Niagara Falls also has five separate year-round haunted houses because, well, it’s a huge, majestic waterfall. The house with the most tourist acclaim (based on TripAdvisor.com’s user ratings) is Nightmares: Fear Factory, where Canada’s primary export – fear – is rendered from the phantasmagoric dreams of children who saw their parents murdered, sweetened with real Maple syrup and shipped off to Africa. Nightmare’s prolific brochures and advertisements lure in the tourists (myself included) using three gimmicks:

1. A vague back story about a grumpy old coffin maker who used to operate out of Nightmare’s building. Kids made fun of him, and when he tried to shoo them away, somehow a coffin fell on him and he died. Now his ghost haunts the building or something.

2. A Splash Mountain-inspired offer of two mid-attraction keepsake photographs taken during the house’s most terrifying moments.

3. A safe word (“Nightmares”) to shout if and when you want to prematurely back out – an option that, according to the ads, has been taken advantage of by more than 100,000 paying guests.

My experience as it relates to the gimmicks:

1. I still don’t know what this almost-certainly apocryphal tale has to do with anything. The story suggests a cantankerous ghost, bloodied coffins and a vengeful agenda. Also, maybe an America’s Funniest Home Videos tape where the coffin topples over, or a Benny Hill sketch where the guy chases the kids. Nightmares: Fear Factory is a pitch black maze where startling sound effects give way to screaming actors shooting pressurized air at your genitals.

2. The closest thing I experienced to the freak-out visible from space that they portray in the ads was my reaction to Nightmare’s 13.95 CAD admission fee, and even then I just quietly wet my pants while sighing. Granted, in my picture, I was nervously laughing while cowering my way through the maze, holding my girlfriend in front of me like some sort of fright plow. Needless to say, I didn’t pay the extra scratch for the photo. (If you’re that desperate for it, just picture a quivering Shaggy desperately clinging to a stoic Ellen Ripley.)

3. I don’t know. I bugged the guy at the box office to give me more information about the chicken tally, but all he could tell me was that it spanned 26 years of bok-bok-b’gokking wieners. I can’t imagine that many people being inconsolably terrified of a dark hallway that they paid handsomely to grope their way down. The x-factor is drunkenness – the 600,000 gallons of water that drop over Horseshoe Falls every second have nothing on the gross volume of alcohol consumed by college-aged tourists every hour. 90,000 of these so-called chickens were probably just triumphantly declaring their location. “Nightmares! WHOOOO!”

Unrelated Note: If you look at Niagara Falls, Ontario as Canada’s perception of what leisure-seeking Americans value, there’s nothing more telling than the giant sculpture of Frankenstein’s monster eating a hamburger. Seriously, take a look AFTER THE JUMP!

Wednesday: 100% more barrels

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