7th Invades Gatlinburg Part 1: Hauntings!
Posted by 7th on July 20, 2004

The little 2 mile strip of highway that cuts through the heart of the Smokey Mountains and compromises the town of Gatlinburg has got to be one of the weirdest strips in the country, though in many ways it's no different from the miracle Strip in Panama City Beach, or the main strip in Daytona that dead ends right onto the beach. You have your overpriced restaurants, your cheesy gift stores, your air-brush shops, your tattoo parlors, and thank God, a whole week's worth of hilariously campy tourist attractions. And of all the Museums, stores, and dinner shows I attended while vacationing, some of the strangest were the haunted houses.

But before I get into those, I should also mention that there's quite an extensive "Haunted Places of Gatlinburg" tour that is available. It's about a 2-3 hour walking tour, but I chose not to go on it. Why? Because my hotel was one of the locations. I saw no point in paying to tour a building I was already sleeping in. But I'll divulge more about that little experience later. For now, let's start with...

Hauntings was actually the last of the three houses I went to, and by then I'd completely filled up all of my CompactFlash cards, so I sadly have no pictures of the inside of this little hole of an attraction. But believe me, that's no big loss.

This is actually the recreation of an older attraction that had been a staple of the Gatlinburg strip for many years. The original Hauntings was in a different location, located on the corner next to the Old Rebel Store and the original Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum. All three were burned down in a fire in 1992. Hauntings went up in flames, and according to legend, so did its original owner.

A few years later, Hauntings was rebuilt right across from the World Of Illusions museum. It's much smaller than it was, and a large portion of it is actually built over a fudge shop, as though the owners wanted what you ate before going in to be visually similar to what you scraped out of your undies afterwards.

Not that this is really the case. Hauntings is easily the worst of the three haunted houses I went to. It's a cheesy schlockfest of the "mechanical corpse jumps out from behind a door" vein. The "mood" music sounds like it was ripped straight from those CD's they sell at Hallmark's every October. If you guessed that the floors occasionally have pressure plates that, when stepped on, sets off buzzer alarms or blasts of smoke, you'd be right! If you guessed that the whole thing is poorly lit and painted in blacklight paint to hide the shitty special effects, you'd also be right! And if you guessed that the most frightening aspect of it was that it's the worst haunted house of all three, and yet is the most expensive, well you just hit the nail on the head. The only thing that truly frightened me about the "Hauntings" experience, besides the fact that walking through it is no different than a hundred cheesy "spook houses" you can find at carnivals and state fairs across the country, was the unnerving population of frightened 16 year old blonde girls pouring through the place. I couldn't as much as take a single step without one of these stupid ditzes screaming at the top of her lungs... usually right in my ear. And at what?! Ooh! That plastic head jumped up from behind the tombstone! There's something I'd NEVER see at fucking DISNEYLAND! What a joke. I've seen more frightening sights in my mother's shower drain.

After the fire of 1992, Ripley began buying up property up and down the strip. Where they once had only one attraction, namely the Believe It Or Not Museum, they now have four. The Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum, Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies, Ripley's 4D Theatre (this is the only one I didn't go to... no offense Mr. Ripley...godresthissoul... but once you've ridden Mission: Space, other motion simulators just come up motionless, ya dig?) and finally, Ripley's Haunted Experience.

I know this is a real fun killer, but I must first admit that this is yet ANOTHER haunted house where I only managed to get pictures of its exterior. But this time it was for a whole other reason entirely.

The story goes that there used to be a coal mine on the spot where this attraction now sits. The mine was abandoned after the shaft collapsed, killing hundreds of miners. Years later, a family mortuary named Grimly and Streaper's was built over the shaft. Shortly thereafter, strange things began happening to the little town of Gatlinburg, including strange smells, disappearing corpses, overpriced snowcones, and the Star Cars Museum.

