Your hands are bound together.
It’s pitch black, but every 10 seconds or so a flash of light reveals the masked faces
of men.
They drag you into a corner.
You can hear the petrified screams of your friend through the wall.
You’ve never heard him sound like that before.
What have they done to him?
Another flash of light reveals cockroaches scurrying all around you.
They run up your legs and some of them get into the onesie you’ve been forced to wear.
Suddenly a mirror is held up to your face.
When those lights flash you see one of the guys shaving your head.
Another flash, and a great,First let’s explain to you what we are actually talking about.
big tarantula is crawling over your shoulder.
The masked men then grab you and take you to another room where they push your head
into freezing cold water.
You plead for them to stop, to show you some mercy, but you’ve signed up for this, and
there’s no ‘get-out’ clause.
What we just explained to you isn’t an exaggeration.
In fact, this haunted house experience can get much worse than that.
It’s so bad, that if you can actually get through enough hours of it you’ll be handed
$20,000.
There’s actually a long list of thousands of people in the U.S. in the queue waiting
to experience this haunted house, but we can assure you, most of those that do get the
full experience regret it.
Has anyone gone back for more?
Has anyone ever completed the experience?
The place we have described is called the “McKamey Manor”, and that to most people
would look like any suburban house in the USA.
But this house in a now undisclosed neighborhood in the USA, doubles as a kind of extreme attraction,
or what you might call a horror survival course.
ThinWhen we say haunted, well, it’s been called that, but regarding horror it’s less
about ghosts than it is about torture.
It’s closer to the “Saw” franchise than it is “Paranormal Activity.”gs don’t
move around by themselves in the dark, if you don’t count large, burly men in masks
terrifying you psychologically and even roughing you up a bit.
We are not kidding….
There are pages on Facebook that criticize this outfit and say it should be illegal.
Those detractors say the Manor can cause lasting psychological damage and they state that those
who do the terrifying things are sick and sadistic human beings.
Still, you’ll find middle-aged, bored accountants and young beauticians giving McKamey Manor
a go.
They actually want to be scared out of their wits and they don’t give a hoot what some
people have to say on social media.
The experience is no joke, though, that’s for sure.You won’t even be allowed to get
your foot in the door if you haven’t signed a 40-page waiver, are 21, or at least 18 and
have your parent’s approval.
You’ll need a doctor’s letter saying you are in good physical and mental shape and
you’ll be screened first.
If you don’t have any medical insurance, forget about it.
Here are two very important clauses in that 40-page waiver:
Clause 20: “Participant agrees there is no quitting unless serious physical or psychological
injury is present.”
Clause 25…
“Participant fully understands that at many times they will be in a panic state of anxiety,
in which they feel that they will drown and they may die.”
That’s why it’s called a “survival horror Challenge”, maybe something our dear Challenge
writer could do one day.
After all, the only payment you have to make is some dog food.
That’s right, a few tins of mashed mystery meat and gristle and you’re in.
But would you really want to get in, that’s the question?
The tour of the house lasts eight to ten hours.
Yep, that’s possibly a good chunk of the day with a bunch of very large, seemingly
angry, vengeful men.They want to terrorize the life out of you and you will believe they
are for real.
These guys have practiced the art of physical and mental torture, and while that torture
might not be anything like what you saw in that movie called “Hostel”, it’s going
to be bad enough to make you want to quit.
In fact, while your average plumber and office worker have given up after only a few minutes,
even cage fighters and marines have tapped out.
There are other extreme haunted house experiences out there in the U.S., but this one has one
major difference in that you don’t have a “safe word” so you can just drop out.
Why would anyone do this, you might be wondering, besides trying to get that 20,000 bucks?
The guy behind the house is one Russ McKamey.
He’s said people do it to escape the daily grind of life.
Sure, some folks might be masochists, but others are just hankering for something to
knock them sideways.
For McKamey it’s theater, an extreme kind of theater.
He’s ex-Navy and has studied theater, so he knows what he’s doing.
He’s said that while he will take people to the edges of their fear and sanity, he
records everything on tape and nothing they have done at the house has broken laws.
It’s awful, but lawful.
Hmm, we kinda like that tagline, maybe we should get in touch with them and make a deal.
Just watch the videos of people going through the experience and you can watch them crumble,
uttering words with a shaky voice, “You beat me…I can’t do it anymore…I’m
done…I’m flying home tomorrow…I don’t need any of this.”
They might have been covered in insects, stomped on, dragged around like a doll, held under
dirty water and even made to eat their own vomit, but they only get to stop when their
torturers think they’ve had enough.
In an interview, McKamey said, “Every year it’s got more crazy, more aggressive.
We wouldn’t be infamous if we weren’t able to deliver the product.”
The product he says is fear, 100 percent, unadulterated fear, non-stop for as many minutes
or hours as a person can take.How long would you last?
You might first get kidnapped and soon realize that the guys aren’t messing around.
They might not break your arm, but they will certainly stress your body in ways that are
uncomfortable for you.
They start with things that will psychologically stress you, but then escalate it until you
are absolutely broken.
McKamey says no one suffers any bad injuries and it’s all one big show, otherwise the
place would have been closed down a long time ago.
Some people disagree with him, saying that he must be a sadistic psychopath to do what
he does.
People have even protested outside his gates, and so he has had to change locations at times.
It’s kind of a grey area, because you can see with your own eyes that people are literally
scared for their lives.
They absolutely do get broken, so you might ask if the torture is real, not just a show.
We found one woman, a U.S government logistical analyst, who lasted just five minutes in the
house, a far cry from eight hours.
She actually returned again the year after to see if she could last a bit longer.
She got her chance and one day she went through the ordeal with a female nursing student and
a young man who was hoping to become a DEA agent.
After a couple of hours, the latter two participants were asking to quit.
The nurse was tied up, the guy was fastened in a straightjacket, and both were screaming
out that they’ve had enough.
They didn’t get what they wanted right away, and faced some more agonies before they were
let go.
When the masking tape was taken off the young man’s face, he was visibly traumatized,
and almost sobbing, he said, “Please Russ, I’m done.”
The nurse was the same, and through tears she exclaimed that she would never, ever,
do that again.
The analyst held on for longer.
Not only did she last longer than five minutes, but she passed the four-hour mark.
She’d been force-fed, showered with freezing cold water, dragged through stinking sewage,
and had her head shaved…at one point she just she cried out for help and of course
no one came.
She said she was proud to last that long, and she admitted that she had been pushed
to her limits, but she didn’t feel like she’d been abused or tortured.
She even said she’d give it another go if she ever got the chance.
In fact, around 25,000 people are waiting in line to see how long they can last in this
house of horrors.
No one, and we mean no one, has ever gone the full eight hours or ten hours.
For more horror go watch “YOU vs FREDDY KRUEGER -How Can You Defeat and Survive It?”
and, “7 Scary Sounds That Will Trigger a Fight Or Flight Response In You.”