# Share your Haunt Backstories!



## HalloweeNut (Mar 2, 2010)

Well, it's been a long time since I posted on HF, but I figured no time like the present. I was just curious if any other Haunters wanted to share their backstories with other Haunters. I'll start with mine; I haven't actually built the haunt yet (no time, no money, no yard) but I can dream. I call it "Belsco Manor". The big influences were Disney's Haunted Mansion and Richard Matheson's "Hell House":

“One element of Gothic and Phantastic Fiction that will never go out of style is that of a man driven to madness out of terrible grief, and being driven to do horrible things because of this madness. It is something of an old trope, and one that will certainly not cease it in its popularity anytime soon. However, that does not mean it is not rooted in fact. There have been many cases of men suddenly turning horrifically violent for seemingly no reason. However, one above all others has struck a chord with your author – his name was Emeric Belsco. 
“The story of Emeric Belsco, and his eventually descent into madness, began before he was even born. It begins with his father, Andrew Belsco, who became very wealthy through his business, the Belsco Shipping Company. Flushed with his earnings and looking for a place to settle down and raise a family, Andrew decided upon the small town of Autumn Creek, in New York State’s Hudson River Valley. He decided to build a large, stately manor house high on a hill overlooking the beautiful valley for his wife. Construction began in late 1852, and was eventually completed in 1854. Andrew was a known lover of puzzles, and so took it upon himself to have several secret passages and hidden rooms built into the manor during its construction. In 1856, Andrew’s wife became pregnant. 
“On April 30th, 1857, Emeric Belsco was ushered into this world. His childhood was an uneventful one, and he was often described as a friendly, artistic child, very polite and kind. He was also extremely intelligent, and by age 18 he had inherited the family business from his father, who appears to have died of a heart attack. In 1877, Emeric married a beautiful young Spanish woman, Esmeralda Orellana. Those who knew Emeric said they had never seen him as happy as he was around Esmeralda; they two of them were very much in love. In 1879, the couple were blessed with the birth of their first daughter, Anastasia. Emeric was overjoyed, and often spent his time doting on his wife and child. But all good things must come to an end, and tragedy was soon to strike. 
“In 1880, Esmeralda was to give birth to their second child; however, complications arose. The child, named Sarah Belsco, was born with grotesque deformities, and Esmeralda died giving birth to her. Emeric was stricken by both grief and hatred; grief for his wife, and hatred for his newborn daughter, whom he blamed for the death of Esmeralda. Not wanting anyone to know of Sarah’s existence, Emeric set a cruel plan in motion: he told the people of Autumn Creek the child had been stillborn, and locked her away in the secret rooms and passages built by his father. And so began a lifetime of cruelty for poor Sarah. As his two daughters grew, they differed very much from each other: Anastasia was extremely beautiful, but cruel and twisted, whereas Sarah, though horrible in appearance, was kind and loving. The family’s strange existence continued as Emeric wanted it to for 16 years. And then, everything began to fall apart.
“In 1896, in an effort to increase his business and his social standing, Emeric decided to marry off Anastasia to Mathew Bain, the son of Charles Bain, a potential business partner. There was, however, one flaw in the plan: Sarah was in love with Mathew. She had been watching him from the hiding places her father had sealed her in, and quietly fallen for the handsome youth. When she found out her sister, who treated her with nothing but cruelty and contempt over the years, was to be his bride, something in the abused young Sarah’s mind snapped. She came to Emeric the night before the wedding, and begged him to marry her to Mathew instead. Instead, it seems he tied poor Sarah to a chair, sealed her in one of the secret rooms, and left her to starve.
“The wedding itself went flawlessly, and all of those invited were properly impressed by the spectacle of the occasion. As the party wound down, Anastasia and Mathew departed to spend their wedding night at a nearby inn. However, the following morning, when a maid at the inn went to deliver breakfast in bed, she made a horrifying discover: the ghastly murders of Anastasia and Mathew Bain. The two of them had each been stabbed at total of 15 times in the face and chest. In addition, Anastasia’s heart had been cut out. The grisliness of the crime shocked the village of Autumn Creek, and soon hunting parties were sent out in an attempt to catch the murderer. But Emeric already had an idea who had done it. 
“He hurried back to the manor as fast as he could, only to discover that somehow Sarah had escaped from the house in which shed had been a prisoner for 16 years, and had had her revenge. Emeric went deep into the woods that day, and vanished temporarily. When he returned the following day, he was missing his walking stick, and had dried blood on his shirt, though he claimed it was his own. Eventually, the search parties discovered the body of a young woman half-buried in the woods; she was not only horribly deformed, but she had been beaten so savagely that her skull had caved in. Strangely, it is said she had a wicked smile frozen on her face. 
“Although the murders were never officially solved, Emeric underwent a strange transformation in his demeanor and personality. He began talking of seeing a “woman all in white” roaming the grounds of the manor. He complained of tapings in the walls, of cold drafts, and of childish giggles that no one else heard. Convinced he was being haunted, Emeric became obsessed with the occult in an attempt to rid himself of the spirits haunting him. He collected such depraved writings as Des Vermis Mysteriis, Remigius’ Daemonolatreia, and even the abhorred Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred. He became convinced that the only way to exorcise his estate was to draw different entities to his manor to drive away the ghosts of his daughters. 
“Emeric became a complete recluse, seen very little in the village. However, In October of 1897, it was agreed upon by the people of Autumn Creek something must be done about Emeric’s behavior. A group of villagers ventured up to the manor, only to discover a blood chilling sight. As part of his attempts to draw more entities to the house, Emeric had constructed bizarre scarecrows out of human bones, obtained from robbing the family graveyard. Eventually, after searching the grounds, Emeric was discovered to have hanged himself from the rafters of the attic. Pouring over Emeric’s journals, it became clear that he believed his efforts to rid himself of his ghostly daughters had backfired – he had only succeeded in causing more ghosts to haunt him, driving him all the more insane. It seems Emeric was convinced something terrible was going to happen on the 31st of that month; he had written in his journals, “On Samhain they shall come. The hills shall run red with my blood!” (Samhain, pronounced “SOW-en”, was the ancient predecessor to the modern Hallowe’en). 
“As no one wanted to purchase the “cursed” estate, the manor was boarded up, abandoned, left to rot. The grounds of the estate were opened to the public as a cemetery. However, the tales of spectral figures and menacing shadows never stopped. The townspeople told of the woman in white, and a shadowy man with the face of a corpse and eyes like fire roaming the grounds, unable to leave the estate. Strange and eerie sounds have been reported coming from the manor, and some claim to have seen candlelight emanating from the windows of the old house. None but the most foolish venture near Belsco Manor, for it is said that on cold, moonless nights, if you listen carefully, you can sometimes hear the sound of a young woman laughing, softly…”


