Thrillist: October’s the only time of year when people applaud you for showing up to a party with an ax in your head. It’s an entirely themed month, in which normally mousy drugstores fill with Dracula puppets shriek-laughing like the Count on an endless loop, and when fun-sized Snickers constitute legit breakfast. It’s also the best time of year to step beyond mere horror movies to try and scare yourself silly, just ‘cause you can.
11 comments:
I love articles like this. Anytime of the year. We have a fascinating history as a country. I also like to travel and while it can be fun to be a tourist (not really). I really love to go off the beaten path to places that are mentioned in the article. I’ve been to the pen (ESP that is) and it is creepy. It also gives us a glimpse into the past and especially at places like ESP gives us an understanding that we have a dark past as a society. What we do today with those are are mentally different is far more advanced than what happened to these individuals in the past. Also, as a history buff, places like some of those mentioned could be really fun to visit just to learn about the people and the lives they lived. I’ve always wanted to go stay at the Stanley Hotel and visit Biltmore and now, after reading this article, I have more reasons to go and do that. These places are better than the pop up haunted houses that appear during October and they are open all year long, not just in October.
I'm from New Orleans (yeah I know. I think I'm becoming that person who doesn't shut up about their hometown. sorry in advance), which means I'm immune to haunted places. It seems like you can't even drive around the city without passing a place that is notoriously haunted. We even have an entire haunted hospital that stands vacant in the middle of the city. The entire place is haunted. It's creepy. It's chilling. It's kinda really ugly. And I absolutely love it. It is totally against the law to trespass into it, and few people gain permission to go inside, but I am so eager to explore the halls littered with overturned hospital beds and rusted medical equipment strewn everywhere. I'm not necessarily intrigued by haunted places because of the ghosts or spirits. I actually want absolutely nothing to do with any of that, and I could go my entire life never coming into contact with a spirit of any kind. I'm more interested in the history of these buildings because no one just builds a haunted place. Something has to happen for it to gain that status, and that is just the most intriguing thing ever.
I look at articles like this all the time and I'm like highly impressed with the amount of work that goes into finding and publishing these articles. I'm sort of a thrill junkie and I really like haunted houses, places, and rollercoasters- some may even say that I live on the edge. I can positively say though- that I have been to one of the places on this list. I went to the Biltmore estate in North Carolina and it is in fact kind of creepy to be inside of. The overall mansion is absolutely gorgeous and it has a beautiful view of the Appalachians and everyone should spend a summer or something in that region- but the house gave me major creepy vibes, it felt like there was something living in it that was supernatural. A lot of the places on this article are prisons or asylums and those places are very creepy and I would love to go to all of them at least once in my life.
I always love to read articles like this that list certain qualities about each of the 50 states. I have always really wanted to use one of these articles to plan out a big road trip or something like that to see as many of these sites as possible. It would be really cool to do a Halloween themed road trip across the country to try to check off as many haunted sites as you can in each state. But it is also just very interesting to be able to read about the haunted history of each of these sites online. Thrillist does a really nice job of simplifying all of the information down into a relatively short paragraph that many people can read and get some entertainment from at the same time. I also really appreciate how the sites are linked to their websites from Thrillist so you can click to find out more information. I would love to visit some of these or at least the one that is in Connecticut.
This is so cool! I love ghosts and spooks and things like that! There's so many places on this list I want to visit! Diving into the history of older cities is so cool. I went to Savannah, Georgia with my family a while back and it's SO haunted! Even if you don't go there for the ghost tours, it's so fun and spooky! I went on a home tour just to see the architecture and the tour guide told us about the house's ghosts and one of them was supposedly a cat! That's literally so cool. The architecture and interior design were also so cool and I encourage everyone to tour some old mansions at some point in their life! I've also been on two Fort Lauderdale ghost tours in our historical section of town and they were so cool and creepy. People don't really think of Florida as an old state, but the historical section of Fort Lauderdale is really rich and you can learn a lot from a tour like that, even if you don't believe in ghosts of any sort! I definitely prefer ghost tours and such to artificial haunted houses, especially because I believe in ghosts and love history. Haunted houses kind of bore me and jumpscares are kinda dumb, so I prefer something that I think is real and interesting at the same time!
