Louisville Halloween interviews Nashville Nightmare’s creator/owner, Brad Webb, to get inside the mind of the architect of Tennessee’s biggest and most infamous haunted attraction.
Welcome back, my rancid little road trippers, to another installment in our new series focusing on some of the best regional haunted attractions within just a couple of hours drive of the Louisville city limits. I’m your spectral navigator, The Phantom of the Ville, and today we’re pointing the compass due south to Madison, Tennessee and the cemetery gates of Nashville Nightmare!
One of the questions I ask every haunter or person I interview who works in the Halloween business is, “Do you remember the moment in your life when you fell in love with ghosts, goblins and everything ghoulish, and knew you wanted to do something scary when you grew up?,”. For many, it’s a series of youthful misadventures and unfortunate events that created a perfect storm of dark influences, but rarely does anyone point to one single attraction or day in their lives that shaped everything to follow.
Brad Webb can point directly to the source of all his nightmares: The Mysterious Mansion in Gatlinburg, Tennessee!
The Mysterious Mansion, still open and scaring future generations today, is a permanent, year round attraction in the tourist town of Gatlinburg, TN where hundreds of thousands stay each year while visiting the Great Smoky Mountains. It first opened its doors in 1980 and has operated continuously for over 35 years, now owned by a descendant of one of the original owners.
“I was five years old in the fall of 1984 when my dad took us up the walkway to that Victorian mansion with spooky music playing in the air, and I looked up at that house in awe,” testifies Webb. “Dad said, ‘Brad, are you going in with us,’ and I said, ‘Nope, there’s monsters in there!’.”
Webb did, in fact, go in and from that day forward became obsessed with monsters, haunted houses and Halloween. This eventually led to his first job working in a haunted house at 15 years old in a classic Nashville haunt called Horror High, an attraction he brought back to life at Nashville Nightmare.
“This will be the last year for Horror High at Nashville Nightmare, and we’re calling it ‘The Final Exam,’” says Webb, so if you want to see this classic attraction before it’s gone, you better make Halloween 2016 the year you take the road trip to Webb’s haunt.
Webb also opened and has continued to operate his own Halloween Express stores in the Nashville area since 2003. Locals know him best, however, for his seasonal haunted attraction which he opened in 2011. By 2013, after only being open for two seasons, Haunted Attraction Magazine called Nashville Nightmare “one of the 31 Must See Haunted Houses in the Nation.” Just this March, at the Transworld Halloween & Attractions Show in St. Louis, Webb was awarded the Board of Director’s Award by the Halloween Attraction Association.
“We just signed a 10 year lease with our current location,” says Webb, so it looks like Nashville Nightmare will be scaring folks in the Country Music Capital for the foreseeable future.
New for 2016, Webb’s feature attraction will be called Dream Ripper’s Haunted House, a journey that begins in subterranean tunnels and sewers that lead to the remains of the old Antioch Asylum and will eventually take guests through a mortuary, graveyard and mausoleum before they finally reach the rickety front door of Graves Manor.
Along with Horror High: The Final Exam, Nashville Nightmare will also feature a third attraction called Fairy Tale Hell, where all bad fairy tales go when they die! Classic children’s fairy tales are twisted into abominable, barely recognizable versions of their sweet & sugary origins.
What does Webb see trending in the haunt biz? “Mirror effects like simulated bottomless pits, illusions and projections; classic smoke and mirrors effects brought up to date blending practical magic and illusion with modern technology.” Webb also predicts an expansion in off season events like his My Bloody Nightmare Valentine’s Day event, “the only event we do that employs touching and more extreme haunt tactics,” he reveals.
Nashville Nightmare is located at 1016 Madison Square in Madison, TN and begins its 2016 haunt season on Friday, September 16. It will be open weekends through Halloween, picking up Sundays and certain Thursday nights in October. Find the full haunt schedule at www.nashvillenightmare.com. Find information on this and more Nashville attractions on our Nashville Road Trips page.
