Marc Nardacci
The State News
Marc Nardacci
The State News
Marc Nardacci
The State News
Phantasmagoria Terror Dome opens in its new location in Okemos
While other 12-year-olds were running from door to door trick or treating, Jerry Browne took a different approach to Halloween. He dressed dark, lied out in his front yard under a blanket of leaves and said he scared the hell out of the other kids. Eighteen years later, Browne has moved on from haunting his mother's front lawn to terrifying people professionally.
He is now one of three owners of Phantasmagoria Terror Dome, a haunted house attraction located in the golf dome at FunTyme Adventure Park, located at 3384 James Phillips Dr., in Okemos.
The haunt was previously housed, for the past two years, at Logan Square Shopping Center in Lansing. The reason for the move was simple, Browne said.
"It's a bigger space," Browne said. "Looking to add another element and being in the dome allowed us a chance to do that."
Browne, along with his wife Jamie and friend Ty Paff, started Phantasmagoria three years ago as a makeshift attraction in the garage of Browne's house. Using junk wood panels from local lumber yards, the trio made a haunted house consisting of three rooms.
"It turned out great," Browne said. "Everyone loved it. So we expanded the house by 11 rooms in a 30-by-20 garage."
As the years went on, Browne and company grew more sophisticated in their haunting, going so far as traveling to a haunted house convention in South Carolina to pick up tips from professionals.
After they got back, they worked to refine the haunted house and in 2004 decided to make it semi-professional.
"We ran the haunted house like it was a professional haunt," Browne said. "We sent press releases, told people it was free."
Running only for three hours on Halloween, it drew more than 1,000 people. From then on, the three decided to try their hand at running a full-on professional haunted house.
"It grew too big," Paff said. "We pooled our resources together to get our initial startup to see how we could make it."
After finding success as a free, homemade haunt, the trio expanded Phantasmagoria and ran it for profit at Logan Square Shopping Center in Lansing. It was there for two years before moving to FunTyme this year. Phantasmagoria is divided into four parts, each designed to appeal to different groups of people.
"We tried to make a multi-element haunted attraction," Browne said.
The first, "Quarantine," is a dark, mine shaft setting littered with barrels of glowing toxic waste and zombies.
The idea behind Quarantine was to give visitors a more interactive experience, said Ty Paff the third owner of Phantasmagoria.
"We wanted something a little darker," Paff said. "Haunted houses are more like theater. Quarantine requires the watcher to interact with the environment."
Also adding to the immersion are the actors, Paff said.
"We don't like putting too much machinery in it," he said. "We wanted to keep the humanity in it. Darker, high intensity startles and thrills."
Next up are "3-Dimentia" and "Chaos," two haunts designed with a different target audience in mind than "Quarantine," Browne said.
3-Dimentia is a three-dimensional haunt requiring special glasses that make the murals on the walls pop out at the customer, while Chaos is a haunt Paff describes as an "urban corn maze."
There are no actors in Chaos, but customers have to make their way through the fence maze while it is filled with thick fog and strobe lights.
"You're not exhausted after because you've been chased through the haunt by someone with a chainsaw," Browne said.
The final haunt, "Purgatory" is more of a traditional haunted house, complete with knife-wielding murders and an homage to classic horror films. In addition to pulling from horror icons of the past, Purgatory also pulls from Phantasmagoria's past.
"Certain parts of (Purgatory) are from the home haunt," Paff said, adding that the graveyard scene and "black hole" are heavily modified versions of attractions present at the first haunted house.
As an avid visitor of other haunted houses, the trick to an effective scare is the strength of its actors, Paff said.
"All of us are Halloweenies," Paff said. "When I go (to haunted houses) myself, I see these big, large, 10-foot pneumatic props. As soon as I hear a hiss, it's not like a creature coming out at me, it's a prop. Humans, though, can modulate. A good actor who really knows what they're doing and knows how to interact with people is 10 times scarier than any machine could ever be."
While finding a good scare in metro Detroit is easy - according to Browne, Detroit is home to more than 60 haunted attractions and has "more haunts there per square mile than anywhere else in the world" - Lansing has a much smaller market for haunted houses. So, Browne said, he wanted Phantasmagoria to make its mark on customers.
"I want everybody to be satisfied," Browne said. "I wanted people to be laughing at their friends because they're scared to death. I want them to remember they got scared to death."