Halloween is the season of costumes, scares, and everything spooky. Those who appreciate the scare factor in horror movies and haunted houses often thrive during this month, and some of those people find themselves seeking out spooky attractions in their area.

 Haunted houses create a horrific, bizarre, and bone-chilling, yet thrilling experience for all scare lovers. People who enjoy being scared often attribute it to the adrenaline rush that releases endorphins when something startles them. If you’re seeking out startling attractions like this, Iowa is chock-full of them, be it entertainment or the real deal.

Entertaining Treats:

Barnum Circus of Freaks is a family-owned haunted house located near downtown Des Moines. The family members work to creatively direct, manage, and run the front together. Their show is circus-themed with clowns, gorillas, and ringmasters. The owners give the actors the option to create their own characters or to have one created for them.

 When interviewing some of their scare actors, they both said they took on the unconventional job because they simply love scaring people and love being part of the spooky community. The haunted house’s makeup artist told us, “I love the creative freedom I’m given, and working with other employees and trying new looks and techniques on them every night.”

While they are given much creative leeway and love scaring customers half to death, it can be challenging at times when people have different reactions and when customers come in intoxicated or are a bit too young to jump out at. The house told us about certain safety protocols they have for their actors and how their top priority is making sure that people get a good scare, but never at the expense of their actors.

One actor told us, “Some people come in and try to get in your face and make you break character, but it’s really just a coping mechanism to act like they’re not scared when they are. It’s hard sometimes because different people react to being scared in different ways.”

Along with the business being family-owned, many other families work within the haunted house. One scare actor shared how her daughter volunteers in the haunted house and how the opportunity gives this young girl an audience to practice her performance skills that later help her with dance. These opportunities for kids to volunteer helps them get their foot in the door with a future in the scare world. Along with the thrilling and disorienting feel of a haunted house, Barnum Circus of Freaks, “where the freaks run the show”, gives a warm welcome to all who visit their wonderful attraction.

Slaughterhouse is another popular haunted attraction in Des Moines with 60-70 scare actors. Their haunted house attraction has multiple rooms with all varieties of terror, such as medical horror, clowns, spiders, monsters, pigs, and creepy characters. In interviewing a couple of the actors who work at Slaughterhouse, they talked about being drawn to the attraction after going through it for the first time.

Scare actor Lydia Polzin says, “Getting a scare from a customer is really rewarding.”

All the characters at Slaughterhouse are thought up by the actors themselves, and they work with the makeup team to bring that character to life. In fact, this is their first year where their year theme is based on a character feature, Stitches. They also learn more about how to better scare customers over time and by learning how to use their environment, since every room is different. The actors also have a good support system in each other, doing a pre-show powwow every night to hype each other up before their “death march”.

However, being a scare actor isn’t all creepy makeup and fake chainsaws; it can also be very mentally taxing. Scare actor Nathan Long said “It’s hard to try to anticipate how people will react to us, and how certain rooms may be too freaky for them, so when people freak out toward us or try to get us out of character or touch us, it can be annoying.” Being alone in the dark in some rooms can also be scary, when they’re waiting for a new customer to spook. However, they take certain precautions to ensure the safety of their actors, such as security cameras in every room and certain cues that the actors have if something goes wrong.

Putting on the persona and jumping at people can also be very tiring because of how much social interaction it takes from the actors. With 400 presales the night we went, they get well over 1,000 customers a night, with a record of 1,477 people in one night! Yet, despite the sometimes difficult nature, all the actors love to put on the mask of their character every night and get a good jump out of a scared customer.

The actors we interviewed told us about how you can tell something is wrong if you don’t hear screams. When customers are in the attraction, employees like to say that “the house is singing”, a sound they love to hear.

Slaughterhouse additionally has a thrilling backstory to their attraction about Zebulon Levithan Biggs, a war surgeon intrigued with human anatomy, establishing a hog farm. After some exchanges between Biggs and H. Holms, a pharmacist interested in Bigg’s medical tools, the two established a theater where they sold specialty equipment. Holms and Biggs’ business fizzled out, however, when Holmes was sentenced to death after committing many murders in the Chicago area.

The remaining Biggs family made a deal with the government to provide meat for WWI, but the meat strangely tasted nothing like pork. As the family line continues, Albert Herman Webster, his grandson, seems to have the same anatomical interests.

Their business grew outside to other midwest states, including Iowa. Al Biggs continues to buy other hog operations throughout Iowa along with making many other contracts, but when Big Al grows bored of hogs and leaves the business to the rest of his family, he leaned on his grandfather for inspiration and opened “Big Al’s Slaughterhouse” in Des Moines, IA. While the Slaughterhouse show is all fun and tricks, true stories like this are ever-present in Iowa.

No Tricks:

There are countless haunted houses where people dress up and scare people each Halloween as a job. While for some people being scared is a fictional part of life, for others it is a reality. Iowa is also home to many real haunted houses, where ghosts haunt the halls or murders have occurred. More recently, a real haunted house just outside of Des Moines became known when two YouTubers decided to buy this haunted property.

Farrar Elementary School was built in 1921 and opened approximately a year later. This school opened to combine other surrounding one-room schoolhouses into one, creating a central school district for the students in the area. While still open there were numerous reports by students and teachers of hearing voices, seeing figures, and slamming doors. This elementary school stayed open for about 80 years until it closed in early May 2002 due to low numbers of students caused by a town population decline.

Four years later, a married couple, Jim and Nancy Oliver bought the 17,000 square-foot school house. Yet, after numerous occasions of hearing voices, seeing dark shadows, and slamming doors, the couple quickly realized they were not the only ones in the building. Nancy Oliver was on the stairs one day and became unsteady when someone or something caught her. She turned around to thank who she thought was her husband but instead was a kid figure who disappeared only after a few seconds. This spine-chilling encounter had confirmed their suspicions of the school being haunted.

For about 15 years, investigators came to Farrar and all walked away with one conclusion: Farrar Elementary is riddled with spirits. There were no reasons why the property was spiritually active. The only possibility would be the cemetery right outside the elementary school, which had a larger growing population than the town itself.

Earlier this year, YouTubers Sam and Colby bought the haunted Farrar Elementary School. This Halloween, they decided to spend a week in the school in what they called “Hell Week”. Each night they would decide a different room to sleep in by drawing out of a hat, and then present each other with challenges throughout the week. During their adventure through the school, the YouTubers had called the first floor “the safe floor”, and had even found a safe room that was said to not be haunted at all. The second floor, on the other hand, was mostly known for the spirits of children who liked to play tricks on people.

The two had always been interested in buying a haunted property. When the opportunity presented itself they had to take a closer look. After they had discovered the school would be destroyed soon they, and others, investigated the property. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that this schoolhouse was truly haunted, giving them the appeal to buy it and to keep the historical landmark alive.

It’s obvious that the love for horror is alive in Iowa. Between the love of fun haunted attractions and the interest in real haunted houses, the horror community is thriving this season. Aside from being a location of multiple horror movies, there is plenty of scary fun to find in Iowa, whether you enjoy the performance of the entertaining haunted houses or find yourself falling down the rabbit hole of a true haunting.