How Haunted is Laurel’s House of Horror?
If you have been following along with our YouTube content, you’ll likely know that we are adventurers, explorers, haunters and spooky enthusiasts. Each year we travel up and down the East Coast in an effort to experience new and exciting haunted attractions, looking for the best jump scares and the most immersive sets during both the off-season and the main (fall) season. However, throughout all of those haunt experiences, we’ve never dipped a toe into the world between the worlds; which is to say, we’ve never explored or experienced anything truly paranormal. So, when our friends at Laurel’s House of Horror invited us out to take one of their famous paranormal ghost tours in the empty, abandoned movie theatre…how could we say no?
For those who may be unfamiliar with the property, Laurel’s House of Horror is built into the shell of the former Laurel Twin Cinema in the Laurel Shopping Center directly off of Route 1. This location was overshadowed by the nearby, always-looming Laurel Sanitarium, a mental institution where patients were allegedly subjected to traumatizing experiments and experimental treatments. Upon the closure and demolition of the Sanitarium, now long paved-over by apartment complexes and adjacent shopping venues, the theatre continued to operate under a number of different monikers. After loading some of its final film reels into projectors in the year 2007, the property then sat empty for decades before being acquired and reimagined as a haunted attraction by the current owners. It was only after haunters, scare actors and paranormal enthusiasts began to experience strange and unexplainable occurrences on the property that Laurel’s House of Horror expanded into a multi-experience venue, offering a haunt experience full of well-trained scare actors and performance artists during the fall as well as escape games and paranormal ghost tours year-round.
Above: Our Full-Spectrum Phasm Cam allows us to see as if we had nightvision, which makes it much easier to spot ghosts!
Led by our paranormal guides Mandy Gibson and Evan Webb, we started the tour by taking up a position in the area of the maze currently known as the Butcher Shop. Mandy dutifully and carefully placed readers and spiritual detection devices known as ‘REM-Pods’ throughout the area. These devices, we were informed, would emit a beep or a loud shrill whine if something passed near enough to them, and would also detect shifts in air temperature by changing colors and pitch. Additionally, Mandy and Evan took the time to place devices affectionately known as ‘Cat Balls’ in areas near doorways and access points. These small spherical devices are notably less sensitive and would only blink or light up if they were actually, physically touched - we were invited to confirm this by tapping them to get a blinking reaction. Lastly, Evan opened up a smartphone app called ‘Spirit Talker’ which is evidently quite popular in the paranormal community. This app ostensibly uses a smartphone’s microphone to seek out specific pitches and electronic voice phenomena (EVP) which may otherwise go unheard by the human ear, and then translate it into human speech. With all of these devices armed and ready, we sat back and waited to see what might happen.
It’s important, at this point, to point out that paranormal enthusiasts and haunters can and do overlap in many regards and respects. Nevertheless, these two types of people still represent different audiences with different interests. Haunters like ourselves are often shaped by our hobbies and interests, and we delight in the immersive environments and the macabre world-building that the world of haunts and haunted attractions offers. Paranormal enthusiasts, however, are more commonly shaped by beliefs and personal experiences. A glimpse into the paranormal is said to be a life-changing experience, one that goes beyond the Google Review and a great story to tell and goes on to shape your entire perception of spirituality and the afterlife. As such, it is possible to be a haunter without being a paranormal enthusiast, and one can be a paranormal enthusiast without being a haunter. As skeptics by nature, we’d be lying if we said that we were fully committed to the idea of ghostly activity inside the building…but we had resolved to go into this experience with open minds and open hearts, and we were willing to go wherever the journey took us.
Above: The Spirit Talker smartphone app gave us quite a few different words and phrases to digest!
All too soon, the first chimes of the REM-Pods began to shriek into the still air of the Butcher Shop. Occasionally, the Cat Balls would blink as if they’d been touched, though we were far enough away from any one of them to have been directly responsible for any kind of physical contact. We did notice a progressive chill settling into this section of the maze, as well, as the Spirit Talker began dictating a seemingly random assortment of broken sentences and words for us to dissect. While we will be the first to admit that any one of these elements can potentially be explained away by scientific reasoning and logical assessment, we will also say that the combination and the timing of these elements as a chorus of sound and sensation was genuinely unsettling. And Evan must have noticed our concern as we exchanged glances, because he was quick to offer the commonality of terror as an initial reaction. “It gets less scary the further you get into it”, he added. He was mostly right - but more on that later.
