We’ve all enjoyed Halloween-season haunted houses. But the fearsome McKamey Manor in Summertown, Tennessee — population 866 — is something else altogether.
Admission is a bag of dog food and anyone who makes it all the way through his or her visit is promised a prize of $20,000, WFLA reports. Just one problem with that last bit: You probably won’t make it through.
Spook-house proprietor Russ McKamey, who claims to work as a DJ and wedding singer on the weekends, considers a full tour to be a 10-hour endurance challenge. And that’s after you read aloud a 40-page waiver in which you sign off on tooth pulling, finger breaking or head shaving, present proof of a passed physical and endure a background check, per the site.
The manor is said to be staffed by a cast of “actors,” according to Nashville Scene, who carry out McKamey’s orders to get physical with daring customers, who start the ordeal by being splattered with fake blood.
Once the actual haunted-house party begins, it can include being put in a straitjacket, having your mouth duct-taped shut or getting dropped into a pool of nasty water.
McKamey has claimed to use hypnosis as part of the fright process and films every show for both entertainment purposes — and proof.
“When I use the hypnosis I can put you in a kiddie pool with a couple inches of water and tell you there’s a great white shark in there, and you’re gonna think there’s a shark in there,” he tells WFLA. “And so, when you have that kind of power over people, and have them do and see things that you want them to see, then they can leave here thinking it really happened, and they’ll go to the authorities and say, ‘Oh, whatever,’ and I have to come back and show the footage and say, ‘It didn’t go that way at all.’ ”
But there also may be some roughhousing that sounds borderline sadistic.
A Colorado woman, according to Nashville Scene, checked into a San Diego outpost of McKamey Manor in 2016. The publication reports that she lasted some three hours and got more than she hoped for: “I was waterboarded, I was tased, I was whipped,” she claimed. “I was repeatedly hit in my face over and over again.” The woman was reportedly even made to dig a ditch and told to lay in it before staffers began throwing dirt in her face. Mercifully, she was given a straw to breathe through and, after begging for water, got doused.
Supposedly, things are toned down in Tennessee, but that hasn’t prevented the police from being called on at least one occasion — somebody shooting a bullet at McKamey (or so McKamey claimed to Nashville Scene) — and townsfolk circulating a petition to shut down the deviant den.
While McKamey insisted that nobody’s ever been hurt, he might have a broad view of the word “hurt.”
As McKamey told Nashville Scene about folks who enter the manor, “You’re gonna get fish-hooked, you’re gonna get swollen lips, you can get black eyes — it’s all in the contract. You’re agreeing to that. That’s what they’re signing up for … extreme physicality.”