By Mandy Sparber
Lights flicker on and off, on and off. The room is spinning around. In the distance, a siren wails. Smoke fills your lungs and obscures your vision. A voice whispers, “Follow me, follow me. We need to escape.”
Cautiously you step forward. Your hands come in contact with cold linked metal. The smoke clears just enough and you find yourself face to face with a bloody, drooling inmate from the Fox River Penitentiary.
Now what?
Luckily, “Prison Break Live!”, based on the Fox TV series, is just one of the new attractions at the Wachovia Spectrum’s Nightmares X-treme Scream Park. The 70-minute, self-guided tour — except for the occasional ghoul and goblin usher — runs Oct. 5 through Oct. 29.
The orange carpet premiere on Oct. 5 began with four limos pulling up with characters including Pirate Jack, ambassador of Halloween, Edgar Allan Poe and Lynton V. Harris, the director and creator of Nightmares X-treme Scream Park.
According to Dead Elvis, who hosted the premier, Nightmares X-treme Scream Park is the nation’s only haunted house in a sports facility.
Bob Kehm, marketing manager for Comcast Spectacor, says this is the third year for the indoor, Hollywood-style haunted house. The theme in 2004 was “Nightmares on Broad Street.”
“Each year we try to make it scarier than the last,” Kehm says. “This year is the scariest.”
Seventeen-year-old Stephanie Williams from West Chester, Pa., says she has been to several haunted houses before, but would agree with Kehm’s opinion.
“It is definitely one of the scariest things,” Williams says. “But it is definitely worth it and exhilarating in the end.”.
Stephanie Strubble, 14, from Mt. Laurel, N.J., could not believe she made it out in one piece.
“I had my eyes closed the whole time,” she says. “There is no way you could get me to go back in there.”
Senior Tyler Randall, who is working to promote Nightmares X-treme Scream Park, says the event is for all ages.
“Seven until you’re dead,” Randall says.
Aside from “Prison Break Live!,” the attractions are “Fear Park,” “Flyers Fright,” “Dead Elvis in Concert,” “Horrorwood Theatre,” “Snakes in a Tomb,” “Tattoo 3D” and “Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic Nightmare.”
Flyers Fright takes visitors into an abandoned locker room where deadly hockey players follow them around with machetes instead of sticks. Philadelphia native John Wu, 17, says Nightmares X-treme Scream Park was his first time at a haunted attraction. He says he doesn’t even like being scared but could appreciate this attraction.
“This kind of scary is great,” Wu says. “There is a lot of fun and the excitement of mysterious things popping at me was great.”
“Snakes in a Tomb” is a Laura Croft-style adventure that takes patrons through a pitch-black whirlwind maze of tombs. It features a live 16-foot Burmese python and mummies waiting around every corner.
Tiffany Baldwin, a 22-year-old from Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, says she was so frightened she couldn’t complete the “Snakes in a Tomb” portion.
“I was so scared that I actually started crying,” she says. “The minute I turned the corner and saw the snake head right there I couldn’t go through it anymore.”
Although Baldwin was scared, she says she would come to Nightmares X-treme Scream Park again.
“I would tell my friends to come,” she says. “But I would also warn them that it is extremely, extremely scary.”
