The highlight of my Halloween 2022 was the 17th Door Haunted House in Fullerton, CA. This was the first semi-extreme haunted house that I attended, and yes, yes, yes! This haunted house did require a waver. I paid $115 for the VIP experience that involved an additional sixty minutes. A basic rundown of the package before going in is that the first sixty minutes was a mix of van ride and special haunted warehouses that told the story of the haunted prison. This was be followed by thirty minutes of the main event haunted house.

     The initial impression being in line, set the tone for the night because people were getting shocked in the lines when getting rushed into the vans. I went solo and wound up in a group of seven people, getting paired with three other couples. For the whole night, they all thought that I worked as an undercover haunted house worker because I didn’t come with another person. 

     The first section began with us getting a ride by a “prison inmate driver” and she told us her horror stories of her time in the prison and got us to begin working together as a group. She sparingly was involved in the haunted locations we were going through also. It was very story oriented throughout this first sixty minute section, but near the end we started to do things such as hide from “scary old guards” and we were in full on sprints in the last ten minutes because they started to bring out the electric shocks.

     On the way back to the main event haunted house, I was mentally preparing myself for the main show. I will not spoil the entire haunted house, just in case any of you decide to go here in the future. When we first walked into the inside lobby, we had to restate that we signed a waiver and proceeded to be immediately yelled at in the “rules room.” One of the first rooms that we journeyed through involved our whole entire room rotating, which was a really inception-esque feeling experience. The very first room, I was sacrificed as tribute because they said “Only way to leave the room is to get the numbers seventeen, cut into one of your hair,” so I was the one that realistically could of done because of the women in the group and other member that was bald.

     After that some of the more interesting rooms included us entering into chairs that resembled electrocution chairs and essentially we picked numbers that correlated to everyone in their chairs. There was some electric shocks that happened in here and I only felt the hand shocking, but others felt the full chair shocking. After that we entered into a room that we had to turn our backs and got shot at with airsoft guns. It was really unique because we went through more rooms and then we became the people shooting at others with airsoft guns.

     The rest of the rooms were pretty fun involving bugs and one room where we received a countdown and were subsequently dropped into a pit of balls. The final room was the one that gave me a big stress level because they told us to type something like “Code 6322” into a lock at the end of a closed chamber. I put the code in and it would not work, meanwhile the person beside was screaming intensely! What ensued was us being submerged into water for roughly a minute. This was insanely stressful because I cannot swim and rarely hold my breath, so my heart was racing and I was getting nervous trying to hold my breath. The moment that we re-emerged from the water, the stresses ended and I was left drenched. Overall, this haunted house was amazing and it was truly scary because signing a waiver and being shocked in lines set the tone, that we would get touched and that just added a sense of scariness unlike your standard local haunted house.