these sets are behind the walkway, turning our undead safari into a petting zoo. You become more distant from the danger when the verisimilitude of the experience is dissolved by the incorporation of movie posters, reminding you that the experience isn’t real.
There are a few jumps here, and we had one major scare when a clown left his scene and followed a female member of the team for the last fifth of the journey, which reeked of desperation and got old pretty damned quick. Last year, we gave this haunt a moderate review. But seeing that almost nothing feels different this time around, last year’s extollment feels like this year’s extortion. I do think the workers are good people deep down, but so much of the potential is squandered here on trade-show animatronics and fake plastic heads that it feels like you’re going through a store and not an amusement.
Dead Land
Myers Creek
Still to explore:
Bloody Acres Haunted Woods
318 Big Station Camp Blvd., Gallatin
(615) 974-8589
$15
bloodyacres.webs.com
Creepy Hollow Haunted Woods
2133 Joe Brown Rd, Spring Hill
(931) 796-5937
$17
creepyhollowwoods.com
Dead Land Haunted Woods
7040 Murfreesboro Rd., Lebanon
(615) 519-3116
Single trail: $15, 3 attractions: $30
deadlandwoods.com
Evilution
7091 Hwy. 41-A S., Pleasant View
$13
evilutionhauntedwoods.com
Miller’s Thrillers
1431 Carters Creek Pike, Columbia
$15
millersthrillers.net
Meyers Creek Haunted Woods
3800 John Bragg Hwy., Murfreesboro
$15
facebook.com/MeyersCreekHauntedWoods
Scream Creek
1765 Martins Chapel Church Road, Springfield
(615) 382-7593
$15.95
screamcreek.com
Monster Mountain