So you buy your ticket to tour Grimly's and Streaper's. You walk past an old horse-drawn hearse and around a corner to the far wall, which is adorned with fake headlines explaining the story of the place. One even mentions the sheriff of Gatlinburg being murdered. You walk up a ramp, and the first thing you see is this:

This is supposedly the remains of the elevator system the miners used to get in and out of the mine shaft... nevermind the fact that elevators as sophisticated as this one didn't exist in mine shafts during the 1800's, but I digress. You'll also notice that the elevator doesn't go down into a mine shaft. It merely goes up about 15 fucking feet to the second floor. I suppose this is a security measure to keep people from just rushing in, but it all comes across as a rather anti-climactic elevator ride...

So they make you stand in this elevator till there's eight or nine of you in there. Then this long haired freak who looks like the hippy computer geek from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective comes walking out dressed in a workman's uniform and wearing a cheesy set of Marilyn Manson contact lenses. He explains that a gentleman will be waiting for us at the top of the elevator, and we are to give him the utmost respect, as this is their home and we are but guests. I tried to snap a picture of this dickhead (keep in mind I'm still TECHNICALLY outside at this point) and he physically smacks my hand down. He glares at me and says "Photographs of any kind are not allowed at Grimly's and Streaper's. If you are caught using that inside sir, you will be... removed from the premises."

"Fine," I say. "And if you touch me again, I'll remove your testicles from your scrotum."

To his credit, the fucker actually stays in character. "We shall see, sir," he mumbles, then slams the elevator gate closed and sends us up the ramp.

Now I can understand why they wouldn't want FLASH photography. These kinds of places rely on the dark, both to hide the mechanics behind their special effects, and to hide the actors that jump out at you periodically. But more likely, they don't allow cameras because of guys like me, who love to spoil the surprise for everyone else by posting reviews like this one. So just to stay in true "I'm the guy that ruined the Sixth Sense by blurting out that Bruce Willis was dead 20 minutes into the movie" form, I'll now take the time to describe to you what happens inside this attraction.

As I said, you go up an elevator. A guy who looks like the revived corpse of Nick Lashay's career greets you at the top, and escorts you into the first room, which is a blatant rip off of the portrait room inside Disney's Haunted Mansion. This room leads to a dimly lit parlor. A glass-topped casket is positioned in the center of the room, the surrounding walls lined with old pine box coffins like the ones used during the Old West era. The greeter explains again that this is their home, that it has a long and storied history, blah blah. He then explains that throughout the entire attraction, all eight of us must stay in a straight line, and we must keep a constant hold on the shoulder of the PERFECT FUCKING STRANGER in front of us. Well as it would have it, I am third from the rear, the last two behind me being a rather obnoxious young lesbian couple. The blonder of the two grabs me by the shoulder and introduces herself as "Roxanne."

"Hi Roxanne," I say. "I'm Seven."

"Hi Seven. You think this is really going to be as scary as it looks?"

"Nah. But don't worry. If something jumps out at you, I'll still make it."

Our greeter than warns us that several rooms are in complete darkness. He advises us to guide ourselves by feeling along the walls of these rooms, while still holding onto the shoulder of the person in front of us at all times. We mustn't run. We must keep moving forwards. If we see something twice, we've gone the wrong way and must turn around immediately. I swear, the rules for this thing lasts longer than the experience itself does.

Finally, after five minutes of this guy prattling on, we're allowed to enter the house. The very first thing I see is a corpse lying on a metal table that's wired to what looks like a car battery. The battery lights up, and the corpse starts to gyrate and jiggle (this was all animatronic, but far more realistic than the cheap shit in Hauntings.) We walk around a corner, and suddenly find ourselves in a chilled meat locker. hanging from the meat hooks are bloodied human bodies wrapped in clear plastic... there's so many that we have to push them out of our way to get through. We come around another corner, and there stands a man dressed as a surgeon, his face covered in blood. Before him on a table lies a dead man split open from neck to nuts, his organs exposed. All that is separating us from this guy is some rather skimpy looking fencing. "Care for a little snack?" He says, and scoops up the man's heart and brain. "Which will it be then, hearts, or brains?"

"Brains!" yells the idiot at the front of the line.

"SMART Choice! AHAHAHAHAH!!!" yells the surgeon, then tosses the brain right at us. It smacks into the fencing and sprays warm liquid all over us (this was a sponge, of course, but it's more fun to describe it as if it were real, don't you think?)

