With the Royals done, haunted houses rally

First off, let’s be clear: Amber Arnett-Bequeaith, who used to lie in a coffin when she was 5, loves the Royals.

But the previous two Octobers have been hard times for her family’s business, haunted houses. In case you forgot, the Royals made it to the playoffs and World Series those years.

Last year, they won it all. Had a big parade and everything.

Never mind.

Anyway, with a city mesmerized by baseball, some fall traditions slumped. There wasn’t a whole lot of, “Game 3 is tonight, but let’s go to the pumpkin patch. They have hay rides.”

Haunted houses struggled.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love the Royals and I cheered ’em on and I wish they were doing it again,” Arnett-Bequeaith said in her upstairs office in the Beast, a haunted house in Kansas City’s West Bottoms.

“But we’re hoping for a better year this year.”

She wants it for the 400 or so employees who show up for the 5:30 p.m. call time on the season’s 22 performance nights. She calls them family. Scare actors, makeup people, set designers, security. Some have been there 20 years, others longer. Scary got in their blood, and they keep coming back.

Like the Ratman, Harry Lewetzow. He’s among the rarest of humans who knows what it’s like to have a live rat squirm around in his mouth. And if you think that would be a deal-breaker on any romance, no, he met a girl doing it. He’s been there 35 years.

Arnett-Bequeaith grew up in a haunted world. In 1975, her mother and grandmother started the Edge of Hell in a five-story abandoned warehouse at 1300 W. 12th St. According to the website, it is the oldest commercial haunted house in the country.

Full Moon Productions, the family business, has since added the Beast, Macabre Cinema and the Chambers of Edgar Allan Poe (which is not open this year).

If you’re in this family, you’ve probably worked at one of these places.

That’s how Arnett-Bequeaith landed in that coffin when she was 5. It was upstairs in the Edge of Hell. She would slowly rise and drop flower petals on people below, before sinking back down in the coffin.

Nice work if a 5-year-old can get it. Pay was how much?

“I got to eat,” she said with a laugh.

She has been in the business ever since. Now as company vice president, it’s her job to keep the place scary year after year, and what worked last year won’t cut it. Fright evolves.

But gone are the old days when she would be sent to the slaughterhouse to get more bones or to the cemetery to get old flowers.

Now, it’s a digital underworld.

Computer programming to the millisecond, animatronic, Hollywood-like special effects and the latest in lighting and sound, all cast against the psychology of fear.

Anymore, Arnett-Bequeaith said, a haunted house is a “Broadway show in the dark.”

Some of what her team comes up with sounds impossible to designer Blu McBride — at first.

“I’ll tell her I don’t know how to do that. Then the next day we’re building it.”

Gets in your blood

Lewetzow was having breakfast at the Blue Bird Bistro recently when a fan asked for an autograph.

Hey, put a live rat in your mouth and people will love you, too.

“I get recognized, sure,” he said. “Of course, I’m in costume. Not a whole lot of people look like me out there.”

Praise be. Tattered suit, tie, white makeup, wild hair, dark, sunken eyes. Oh, yeah, and often a rat on his shoulder.

But if Arnett-Bequeaith is right when she talks about her haunted house cast being like a large family, Lewetzow would be an old uncle.

He lied about his age to get a job there. He was 12.

“They didn’t check back then like they do now,” said Lewetzow, whose Facebook page says, “You can find me under the 12th Street Bridge.”

He works like a carnival barker, entertaining customers as they arrive. He always has three or so rats in his pockets.

“I usually work with the same three for a night, unless they get cold or wet,” he said. “All colors, doesn’t matter, they all taste the same.”

Then the Ratman tells his love story. One night years ago, he saw her. She was a ghostly bride in an attic scene. He knew instantly she was the girl for him.

And he was Ratman — what’s a girl to do?

“We just celebrated our 28th wedding anniversary,” he said. “Our two oldest kids have worked there and our youngest two want to.”

He wants to stay as long as he can. He likes working with the young cast members and welcoming them into the West Bottoms camaraderie of the haunted.

Nobody gets rich. Pay ranges from $8 to $15 an hour, plus bonuses for big weekends.

“But this money is important because families use this money for Christmases and keeping kids in school,” Arnett-Bequeaith said.

John Vandergriff has worked there even longer than Ratman. When he was 14, he went with his sister, who worked at the Edge of Hell.

“I was pretty good at scaring people, so they gave me a job,” he said.

That was 38 years ago. After years of scare acting, he’s now the house manager at the Beast. As much as anyone, he knows why people get hooked.

“Once you get people to scream — to get them to crawl on the floor from being scared — that gets in your blood.”

Roaring dragon

As mentioned earlier, fright is an evolving business.

Here’s what they did at Terror Behind the Walls, a haunted attraction at the abandoned Eastern State Penitentiary, a gothic, castle-like prison near Philadelphia: Say the word, and you get a tracking device on your arm that serves as your OK to be grabbed, separated from friends and hustled into a dark passageway to who knows where.

Lots of visitors sign up for the option. Most, though, remove the device at some point, signaling they want it all to stop.

That won’t happen in Kansas City’s West Bottoms. Arnett-Bequeaith is a critic of physical contact between guests and employees.

But the thousands who show up every year at her houses get their money’s worth from visits to a Louisiana mansion, a swamp and Jack the Ripper’s London. New this year at the Edge of Hell is a roaring, fire-breathing giant dragon with a massive wingspan. The Macabre Cinema is a 1930s-era haunted theater.

The Beast is where the industry’s “open format” began. Now haunted houses across the country use the no-handrail design, in which visitors are allowed to find their own way to the end.

“We started that right here in Kansas City,” Arnett-Bequeaith said. “And believe me, you learn a lot about people watching them in the dark. I’ve seen a lot of men sacrifice women over the years.”

With Kauffman Stadium dark, more people are showing up at the West Bottoms this year. That means strange things are happening inside the old brick buildings that date to the city’s oldest days.

And while people are making their way through eerie darkness, even stranger things may happen outside. Who knows — this year maybe the Cubs will win the World Series.

This story was originally published October 28, 2016 at 7:00 AM with the headline "With the Royals done, haunted houses rally."