McKamey’s Manor: How Far Can A Haunted House Go?
Typically, a haunted house includes a 15 to 20 minute walk through a couple of men who chase, poke, and tease their visitors with fake knives, chainsaws, and costumes, but at Russ McKamey’s McKamey Manor located in Tennessee and Alabama, the experience is like no other. Their goal is to “test every ounce of you physically and psychologically” by force-feeding its participants rotten food, confining you with spiders and snakes, blindfolding, forced into coffins, drenched in fake blood, gagged, taunting, slapping, crawling through mud, and waterboarded. McKamey’s manor is no easy task, in fact no one has made it through the 10-hour experience for the $20,000 prize. If all of that seems appealing, you can join the waiting list of 27,000 people.
According to the McKamey’s Manor website, this isn’t the typical Haunted House since the participants will be living their own horror movie. For a 10-hour night of torture, McKamey’s Manor requires participants to be 21 or older, sign a 40 page waiver, a Facebook screening, a doctor’s note, proof of a recent physical, to pass a drug test, to be filmed and photographed the entire time, and a bag of dog food for entrance. The waiver includes clauses such as (No. 20), “participant agrees there is no quitting unless serious physical or psychological injury is present” and (No. 25), “participant fully understands that at many times they will be in a panic state of anxiety, in which they feel that they will drown and they may die.”
Although many are patiently waiting to have their own opportunity at the haunted house, others have started Facebook petitions to get rid of the attraction. Many of the willing, tortured “victims” have gone to social media to share their horrific experience. However, Russ McKamey claims he has “footage of everything” and although he knows that it’s aggressive and some will come out of it with bruises and scars, “those people weren’t injured like they say they were.” In defense, McKamey claims that “you can die at Disneyland, too.”
Laura Brotherton, a 2016 participant, left McKamey Manor with more than cuts and bruises. After leaving the Manor and heading to a hotel for a shower, Brotherton’s adrenaline began to fade and she started to feel immense pain all over her body. She drove herself to a nearby hospital where she documented her injuries. In one picture, she is in a neck brace. There appears to be “scrapes on her cheeks and a lump on her forehead” and scrapes around her mouth similarly to Heath Ledger’s Joker. Her torso is bruised and a scar from a previous surgery has reopened when her knee-pads were cut off and she was forced to crawl on the ground. Her x-rays “showed a hairline fracture in her foot” and the inside of her mouth was torn and scratched. When asked how she was injured this badly, she refused to respond since she signed McKamey’s waiver and he threatened to sue.
If any of this spiked your interest, you can watch some of the visitors of McKamey Manor in Netflix’s Hauthers documentary and in David Farrier’s Netflix series Dark Tourist.