We come around another corner into a room with no lights. I can hear flies buzzing around my head, and what feels like spider webs and... shit, human fingers... dangling above my face...

We pass into a padded corridor. We walk past a darkened cell, which is suddenly lit up by a man in a strait jacket running a live electrical wire along the bars, sending sparks flying. We walk past him to another cell, where a guy who looks for all the world like Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket is standing there in a diaper, staring at us. I walk past, and one the dykes behind me screams. I turn around, briefly letting go of the person in front of me, and I see that Gomer has stepped out of his cage, and is getting right up in the brunette lizzy's face. I shrug and keep going.

We walk past a wall that appears solid, yet as I approach it, someone (or something) presses through the wall as though it were made of rubber and wags his tongue at me... I briefly wonder if this is what a vagina sees when a condom-clad member comes charging at it.

Yet another dark room. This time, we have to feel our way around. We find the wall, and begin to follow it. Someone whispers in my ear. "We can see you... but you can't see usssssss."

(Quick note:) I'm probably leaving some rooms out, as I'm doing this all by memory and the damn thig is so big... plus the guy in front was sort of rushing us through it...)

So we come to one of those spinning hallways you see in carnival houses. You know, the kind that make you feel like you're spinning when you try to walk through them. We start to make our way across, when the lesbian behind me latches herself to my neck. "I can't do this!" she says. "I'm gonna puke!"

I sigh, knowing that she is going to end up separating us from the rest of the group if I don't do something. "If you can lick the bearded clam, you can do this." I say, and move her hand back to my shoulder. "Close your eyes, and just follow me. I'll guide you across." She nods, choosing to ignore my insult.

I turn back towards the group, and keep my eyes focused on the doorway. Before too long, we are across, and the muff diver's nausea subsides. We then move into a long square room. A catwalk is suspended over a boiling pool of slime, inside which is living a huge green slimey troll-like creature, which rises up and blows its nose at us as we pass (all animatronic, mind you.) We're then in another dark hallway. This time I can hear squeking, and what feels like rat tails flicking at my ankles (the same trick is used at Disney's Honey I Srunk The Audience 3D Movie.)

Finally, we come into an area that looks like some sort of underground bunker. There's a dead baby resting in a crib, and a family of corpses seated around a table. All of this is striking me as abundantly familiar. We come around a corner, and we can see the exit. What I can also see is that the walls are covered in white meatlocker style tiles... white tiles that are covered in bloody hand prints, just like a scene from a very popular horror film.

"Oh shit!" says the brunette crotch kisser, "I've seen this somewhere before."

"Of course you have," I say. "It's Leatherface's butchershop."

Just as I say this, the sound of a cranking chainsaw fills the room. Everyone bolts for the exit (which, in a nice touch, is partially obscured by strips of protecting rubber hanging from the ceiling... sort of like the door guards you see in the back rooms of grocery stores.) Just as we get within ten feet of the exit, Leatherface smashes through a hidden door and comes charging at us, his chainsaw held high over his head. I'm literally shoved through the exit by the two lesbians, barely keeping my balanc well enough to avoid being thrown to the floor. We all turn around, and see Leatherface staring at us as the door swings shut. Behind us is an elevator that takes us back to the ground floor, to safety.

This was easily the best budgeted of the three, but not neccessarily my favorite. The inclusion of Leatherface took me out of the whole story they'd concocted. I'd have rather seen our greeter come after us, or some of the other freaks, rather than a movie character that had nothing to do with a mortuary in Gatlinburg. PLus, later on that day, as we were heading towards our car, I saw Master Nick and The Surgeon staind out back moking cigarettes. Kinda surreal. Still, it was the scariest of the three. And that brings me to my favorite of them all.

The Mysterious Mansion of Gatlinburg has been around since I was a little kid, but this was the first time I'd ever actually chose to do it. Yes, it's old. Yes, its effects are almost as cheesy as the Haunting's. Yes, the actor's costumes suck compared to Ripley's. But the Mansion has something they don't. Once you enter the mansion, it's up to you to find your way out.

