Climb the Rickety Stairs with Us to Take a Peek into The Devil’s Attic!
Take a deep breath, Haunt Fans, and follow me as I take a terrifying whirlwind tour of all the best Haunted Attractions in the Louisville area over the next two weeks. On Friday, September 21st, the floodgates of Hell were opened in the Ville, and a skeletal fistful of attractions opened their doors to the unwary populace. Join me, The Phantom of the Ville, as I attempt to hold onto what’s left of my mortal sanity as I plunge myself head first into every nightmare created by the twisted masterminds of these haunts.
Here at the Louisville Halloween website, we don’t like to start in the shallow end of the pool, so we’re climbing all the way up to start in the attic, The Devil’s Attic! Located at 647 West Hill Street in the old Jobson Paint Company building, which was built in 1914, The Devil’s Attic offers 10,000 square feet of terror. This is the third year in the Ville for this haunt, and it has doubled in size every year so far since its humble beginnings in a strip mall in Jefferson County.
Spookmaster, Jason Besemann, is 100% hands on with his mad creation, having done all of the electrical work and painting himself. Raised in a strict Southern Baptist family, Jason wasn’t allowed to celebrate Halloween as a child. It wasn’t until his early teens that he began sneaking away to friend’s houses where he saw movies like “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and “The Exorcist” that fired his imagination and set him down the road that eventually led him to open his own haunted house.
It was the horror films he saw at an impressionable age that started the germ of the idea that Besemann had about creating his own house of horrors, and it is his continued love of modern horror cinema that drives the themes and scenes in The Devil’s Attic. It all begins in a Gothic chamber ruled by the Devil himself, who warns those that are about to pass through the fiery gates of his domain to “abandon all hope” if they are to proceed. The group that I was with lost one member in the very first room; a 6 foot 6 six inch, muscularly built gentlemen (SEE PHOTO/CENTER FRAME) was left bent over, gasping for air after the first shocking scare and had to bypass the rest of the tour. Gracefully, he posed for a photo with the “braver” members of our group after we made it out alive!
The passages through the Devil’s Attic are detailed with walls covered in skulls and ancient crypts, creating an oppressive atmosphere filled with dread. I was thrilled to see scenes from classic American Halloween tales like Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” alongside moody British horror classics like Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” You’ll also see great scenes from contemporary horror films, like the 2001 version of “13 Ghosts” with it’s amazing “glass house” set. If I had to pick one scene that really blew me away, it would be the “Exorcist” scene influenced by some of the recent films about demonic possession. Besemann has gone as far as to hire a professional contortionist to play the possesed girl in the scene, twisting and bending her body into postions that don’t seem humanly possible! She really, really creeped me out.
You’ll also be challenged by a room of many doors where you’ll have to choose a door to proceed in the hopes of finding the right passage or be forever lost in the twisted maze of dead ends and paths that lead right back to where you started. I don’t want to spoil all of the other surprises you’ll find deep in the dark corners of Devil’s Attic, so that’s all I’m going to warn you about. The rest of the Attic’s secrets you’ll have to either learn for yourself or be included with my group’s faint of heart gentle giant and end up just one of the many victims unable to survive the terrors of The Devil’s Attic!
The Devil’s Attic is open September 28-29 from 8PM-12:30AM and in October every Thursday night through Sunday night. Thursdays and Sundays the hours are from 8-11:30PM and Fridays and Saturdays the hours are from 8PM-12:30AM. The Devil’s Attic will also be open on Halloween night (a Wednesday this year) from 8PM-12:30AM. The official website can be found at www.thedevilsattic.com/.
Stay tuned to www.louisvillehalloween.com for many more Louisville Haunted House previews to come over the next two weeks. The first person to post a picture of yourself outside of The Devil’s Attic alongside one of the Attic’s wandering ghouls to The Phantom of the Ville’s Facebook Page at www.facebook.com/louisvilleafterdark/ wins a FREE Halloween gift of a classic horror DVD mailed directly to your own haunted house!
