Terrorized!

It was suspiciously quiet in the hallway of the insane asylum, except for the light tapping of water drops spattering on the dingy, stained floor. I was trying to find a room, but couldn’t see very well, and my paranoia was escalating. An old, bald geezer didn’t even notice my state of confusion as he passed by. Strange, but the sound of his metal walker clacking the floor didn’t intertwine with his footsteps. Where were his legs, I thought to myself. Was he a patient, too? Or the ghost of a patient? Why did I pay to be in this creepy place?

Suddenly a voice said sternly, “Move along!” And as I walked faster with a solid knot in the pit of my stomach, quickly passing rows of faceless nurses and an electroshock room, I turned and wound up in an old morgue. The sign above me read: “Think not of death, but of passing to a better place. Many before have passed through here.”

WHAT: The 13th Gate, the nation’s top-rated haunted house, according to HauntWorld magazine

THE MASTERMIND: Dwayne Sanburn’s Midnight Productions, with 100 actors who’ll terrify you

WHERE: 832 St. Phillip St., near the I-10 bridge and the Pastime

WHEN: Until Oct. 18, 13th Gate is open from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. From Oct. 23 to Nov. 1, it will be open every night from 7 p.m. until the last victim enters.

COST: $20 per person, $15 on family-night Thursdays

LEARN MORE: 389-1313, or midnightproduction.com

“Here’s a guy who’s doing something in the Baton Rouge market on a New York City level. He’s broken all the molds, all the stereotypes,” says HauntWorld magazine’s publisher, Larry Kirchner. “He’s in the top 10 in the country for attendance. That says something for the people of Baton Rouge.”

I bent down and held my knees for a minute, taking deep breaths, trying to control my bladder, when a posse of suburban teenagers pushed into me, shrieking and laughing, “Run!”

I snapped out of it, remembering I was at the 13th Gate, a haunted Baton Rouge icon in the old Steinberg Building downtown on St. Phillip Street.

There are 50 to 60 people a night who can’t make it through, says Dwayne Sanburn, head of Midnight Productions and mastermind of the 13th Gate. “If you get scared in the first room and leave, we did what you paid us to do. Prompt service.”

Dwayne Sanburn has never seen a ghost, but he is the kind of guy who takes notes from his nightmares. “I’m actually quite normal,” he says. Here are some behind-the-scenes tales from the 13th Gate.

– In the beginning of the slaughterhouse set exists a room that is secluded from the rest of the haunted house, and for some reason Sanburn can’t keep actors back there. “One girl was in there for 20 minutes when she just left. She didn’t tell anyone. She just left,” Sanburn says. Actors who’ve worked with 13th Gate through the years say they’ll work in any room except that one.

– When Midnight Productions first moved into the 150-year-old Steinburg Building, they had to dig holes in a couple of places, uncovering several bones. Sanburn brought the fragments to a crime lab to find they were all different sorts of animal bones. The building, originally a brick foundry, later became a slaughterhouse for animals.

– Sanburn and his year-round crew have heard strange sounds, such as the crashing of a chandelier, rattling doors. “It sounded like a guy beating on the door, but when I walked around to the other side, no one was there, and the noise stopped,” Sanburn says.

Sanburn, a former registered nurse who worked in intensive care units, loves Halloween, and in his mind the 13th Gate is never really finished. “But at some point, you have to open your doors.”

More than 60,000 visitors enter the 13th Gate every Halloween season, and many leave so flustered they ditch cell phones, earrings, even shoes. “They get scared, leave and don’t even want it back. It’s quite an intense show,” says Sanburn, who now has a five-gallon bucket of left-behind jewelry collected since he opened The Dungeon 10 years ago at LSU.

It also says a lot for Sanburn and his 13th Gate, voted No. 1 this year by industry insiders at HauntWorld. His crew of crafty carpenters and scenic artists works year-round on updating the sets of the 40,000-square-foot attraction, which operates in a 150-year-old building that once was a slaughterhouse. And Sanburn spends thousands of dollars updating and improving it every year.

“Now it looks like the movies rather than the standard haunted house with spaghetti and eyeballs. All that’s gone,” Sanburn says. “Now we have $50,000 in animatronics, and we must outdo ourselves each year. People expect that.”

The budding film industry in Baton Rouge has only enhanced 13th Gate’s ability to put on what Kirchner calls a “Disney-size” show. This year, about 300 actors and all-around Halloween enthusiasts auditioned for 100 positions in the 13th Gate—and Sanburn tapes each audition, which could make for some hilarious American Idol-style outtakes. No fewer than 11 make-up artists, many who also work on movie sets, prepare the cast nightly for their ghoulish, blood-curdling work.

Technical director Scott Meyer sets the scythe on the animatronics creation “Angel of Death.” The 13th Gate has spent more than $50,000 on animatronics so far. This mechanical grim reaper will greet visitors from the roof of the downtown haunted house.

“I could spend all the money, but it really comes down to the actor in the end,” Sanburn says. “I’m really proud of how they’ve turned out.”

Besides the acting, make-up, animatronics and brilliant set designs, what makes or breaks a haunted house? A fiendish array of terrors: 13th Gate has 13 different theme sections.

People react to fear differently. Some are afraid of certain things, like claustrophobia or low, ambient sounds, Sanburn says. But in the end, even if it’s cliché and overdone, more than half the visitors Sanburn polls at the end of the tour say the chainsaw scared them the most.

His favorite horror flicks

Halloween (1978)

House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

The Exorcist

Fright Night

Day of the Dead (1985)

Hellraiser

The Evil Dead

Saw

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Sleepy Hollow

An American Werewolf in London

The Descent

It really depends, however. Sanburn took advantage of a universal fear of clowns in his swamp scene, inspired by the Stephen King’s It. An old circus closed down, and all the clowns are homeless and eating rats. The faint smell of popcorn and cotton candy drifts through the swamp area—yes, scents are another detail of the 13th Gate.

“Not that it’s necessarily the scariest or most detailed, or the best design or the best anything, but 13th Gate just has all the right elements mixed together,” HauntWorld’s Kirchner says. “That’s what separates them from everything else. It combines all the elements that a good haunted house should have—great scenery, a make-up department, a costume department, special effects and Disney-like details. A lot of haunted houses will have one or several, but not all.”