I walk up and buy my ticket.

"You're going in alone?" asks the ticket taker.

"Is that a problem?" I ask.

"No. Just hope you know what you're doing."

I'm sent into the first room, the door locking behind me. I'm in a sort of parlor. A bust on a pedestal comes alive, and explains that the house is full of hidden passageways, and that it's up to me to find the exit... but that if I get lost, the spirits might come to my aide (by spirits, it means a guy in a black cape and K-Mart quality Halloween mask.) So I start looking for a secret switch or panel that'll open a hidden door. I'm pulling on the stokers beside the fireplace, I'm pushing on books in the bookshelf, all the things that years of watching Scooby-Doo re-runs has taught me to do when trapped in a haunted house. Finally, I lean against the fireplace itself and feel it give, just a little. Just then, a ghostly voice whispers in my ear. "Push the fireplace."

So I do, revealing a hidden hallway spiraling down into the depths of the mansion. I follow it to a large round room, lit by blacklight. I am surrounded by doors. Which one? Which one won't cause some weird freaky thing to jump out at me? I open one, and a corpse halfway falls out at me. Just as I figured. It's so damned dark that I can barely see what I'm looking at as far as finding the real door, so I just start randomly setting off my digital camera, filling the room with flash light. And that's when I see him, hiding in the shadows. (The picture doesn't do it justice, as the flash exposes the black light paint and how cheap the construction actually is.) Some huge fat guy wearing a black robe and the aforementioned K-Mart quality Hallowwen mask is standing the doorway I just entered through. He appears to be holding a machette. I stand there for a few seconds, wondering if I really saw someone there, or if I'm letting this stupid roadside attraction get under my skin. So I flash the camera at him again. Yep. There his is.

"Alright guy. Just point at the right fucking door."

He steps out, and motions towards a lightless area just to the right of the door I came in from, the door he's standing in, most likely expecting me to be cautious when walking past him. I decide not to give him the satisfaction. I walk right past him, not stopping as I lift my camera once more and set the flash off right in his eyes. I laugh to myself as I hear him cursing under his breath behind me.

I walk up some stairs, and I find a pair of eye holes that look out of a painting into the ticket area. Two girls are waiting to buy their tickets.

"Psst." I whisper. "Hey, you!"

The girls turn around and stare at the painting. I'm silently laughing my ass off. They turn back to the ticket window.

"Hey, I was talking to you, dammit!"

They turn back around.

"Ever been hit on by a piece of wall art, ladies?" I ask, waggle my fingers through the eyeholes, then bolt through the passageway before either can report me to the office (not that they would have... I could hear them laughing as I made my way deeper into the mansion.)

I come around a corner, and am immediately amused by what I see... the same damn blood-stained hallway I saw at Ripley's... only here some dope has actually pinned up a Texas Chainsaw Massacre poster. Oh my God! It's a Leatherface poster. RUN!

I come around another corner, and again, here's the chain fencing, and some guy in black is running an electrical wire across it, spraying sparks everywhere.
I go past him, and then stop. For you see, this particularl area looks over the lobby of the mansion, and I knew from having watched whilst waiting for my ticket that this guy was going to come out and follow me. So I just stood there and waited. He came out, paused as he saw me standing there, and instead of following me, just leaned over the rail to see if anyone else was coming.

"Do you like this job?" I asked.

"Are you kidding me?" he replied.

"I hope they pay you well for having to walk around all day in that get up."

"Shit. Six seventy-five an hour. But at least I ain't flippin' burgers."

I snap the guy's picture, knowing that if his boss reads this he'll most likely be fired, and steal another glance down at the lobby. The stupid fat fuck who was following me earlier comes walking out of a hidden door, takes his mask off, and rubs the sweat from his face. He has an earpiece in his ear, most likely to let him know where we are and at what time and such. I start to take his picture thus exposed, but decide against it... instead I continue on, coming to another staircase. Standing there is a statue of Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera. Just a statue standing there in front of an organ. Of Lon Chaney. For no fucking reason whatsoever.