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## LairMistress (Sep 22, 2009)

I have never taken the time to write a long version of mine. The basic idea of mine, is that the house belonged to the cemetery groundskeeper and his wife, and the spirits of the cemetery became restless. The cemetery is so old, that family members of those buried there no longer visit (presumably, they are gone too, or so many generations passed, that they are unaware or uncaring of their ancestors' burial location).

So, the groundskeeper doesn't take his job very seriously, and doesn't keep it very nicely. This angers the spirits, and they drive him mad. He wanders out into the cemetery one night, and is never seen alive again. However, his wife hears his voice faintly calling to her from deep within the cemetery, and finally, she tries to locate the source of the voice. The spirits take her too, and subsequently, they all haunt the grounds.

I suppose it's a mish-mash of the Haunted Mansion and the movie version of Bram Stoker's Dracula (although they're ghosts, rather than vampires). The idea stemmed more from a seasonal haunted attraction that my cousins always talked about wanting to visit. I'm probably butchering the name very badly, but I believe it was called "Thayer Ashton's Mansion" (somewhere near Alton, IL). I remember hearing commercials for it on the radio, but never saw a print ad for it, and was never able to visit it myself. Their storyline, if I remember correctly, was the man of the house went crazy and killed his entire family, and they all haunted the house and grounds. I preferred to steer clear of the domestic violence part of that, but found the rest intriguing enough to borrow.


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## The_Caretaker (Mar 6, 2007)

Here's mine:

As the caretaker of the Wales Court Cemetery I am best to tell you what happened on that Halloween night in 1892 when all hell broke loose. 

But before I get to that night let me tell you about Zed Jones. I first saw him at his father’s funeral, not more than a child of 12. In a way I watched him grow up. I got to know him on his weekly visits to his father’s grave. Zed was a good kid always helpful and polite; he was a book worm always reading and eager to learn. He stopped and talked with me every time he was here. I heard about how he was doing in school, how some of the kids were bullying him. I showed him how to defend himself. He told me how he wanted to become a doctor when he grew up. We talked about the girls and young women that he fell in and out of love with. I heard about them all, I knew he was in truly in love when he started bringing Jasmine on his visits with his father. 

Jasmine was beautiful, smart, kind the ideal woman, her only flaw if you want to call it that was that her grandmother and mother were the local herbalists or shaman in the community. Most of the folks, the uneducated ones, around here were afraid she was one and would curse them with the evil eye, but it didn’t stop them from going to see her grandmother or mother when then need some remedy for their ills. But Zed was in love he did care what others thought, they were married a year after he got out of medical school. Their wedding was a grand affair. They were happily married for five years when Jasmine became sick, Zed did everything he could to find out what was ailing her, her grandmother and mother even tried, but to no avail. Her death was tough on Zed, it changed him. I saw him here a lot visiting her grave, we didn’t talk much. 

