When we decided to go to Ghoul Mansion in Sharon, Pa., I was apprehensive. I'm not exactly a fan of scary things and I'd never been to a haunted house before. I wasn't sure what to expect and I thought I was going to be too scared. It turned out that I actually could handle it and in the end, I had a lot of fun.
My group consisted of Taylor Ainsley, Shell Collins and Allie Vugrincic. The other group was Lauren Gump, Katie and Anna Lacy and Guy Vogrin. We formed a train with Shell in the front. She probably regrets being the leader in the first house because she ran into quite a few walls as we were walking in the darkness.
We had trouble finding our way the whole time. We almost went out an exit door but a kind monster told us that we were going the wrong way. We were particularly tripped up in the maze portion of the house because the monsters telling us where to go kept lying to us. At one point, we reached a fork in the maze and one monster yelled "Right!" while the other screamed "Left!" We finally went right but that turned out to be a dead end.
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Page One staffer Lauren Gump with a clown from Ghoul Mansion in Sharon, Pa.
"You don't know where you're going, and you don't know what will happen next," Lauren said.
In pitch black rooms filled with fog, it was hard to see anything so there were people popping up left and right when you weren't expecting it. Some seemed to come out of thin air, but we didn't let it faze us for the most part. We continually cracked sarcastic comments. We told the monsters that we liked their makeup and that someone should turn the lights on. Whenever someone was on the floor we would tell them to get up and when they told us to go faster we told them that we physically couldn't run. There was one guy that told us that we smelled delicious and that he hadn't had any lunch. We quickly replied with, "You should probably start eating lunch. Eating three meals a day is healthy."
The second house was even better than the first. It was called the "CarnEvil Fear" and it was in 3D. We weren't sure what they meant by 3D but we soon found out. The walls were painted with neon 3D paint and we were given 3D glasses. This was my favorite part because it looked so amazing.
"I thought it was really cool that they had two haunted houses. The second one was especially cool because it was in 3D," said Vugrincic.
There were windows in the walls where people would pull down a board and scare us so Collins and I made a game out of finding all the places they were going to pop out of. There was also a room that we were led into with two monsters and we could not find our way out. It took us a while, but we eventually got out.
The coolest part of the whole house was definitely the spinning bridge optical allusion. The neon paint-splattered tunnel surrounding the bridge was spinning around the bridge so that when you were walking across, it felt as if the bridge was spinning and that you were walking upside down. We were all so amazed by it that the owner, Jim Bugos, took us back into the house to see it one more time.
Ghoul Mansion was a great haunted house and I highly recommend it to people who are scary-cats like me and those who enjoy being scared alike.