Many spooky surprises await in the library of the Haunted Town Hall in Lafayette.
Craig Kelly | The Lima News
LAFAYETTE — Your heart is pounding. You feel beads of sweat coming down your face but your mouth is dry as you slowly climb the stairway, the creak from each step echoing up the stairwell. You feel the cobwebs on the handrail as you continue to climb, faintly hearing the notes of a song coming from an old gramophone mingling with what sounded like a woman screaming in another room. It is nearly pitch black as you reach the top of the stairs. As your eyes strain to see into the hallway, a red light flickers on behind you, its light reflecting off the head of the axe the murderer is holding as he waits for you in the darkness.
Tales of horror like these are all too common this time of year as people celebrate all things scary during the Halloween season. While a story like this might be part of the plot of a scary movie, haunted attractions give thrill seekers the chance to become part of the story themselves.
“Everybody has their own opinions,” Ned Baughman said. “A lot of them like to be scared. Some of them like the artwork that goes into the process.”
Baughman, along with his wife, Nettie, own and operate the Haunted Town Hall in Lafayette along with their business partner, David Neff. The hall, along with its famous insane Mayor Joseph, is now in its 13th year of operation, kicking off its latest season last month — on Friday the 13th, no less. When it comes to making the attraction as scary and fun as possible, they consider it a labor of love as they paint the faded water stains on the walls or put the finishing touches on the cobwebs covering the shelves in the hall’s library.
“Generally, November, December is a cool-down time for us,” Baughman said. “But come January, we start planning and even taking out old rooms that we know are changing.”
That same planning and effort go into the Hammer Brothers Haunted Circus in Auglaize County southeast of Westminster. Now in its ninth year, the venue has grown to offer something for everyone as Julie Gossard and her husband, Matt, have incorporated multiple spooky attractions.
“We do the haunted cornfield,” she said. “We have our homestead, which is a haunted house walk-through, and then we also do the zombie paintball wagon ride, which is family-friendly for ages 4 and up. In the haunt realm, you don’t see that a lot.”
Both Baughman and Gossard said the number of visitors has been good so far this year, noting that foot traffic tends to ramp up as the calendar flips to October.
“I do think people are more careful,” Gossard said. “I see that more often this year where folks have to really choose what they’re going to do versus other years where they might have done everything because our economy is tough.”
Even as times have been tight, people still have this desire to indulge in the creepy and spooky, especially, it would seem, in Ohio, with venues like the Haunted Town Hall, the Hammer Brothers Circus and Putnam County’s Haunted Cornfield near Ottawa. According to TheScareFactor.com, a website that both keeps a database of and reviews haunted attractions and paranormal sites throughout the world, Ohio leads the nation with 135 haunted house attractions.
“A lot of them are historical, old buildings where they do actual paranormal investigations and stuff, too,” Tyler Proffet, the owner of the website, said. “There’s a haunted prison over in Mansfield. There’s a schoolhouse in Cincinnati that’s got some lore to it.”
Proffet has found during his experiences at various haunted attractions that, while the reasons why people visit these sites may vary by individual, a lot of it comes down to seeking that next thrill.
“It’s an endurance and it’s a real sense of accomplishment when you get out to the other side and you didn’t die or you laugh at your friends as they get scared,” he said.
As Halloween inches closer, there is no sign the thrills, the screams or the laughs will be stopping anytime soon.
“If we can’t scare you, we try to make you laugh,” Baughman said. “There’s people who do the haunt and they’re not scared, but as long as they come out the door laughing and just having a good time, we know that they enjoyed themselves.”
For more information on the Lafayette Haunted Town Hall, go to https://bit.ly/3A2p4kV. For more information on the Hammer Brothers Haunted Circus, go to https://bit.ly/3ZS1wKf. For more information on Putnam County’s Haunted Cornfield, go to https://bit.ly/483hSBU.