As we shifted to a new location deeper into the maze, Mandy deployed our Spirit Box - a sort of radio meant to be used the same way that the ‘Spirit Talker’ phone app was being used, but in realtime. While this box mostly spat out rhythmic static in the Theatre area, we did occasionally notice some guttural sounds and muttering being emitted from the radio’s speaker. With our perimeter again guarded by tactically-placed Cat Balls and REM-Pods, we roamed freely in the large, dark space looking for evidence of the paranormal and waiting to be touched or contacted by someone or something from beyond this realm. It was while we were meandering about that Katie and Mandy heard something that we truly could not explain. As the two ladies took their seats towards the back of the theatre, the sound of the Spirit Talker smartphone app murmured something from behind their seats. Here’s the thing, though….the smartphone was nowhere near the back of the theatre. In fact, the smartphone in question was no less than fifty feet away from their position, and in the opposite direction. Although acoustics can certainly create confusion from time to time, it’s difficult to rationalize how a compressed sound would have traveled from one end of the crumbling auditorium to the other and arrived as a crystal-clear rendition directly behind their heads. Mandy attributes this phenomenon to a something a bit less scientific - a type of entity they know as the “mimic”.
Above: our Spirit Box connected to an output speaker and emitting some downright ghostly words and phrases!
Making our way next into the Dressing Room area, we noticed the Spirit Talker app becoming significantly chattier. We also discovered that whatever spirits may exist within the maze of the old theatre seem to enjoy playing games with lights, as evidenced by our Cat Balls and REM-Pods as well as the touch-activated flashlights that Evan and Mandy deployed at this location. Angelica Karns, who serves as a lead actor and makeup artist at Laurel’s House of Horror, has previously described seeing hollow faces in the reflections created by the mirrors in this area; with the lights off and the haunt music silenced, it wasn’t hard to imagine how terrifying that experience would be! As it was, we could feel a definitive drop in air temperature as we glanced into these same mirrors - and lest you think that our senses were deceiving us, the REM-Pods declared the same with their old, shrill whine.
Above: The mirrors in the Dressing Room at Laurel’s House of Horror would be creepy even in broad daylight!
Our last stop was an area known only as the Town, arguably the most “active” area of the entire haunt. Within the perimeter of the shaped set and the drywall is contained a piece of furniture known to the staff as the Cabinet. This cabinet, as Evan and Mandy described it to us, is believed to be a “portal” - a conduit through which spirits may pass freely from one realm to another. In this case, the cabinet allegedly stood as an open door between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. We were instructed not to close that door, nor to disturb the cabinet in any way, as this might result in some spirits becoming more irritable or to “attach” to us; an experience which we were led to believe may not be pleasant. It was here in the Cabinet Room that Mandy deafened and blinded herself to enter a sensory-deprived state in accordance with the ‘Estes’ method….a time-honored practice of isolating oneself with the sounds coming from the spirit box (or similar EVP device) and simply speaking whatever it is that you hear. It sounds innocent enough, doesn’t it?
Above: Mandy enters a trancelike state through 'the ‘Estes Method’.
Little did we know that this would be the experience that would force us to question everything we believed about spirits, ghosts and the afterlife. Mandy - or whatever might have been speaking through Mandy - began responding to Evan’s words in real time, without seeing him or hearing his prompts or questions. This might have been easily rehearsed, you might say; but it would have been incredibly difficult for Mandy to have known when Evan had spoken without being able to see or hear him through the shroud and the soundproof headphones. Our first truly chilling moment came as Mandy said “watch this” and a moment later, the REM-pods and Cat Balls all began emitting lights and sounds simultaneously. Our second and most terrifying moment came when Evan decided that it was time to pull Mandy out from under the shroud, and the “visitor” threw a fit; telling Evan that he could ‘go to hell’ and snapping her head unnaturally in the direction of where she couldn’t have known he’d be standing - but somehow did. There are techniques, components and approaches in the world of the paranormal that can be easily debunked, but this occurrence wasn’t one of them. To this day, we can’t explain this particular experience away; and it unsettled us so that we could only commit to fifteen minutes alone by ourselves in the Casino area. After we survived our ‘private’ experience, we were blessed by Mandy’s cleansing ritual and piled into the car to head home.
So, do we believe that Laurel’s House of Horror is haunted - do we believe that ghosts, spirits and entities beyond our understanding are real? I think we can definitely say that there is no known explanation for some of the things that we saw and experienced that night on our paranormal tour. Perhaps one day we will have a rational answer for one or two of the unanswered questions that we left with that night. Having said that, we also believe that what we know and understand is but a fraction of what there is to know and understand. Who is to say that what we experienced wasn’t truly paranormal after all? After all, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Check out our vlog below for our complete, genuine and unaltered paranormal experience just as it was captured on January 27th, 2024 - and steel yourself for the spooks that are to come.