I come to a balcony overlooking the outside entrance. The Little Pigeon River flows past. the sound of it is calming. The smoke coming off the mountains is beautiful. Off in the distance behind me, I can hear the 6.75 an hour guy cut a rancid-sounding fart. It's time to move on.

Next thing I know, I'm in an area thathas a decidedly Egyptian theme. Lots of Egyptian artwork everywhere, fake sand, and the like. I walk past a glass window, and there's a mummy on the other side. I lean closer, and it lunges forward, along with a loud buzzing noise. Hoorah. On to the next fake scare.

The next room I come to is very poorly lit. Inside is a guy strapped to a table, his chest all carved up from an apparent autopsy. They give him the juice and he starts jerkin' like the legs of a beheaded chicken. A neat trick, but Bret Hart has something almost exactly like it in his livingroom, so I'm not impressed.

I walk past a sunken jail cell. Inside is a big fat booger with wings and eyeballs that sits up and farts when I get close to the bars. This is starting to get a little tedious. I walk down a long flight of stairs. The walls are blood red, and lined with pictures of dead people. I come around a corner, and I see this:

For whatever reason, the bedroom scene from The Exorcist has been recreated rather faithfully as the last room of the house. A fairly accurate dummy of Linda Blair is suspended from the wall, staring at me as the bed floats up off the floor.
I snap a picture of this then head through the exit.

Why do I call it the best? Because I like having to find my own way out. Sure the effects and such suck compared to Ripley's... Sure the staff clearly don't give a shit about what they're doing. But it's more fun... and you get to go by yourself, which is nice.

But now, for our final scare. A real one.

The hotel I stayed at was the Holiday Inn Sunspree. The main building in front is all nice and new looking, with a restaurant and indoor pool. But we weren't staying in that building. Oh no, we'd been placed in the tower, an older building in the back that's used for conventions and used to be a hotel all in its own right, one of the oldest in Gatlinburg, in fact. I take all this info from the clerk with a grain of salt, then head for my room. I walk into the lobby of this "Tower," and immediately get the creeps. For God's sake, the fucking lobby looks like it was ripped right from The Shining.

This really unnerves me. But I shrug it off and take the elevator up to my room. I walk around the corner, and I see this:

Now the similarities are getting a little fucking uncanny. I walk into the room and look out my window. Four stories down, I see this:

We swam in this pool many times while we were there. There was always hot water coming out of the wall jets, but for some reason the water was always ICE COLD... There was fucking condensation all over the windows from the heat inside that room, and yet stepping into that pool was like stepping into Harrison Bay in the middle of February.

During our stay there, we heard a lot of weird shit... The ice machine would drop ice when no one was in the hall. The coke machine would just drop cokes into the hallway. We'd come back to our room after a day of fun and all of our stuff had been rearranged, even though we were assured by the staff that no one had been in the room, as we'd requested.

Finally, the day we were checking out, I called down and requested that someone bring a luggage cart up for we could pack up and leave. The guy who brought it was an older guy named Doc, whom I told about all that had been going on. He just kinda smiled knowingly, then went n to explain that our hotel was one of the most haunted spots in Gatlinburg.

He went on to explain that a man staying on the pool level, right on the patio, had shot himself a few years back, and could still be seeing walking along the edge of the pool at night. One floor above us, sometimes during the sixties, a group of boy scouts were murdered by their scout master. Doc said he'd himself seen the images of their corpses lining the walls on nights when the temperature on the seventh floor would rise for no reason and set off the fire alarms.

And according to him, someone else was strangled just a couple rooms down form the one we'd stayed in. Suffice it to say, it put a weird vibe on the end of our trip to hear such things. I thanked Doc for the story, then asked him how much of it was real and how much was bullshit. Just then (and I wouldn't shit you on this) The lights went out, then came back on again. "What do you think?" Doc said with a grin and a wink, then left me there to ponder it...

Long story short, why pay to walk through haunted houses when you can actually stay in one? If you ever plan on going, do a google search for "Haunted places of Gatlinburg." I did, and actually found some of the same stories Doc shared with me that day... It's, if nothing else, a unique experience that everyone should by creeped out by, at least once.

-=7th=-