Shortly after her death he closed his practice and spent a lot of time in study. He started traveling al over the world searching for something. I though it was to mend his heartbreak After he returned home trucks started bringing in odd equipment and strange people were coming into town and spending time with Zed. Nobody knew what was going on but there were stories that you heard in whispers around town of what was going on. I didn’t believe them I knew Zed, or so I thought. 

Then that Halloween night in 1892 I saw Zed, his wife’s grandmother, and mother as well as some of the strangers that had come into town in the cemetery. I watched from my shed as they went about their business. They were performing some kind of ritual and around midnight it happened, they opened a portal. That when all the stuff started happening. Bodies started coming out of the graves, even the plants and insects were affected every thing in the cemetery was changed. When the portal opened ZED was standing right in front of it and the flesh was burned from his bones. The next morning I had to rebury all the corpses. I also had to dig Zed’s grave next to his beloved Jasmine. After that every Halloween night the portal reappears and the dead rise again, it is said that you can see the burning ghost of Zed if you look. Then the next day I have to bury all the corpses, again.

There is more to this tale. They found all sorts of odd stuff in his home, as well as his cellar. Then there was what they found in the caves on his property. But those are tales for another time….


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## CreeepyCathy (Mar 28, 2009)

Mine... short & sweet.


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## RoxyBlue (Oct 6, 2008)

Mine - short & sweeter: dead people are buried in our yard


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## Chuck (Oct 10, 2009)

Last year, the name of our haunt was Zombie Labs International. The zombie apocalypse has occurred and instead of going with the usual zombie survival thing, we went with the story that the house was converted into a laboratory that tested the most effective ways of killing zombies. Inside the house we sectioned off areas with clear plastic drop to make them look like clean rooms and had another room as the armory.

We sent out invitations that were just letters on Zombie Labs International letterhead, inviting them to tour the facility. I created a Facebook page for Zombie labs International and sent out a video to everyone that was attending the party showing them who Zombie Labs International were. (A link to the video is at the bottom.) Also leading up to it, I would post things like we had a failure in containment unit B, one of the zombie test subjects got loose and attacked one of the scientists. Here is the last image seen by there personal recording device. and then I would post a picture of the zombie at an obscure angle. I kept this going for about a month.

A few days before the party I made one last post saying that we had a huge lightening storm (which was true, there was a hurricane off the coast) that knocked all power out to the facility. Lightning struck the backup generator and all containment units failed and killed most if not all of the personnel on site. We are abandoning the facility at once.

When people showed it up at the house, it was in complete disarray. All the scientists and security were dead and the zombies were now loose.


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## Dead Screamer Andy (Aug 16, 2013)

Here's ours....
One of the areas best kept secrets, Crestmont Hospital for the Criminally Insane once made it's home where Coonskin Park is today. This hospital was home to some of the most dangerous criminals West Virginia had to offer. These criminals were brought to Crestmont Hospital because Dr. Henry Holmes, the hospitals founder, believed he could cure them of there criminal behavior. After many years, rumors began to spread that Crestmont Hospital wasn't the safe haven it was supposed to be. It was said Dr. Holmes used bizarre and inhumane treatments on his patients, and that he claimed his patients were the worst form of criminal, and they would not be missed. 
On October 13, 1940, a fire started in one of the hospital's operating rooms. Dr. Holmes and his nurses escaped the fire, but the patient being operated on was left to burn to death. The fire was extinguished, causing only a small amount of damage, but it was too late for Dr. Holmes and his staff. Firefighters had seen the conditions inside the hospital. The hospital was built to house 200 patients, but over 1500 patients were being housed at the time of the fire. Patients were chained to the walls. Three patients were found strapped to tables so long, their skin began to grow over the straps. In one locked room, the decayed body of a young women was found. A stain remains in the exact spot of the body, resisting all attempts to clean it. 
After the fire, many patients resisted all attempts to make them leave the building. Despite the horrible conditions they were living in, they still considered it home. Most of Dr. Holmes' staff was arrested, but Dr. Holmes and a few staff members were never found. Even though Crestmont Hospital for the Criminally Insane is long gone, rumors persist that the current building is still haunted by Dr. Holmes and his staff and patients. This October, the Zombie Frogz Ghost Hunters has obtained permission to open Coonskin at night, to let the public see for themselves just what remains of Crestmont Hospital for the Criminally Insane.


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## mikeythemars (May 10, 2008)

These are all great backstories, but many are far too long and detailed for a haunt visitor to digest. In terms of engaging your audience, the best backstories are (a) ones that can be described in at best two to three sentences and (b) have some element of uncertainty that leaves the visitors unsettled. The Zombie Labs and Broadmoor descriptions are excellent examples of both.


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