Nashville Nightmare’s Brad Webb reveals the new terrors he’s unleashing in Tennessee this Halloween.
“It just doesn’t feel like there is an off-season anymore,” says Brad Webb, founder and owner of Nashville Nightmare, who has been engaged full time in the Halloween business 365 days a year since 2011. Webb employs three full time, salaried employees and several more part time workers who are busy designing and building his attractions six days a week year round. Besides the Halloween event, Nashville Nightmare produces a Christmas haunt, a Valentine’s Day haunt and a live zombie hunting event.
“I can flip on our security cameras from home on a late Friday night, and I’ll probably find somebody still there working on the haunt any weekend of the year,” admits Webb who is planning his most ambitious renovations and new attractions for 2017, including a new outdoor haunted attraction at Percy Priest Lake inside Nashville Shores Waterpark.
Priest Lake Haunted Woods is Webb’s latest partnership with Nashville Shores Waterpark, which will be a three tiered attraction that includes themed trails and a haunted hayride just a 25 mile drive from Nashville Nightmare. Although he wants to keep an aura of mystery around this new outdoor attraction, he did drop a couple of hints about what brave souls can expect this Halloween.
“We built two giant slides that serve as your entrance into this experience,” Webb teases. “They’ll drop you down right into the middle of the woods and you’ll have no idea what’s waiting for you there.” Webb will also be adding the full sized, walk through “rotting hulk” ship produced by Nevermore Productions seen this year at the Transworld Halloween & Attractions Show featuring an amazing, full size animated great white shark.
Back at Nashville Nightmare, Webb promises an experience that will begin “as soon as you get out of your car,” including an interactive ticket booth alive with terrifying animations. A new attraction called The Reformatory replaces the old Horror High attraction this year, which is now set in a Catholic Reform School.
“The Antichrist shows up on earth,” explains Webb, “and tries to possess everyone at the Reformatory: priests, nuns, choirboys, everyone. It’s a big renovation. My guys have been working morning and night in order to accomplish what we need to accomplish on this attraction.”
Phantoms is the name of the new attraction replacing Night Terrors, which was the haunts’ very first attraction when it opened seven years ago. “A centuries old Mortician has traveled through time collecting the ashes of serial killers which have kept him alive supernaturally,” explains Webb. “You’ll go back in time to Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel and forward to more contemporary murder scenes.”
Industrial Dead, Nightmare Nashville’s zombie apocalypse attraction, has been “supercharged” this year according to Webb and Fairy Tale Hell, a twisted fantasy themed attraction, will be bigger than ever.
“Every attraction has a brand new beginning and a brand new ending, and they’ve all been tweaked throughout,” says Webb. “Fairy Tell Hell is where you’ll find all the big animatronics. There’s a dungeon queue line and a giant castle. You’ll walk into a giant storybook that takes you to a completely different world.”
“Each of our attractions is about 12 to 15 minutes long,” relates Webb. “I’ve found that attractions that go on for longer than 20 minutes start to lose the audience’s attention span and people end up needing to use the bathroom.”
It takes about 150 actors to fill out all of Nashville Nightmares’ and Priest Lake’s roles, and Webb admits that staffing is his biggest challenge. “We’re hiring all the time. We don’t wait until August to cast for the Halloween season. We’re casting in March. There’s always plenty to do for anybody that really loves doing this.”
Nashville Nightmare was ranked the #1 Haunt in the Nation in 2016 by USA Today’s Reader’s Choice. Don’t miss the lurking terrors awaiting you at the original indoor haunt and the new outdoor haunt at Priest Lake in 2017!
