Category: Haunted House Stories

Thrillvania Haunted House Park Co-Creator and Park Manager Jeff Gilbreath, working at the beloved thrill park is more than just a job, it’s an addiction. “We’re ready for this next season to get started,” he says. “I’m having withdrawals. I’ve got to get my fix.”

Jeff has been living with his obsession for over two decades now. Starting out as an actor at the renowned haunt in 1991, Jeff immediately became infected with “haunted house fever,” and knew immediately that he would never want to work anywhere else.

After moving up the ladder to become first a costume supervisor, then technical manager and finally operations manager, Jeff was one of the core family of seasoned professionals who stepped up to the plate in order to keep the show running after the untimely death of the attraction’s much revered founder, Lance Pope.

“It’s hard to fill Lance’s shoes. We try. He sure was a master.”

It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes an extended dysfunctional family to run a haunt as large and extensive as Thrillvania Haunted House Park , with five different attractions on nearly 50 acres of desolate Texas scrub land. Jeff, along with Park Manager Mike Malec and a handful of others closed ranks after Lance’s death and pitched in to help his parents keep the attraction alive, with welcome advice and assistance from Cutting Edge Haunted House owner Todd James, an old friend and college alumni of Lance’s.

It was difficult at first, but some 11 years later Thrillvania continues to grow and thrive, a monument to a dream and a lot of hard work. Jeff compares it to a “family reunion every year that lasts for six weeks.” Although he works on the property during the off season to make repairs and improvements, from December through around May Jeff also does fencing, remodeling and construction work on a nearby ranch. It’s busy work, he says, while he waits for the real fun to resume.

It’s only June now, and the long-time haunt addict known affectionately to some of the crew members as “Uncle Jim” is already getting antsy, in anticipation of getting the family back together for another season of thrills, chills and just plain old fashioned hair-raising excitement. It’s what he lives for.

“To be honest with you, I don’t ever see myself doing anything else. As long as this park stays alive, I’m pretty sure I’ll be here every second. This will be our 27th season; we’re almost to the 30 mark. It’s going to be awesome.”

A quiet, unassuming young woman, Rosz looks just like someone you might see working at Starbucks. As a matter of fact, she does, along with various other side jobs and an on-again, off-again career as a professional artist. Few would guess she is really the mastermind behind the grotesque faces of evil lurking about the Thrillvania Haunted House Park every fall, when closet werewolves, vampires and ghouls come out of the woodwork to scare the wits out of the citizens of Terrell, Texas and beyond.

Drawn inexplicably to the world renowned Texas haunt, Rosz applied for and was awarded a position nearly a dozen years ago, joining the ranks of the late Lance Pope’s “wolfpack,” seemingly normal people who thrill in exploring the darker side of their personalities between mid-September through the end of October. After half a dozen years of skulking in the shadows and terrifying hapless innocents, Rosz’ artistic talents prevailed, and she took over Thrillvania’s makeup department.

Starting around 4:30 in the afternoon on show nights, Rosz helps some two dozen cast members morph from their daytime personas into creatures of the night, bringing out their secret ghouls and inner demons. While there are upwards of 100 total cast members working the haunt, others wear masks or work behind the scenes and do not have need of Rosz’s remarkable talents. Once the gates open, Rosz quickly heads to Haunted Verdun Manor, where she helps out in the role of assistant manager for the rest of the evening.

Once in a while, Rosz still likes to play with the guests. During her days as a cast member, she frequently appeared in a combination werewolf-banana costume.

“It started out as a gag,” she explains. “We had this funky banana costume we got from somewhere, and sometimes I would wear it out on the midway for fun, because people weren’t expecting it. Then one day I combined it with a werewolf costume, and people really got a kick out of it.” And the Were-Nanner was born.

The costume was so bizarre, so twisted and surreal that it quickly became a crowd favorite, and the Were-Nanner was soon a regular fixture on the midway. Sometimes the Were-Nanner even makes a guest appearance, by invitation, at other haunts in the area.

So when you visit Thrillvania this year, keep a sharp eye out for the rare and elusive Were-Nanner; you just never know when or where she might turn up!

The Pernicious Mortimer Thorn
By Zane Grubaugh

Verdun Manor’s sinister caretaker, Mortimer Thorn made a point of being familiar with every square foot of his beloved plantation, and could often be seen hiking about the property with a gnarled old walking stick fashioned from a twisted tree branch. On one of his many outings, he happened upon a colony of oddly mutated vampire bats, which explained the odd cattle carcasses that were found now and again, covered with puncture wounds and drained of every ounce of blood.

Concerned for the bats’ welfare, Mortimer carefully disguised the opening to their underground cave, and made mention of them to no one.

The night the manor burned, Mortimer alone escaped the inferno, running blindly through the property with the shrieks and wails of the baron, his lady and all of their mutated creatures ringing in his ears as the fire seared their bodies and the greedy flames came licking through the roof, sending sparks and cinders out over the countryside.

Taking shelter in an old abandoned church, Mortimer spent many years studying the bats, following them on their night time raids and learning their darkest secrets. During a series of experiments, he learned to extract two highly toxic fluids from his bloodsucking charges; the first was a powerful anesthetic and the second an enzyme known as desmoteplase, which acts as an anticoagulant, to allow the bats to extract their bloody meals more easily.

What he does with these dangerous substances is anybody’s guess.

Mortimer Thorn continues his sinister experiments to this day in that old stone church, protected by overgrown thorny shrubs and surrounded by dangerous swampland feeding into Voodoo Bayou. Only lost stragglers occasionally find their way through a cleverly camouflaged maze of thorny hedges leading up to the old church. The darkness begins here, in Thorn Hall…