5 Actual Deaths in Haunted Houses

5 A Well-Meaning Principal Pulled a Michael Scott

There’s a popular deleted scene from a Halloween episode of The Office where Michael Scott hangs himself in a Halloween display in front of a group of horrified children. There’s a chance this was based on a real event.

In 1957, Time published a pretty fucked-up story about a small-town high school that was dealing with an annual autumn hazing problem. Instead of letting the seniors beat up the freshmen in the gymnasium, that year the teachers got together and turned a nearby farmhouse into a haunted house as a surprise for the kids. The main attraction was to be their principal, 60-year-old William Hobert Sallee, hanging from a rope wrapped around his chest. You can see where this is going.

As planned, the seniors led the freshmen through the house, and everyone thought the filthy, bloody dead body was an especially spooky touch. But then a teacher noticed Sallee was a little too immersed in the role, and wouldn’t respond when called. To their horror, they realized he had lathered himself up with a bit too much grease and ketchup, the rope had slipped up above his chest, and he had accidentally hung himself from a rafter in front of dozens of kids.

4 The Same Basic Thing Happened to a New Jersey Teen

They say tragedy plus time equals comedy. That’s probably why this story is orders of magnitude more tragic and less chuckle-worthy than the previous one — this happened to a 17-year-old kid in 1990. The young man was a performer on a haunted hayride, and his stunt was to hang about a foot off the ground and deliver his lines as a dead guy. 

One night, the guy driving the tractor noticed that this kid didn’t deliver his lines. It’s unclear whether he continued the ride to the end before checking on the kid, or if he stopped on a dime to go check on him in front of parents and children. But he knew something was up, and when he finally did go to investigate, he found that the prop rope had tangled unexpectedly around the kid’s neck, leading to his accidental death.

3 ‘The Disney of Haunted Attractions’

Turning asylums and prisons into amusement parks is already pretty tasteless (and just begging for a cursin’). But this one is like, 2020-era COVID levels of tastelessness.

For almost 150 years, Eloise Psychiatric Hospital outside of Detroit was a dumping ground for the area’s poor and infirm, serving at times as a poorhouse, asylum and tuberculosis quarantine. It was once the country’s largest asylum, at a time when asylums were doing all the stuff that would go on to fuel the modern horror genre. Then known as “inmates,” its inhabitants were abandoned by society, feared by the staff charged with caring for them and buried anonymously when they inevitably wasted away.

These days, the campus is home to Eloise Haunted Asylum, which bills itself as “the Disney of haunted attractions” (and, for good measure, a strip mall and golf course). The psychiatric facility only closed in 1986, meaning there are still people walking around who had state-mandated apartments in this torture chamber. Detroit journalist Nolan Finley has written about the Disney-fication of a mass murder machine: “Perhaps I’m looking at this wrong. Maybe the anguished screams that once rang through these buildings will be exorcized by the delighted shrieks of Halloween revelers.”

2 An Actual Disney Ride Killed a Guy

Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris is the weird European cousin of the classic Haunted Mansion. It’s darker, takes itself a bit too seriously, and the conceit of the ride basically rips off Phantom of the Opera. In one unintentional, but appropriately dramatic incident in 2016, the ride was briefly closed when an actual dead body was discovered inside.

Cast members showed up to work one morning and were greeted by a human figure in an unnatural position. That’s not uncommon for a haunted house, but this figure was discovered backstage. When they realized this was an actual guy, the ride was closed and police were called to investigate. As best they could tell, a 14-year Disney employee had been electrocuted while working on some backstage lighting the day before.

1 These Skeletons Are So Lifelike!

In 2016, Green Bay, Wisconsin haunted house Terror on the Fox was sorting through storage to try and freshen up their decor, when they found a couple of old coffins that had been donated years earlier. When they opened them up, they found two actual, medical skeletons in there, and decided: Screw it, they’re part of the show now. To be honest, this reeks of a publicity stunt. One dead giveaway is that the company’s social media person was the only one who would speak to the local news about it.

More compelling, however, is the case of Elmer McCurdy. McCurdy died in a shootout with police in 1911, and his body was embalmed and kept on display at a funeral home. They decided that was pretty weird after a while, and sold his body to a circus, which allowed McCurdy to travel the country posthumously for four decades. His body wound up being abandoned in a California amusement park, where it collected dust among other curios. In 1976 it was accidentally discovered by a TV crew setting up to film an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man — a prop guy went to move a wax mannequin, which quickly revealed itself to be a real, mummified, turn-of-the-century bandit when an arm fell off revealing a dusty old bone.