The closest I have gotten to going to a haunted house is watching haunted house react videos on my laptop...and even then I was scared. The idea of being in an environment I can't control where I am the subject to potential abuse doesn't seem appealing to me. However, watching people get scared and learning about haunted houses is quite entertaining to myself. It is very interesting to see that many of these haunted places are set in prisons, hotels, and cemeteries. Being from San Diego, I actually never really knew that this place was considered a "tourist attraction" and was high on the list of most haunted places. I have heard of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, which is a very freaky incident. I have no intention to really learn more about it and I very much don't want to visit the site. I am happy people do enjoy these sorts of activities but it is still bizarre to me that one would put themselves in a environment like these.
-Pablo Anton
I have no capacity for dealing with horror, suspense, or not knowing what comes next, especially now that I've seen enough movies to read the context building up to the tipping point when the murderer breaks down the door, or any other overdone movie trope you can think of. After reading about these haunted sites, I think I would be even less likely to venture to one of these places because of the difference that comes with physically entering a spooky environment, which is that it is impossible to escape it without physically leaving the space. When forced to watch scary movies I often miss entire scenes because I can't bear to sit through the building suspense, but being surrounded by the energy of one of these haunted places would be so much worse. All that said, I have gone to the "Most Haunted Place" in my state: the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire. And, as should be no surprise if you've read the rest of this comment, I hated it. Overall, I think the rhetoric of fear in America is really interesting because a person's will against scary things is often correlated to their strength and confidence. I don't necessarily agree, but the idea that people challenge themselves to put up with the most psychological abuse to show that they are "tough" can tell you a lot about how Americans view themselves.
I’m always really amazed at the amount of work that goes into articles such as this one. I’m not much of an adrenaline junkie, but I really like looking at the historical backgrounds of places and the possible energies tied to those places (read “energies” however you like: ghosts, spirits, preconceived notions, whatever). I’ve never been on a ghost tour but I would really like to. Not for the scares or the adrenaline thrill or whatever, just to really feel the vibe out. It always makes me sad when I see various “haunted” places getting debunked because I would always like to think that there is some connection or another to a place, possibly from a different strata of reality, past, present, or future. There are definitely some places in Houston that are haunted (but not a lot of the publicised “haunted houses”, though there are some scary ones around Halloween), but I’ve never been to the Yorktown hospital, despite being pretty geographically close.
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays of the year. I love getting to go to haunted houses and comparing which ones are good and which ones are bad. In Pittsburgh Keennywood actually has good haunted houses considering its an amusement park. Also the basement is a great experience. For the basement I had to sign a waiver giving permission to the actors to basically do whatever they want. The Alaskan hotel seemed like a really cool haunted house. All of these places mentioned in the article or more “haunted” and less of an attraction. I do not think I would be as scared of these places as I am someone who gets scared but jump scares and such and not really ghosts. For New York they put west point which is a military camp. I think this list could use improvement as I know of way “scary” places then these.
This article really keeps my halloween spirit alive and well. I love reading articles like this because they take so much effort to create in the first place, and they are accessible to anyone around the country. It works to celebrate the rich history of each individual state which is really very cool. I also love haunted places, buildings, institutions, etc. because they are usually some of the most historically interesting places in the world. Ghosts stay in places of turmoil and suffering, and haunted spaces usually are connected to plagues and/or war and/or medical malpractice and the lack of knowledge humans had about each other during the past. But it is a bit disappointing to get to the Pennsylvania section, only to be reminded how ridiculously large this state is and that we are quite far from this historical and extra spooky, Eastern State Penitentiary, but I do think a road trip may need to be arranged.
I have always loved urban spelunking and going into creepy old buildings. I think it might have something to do with the fact that I grew up in an old Victorian house that’s over 100 years old and yet I’ve never felt the presence of any ghosts. There’s just something so exciting about going into abandoned buildings and imagining everything that might have happened in that space. I enjoyed reading about all of these supposedly haunted places and their fascinating histories.
It’s so interesting that the Shining was not actually filmed in the hotel that it was based off of. I had no idea that it was filmed in a different location.
The Curtis House Inn in Connecticut sounds especially creepy. Gordon Ramsay apparently stayed there and said that at one point he couldn’t open his door to escape his room. He did say it could have been broken hardware but he believed that there was more to it.
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