SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- For a fourth consecutive year, the San Narciso County Chamber of Commerce will host the community’s annual Haunted House Spooktacular, which opens Friday at 6:00 p.m. in the Lake Inverarity Social Hall. In years past, the event has drawn more police and paramedics than Halloween thrill-seekers. The 2013 Spooktacular was shuttered after three short hours of operation. Problems arose when parents failed to exercise caution by bringing along children under the age of 12. The theme for last season’s ghastly tour was “Death Panel: American Nightmares,” a politically charged horror show that envisioned a chilling apocalypse of socialism and forced euthanasia unleashed by a mysterious Kenyan serving as a U.S. president. Undaunted, the Chamber of Commerce will push forward this week with a new attraction that the local Tea Party chapter has deemed the scariest, most prophetic nightmare any conservative who cherishes family values, Jesus, patriotism and legal citizenship status will experience this All Hallow’s Eve.

More Terrifying than Ever, Enhanced Warnings Issued

Signs posted around the county during the 2013 Spooktacular by event organizer Francis Baldhamer had warned: “If you can’t afford to have your pants scared off, don’t wear any!” While only a few inappropriate teens took Baldhamer at his word, officials agreed that the cautionary messages were vague and insufficient.

Bennington Vale is one of the nation’s most conservative cities, and though Baldhamer had counted on some watery eyes and unsettled nerves, he didn’t expect soiled clothes, seizures, heart attacks and five suicide attempts -- all over the course of three hours.

“This Halloween, it’s going to be a lot more frightening,” he cautioned. “Despite last year’s mess, we’re not holding back. We want folks to be scared, now more than ever before. They should be petrified of the horrors liberals are visiting on this great land. But we don’t want to mislead them about the awful creatures that will stalk them inside the attraction. Our job, after all, is to inform and educate, not just entertain.”

To avoid legal confrontations over “terror-induced, customer-produced biohazards” and medical bills, the Chamber of Commerce has saturated every city in San Narciso County with more detailed advisories that include comprehensive descriptions of each scene in the attraction (with a floor plan) and strict admission policies. For example, guests will be required to sign waivers indemnifying the event organizers. They must also submit to ID checks at the door, “just like they do at our polling places; so residents should be familiar with the drill,” Baldhamer added. A copy of all rules, related documents and certificates of compliance are available at City Hall.

Spooktacular Haunted House Walkthrough: WARNING, SPOILERS AHEAD

For over four weeks, volunteers and construction crews have been transforming the iconic Inverarity Social Hall into a terrible chamber of horrors.

Guests begin their descent into the dark catacombs of human depravity by entering the Gothic anteroom of an ornate but moldering Victorian parlor. There, they’ll discover walls lined with portraits of some of the nation’s grimmest personalities. Hanging among this rogue’s gallery are Lizzy Borden, Janet Reno, Fidel Castro (during his time as an American college student), Jimmy Carter, Ebola-stricken hobos lined up for welfare checks, Harvey Milk, Occupy Wall Street protesters, IRS staffers, environmentalists, a zombie Cesar Chavez urging hordes of undead immigrants across the borders, and Barack Obama sporting what appears to be a Charlie Chaplin mustache.

A grotesque, doughy and drooling being, like a lobotomized walrus, crouches at the foot of the president’s portrait, wearing a rainbow-colored dog collar and satin tether. Closer inspection reveals the monster to be the White House’s unqualified and inexperienced new Ebola “czar,” Ron Klain -- who is to health what Mike Brown was to emergency management. The gruesome master-and-servant pair are flanked by the murky phantoms of Ebola-stricken children -- covered in boils, blood seeping from their pores -- who moan, “We needed a doctor, not a bureaucrat.”

“Do you hear that music?” Baldhamer asks as we enter the next chamber. It sounds like 60’s folk rock.

“In a way, it is,” he tells us. “It’s Charles Manson singing ‘Look at Your Game Girl’ and ‘The Hallways of Always.’” More than eerie, we find the soundtrack unsettling for both its decent production value and listenability.

Baldhamer leads us down a series of corridors and into mysterious rooms filled with disturbing scenes of damnation, mischievous spooks and night terrors.

There’s the Fallen Pedestal room, populated by crack-addled, unemployed financiers who are begging for change or drugs. All the while, filthy Indian laborers pick the cob-webbed wallets of these poor, unfortunate, once mighty souls for a bank-breaking $2.00 per-hour salary instead of the $1.21 hourly wage they deserve. The destitute bankers plead with equally emaciated and impoverished doctors for help, but the hobbled medical professionals can’t afford to treat them because of Obamacare’s exorbitant rate hikes. “If Dante were alive today,” Baldhamer muses, “this could very well be the tenth ring of Hell.”

There are attics bursting with hysterical female professionals who are demanding equal pay, sadistic lesbians who are torturing benevolent men until they give up their control over women’s reproductive rights, and an alleged rape victim forcing a nun to administer an abortion. One hall presents us with a gauntlet of homeless people -- armed with bottles of Windex and dirty paper towels -- through which we must run.

As we turn one ominous corner after another, we’re assaulted by gruesome tax agents trying to grab our billfolds and over-sized, bloodsucking leeches rushing out of unemployment offices. Brown anchor babies reach up from the murky depths of rivers to grab the legs of hard-working middle-class taxpayers and drag them under the greasy waves to their doom.

Beyond this door lurk new horrors still. No respite is accorded us from this charnel carnival of chaos.

The next room appears to be a polling place, filled with overstuffed voting booths. Dark-skinned hoodlums with no proof of identification or citizenship pile in to vote for demonic political candidates -- sickly grave-robbers who boast of their agendas to destroy the American way of life. A desperate group of Caucasian voters fights valiantly to gain access to a ballot. But each member, before our eyes, is swarmed and eaten alive.

The final room, however, is truly the most hair-raising for members of this extreme right-wing community.

“We agree it’s a bit much,” Baldhamer confesses. “Perhaps too real, too horrible. But we need to show what decent people are up against.”

We cross the threshold into an impenetrable darkness, our hearts pounding in our chests. The attack is immediate and enveloping. Within moments, strobe lights spring to life, loud disco music comes blaring from hidden speakers, and we’re overrun by a seemingly endless cavalcade of Gay Pride Parade participants, bursting through representations of various U.S. states from a giant map covering the eastern wall of the room. As we watch, petrified, more states erupt in an orgy of gay marriages. The garish costumes, the simpering taunts, the exposed flesh and confusing androgyny of these monsters banishes all sensibility from our minds.

But even after our narrow escape, fresh torments await us in a satanic chapel where spectral ushers seat us in eroding pews, draped in rotten meat and thorns. A mannish woman in a smart business suit strides down the aisle, followed by a group of men in shackles. She approaches the prisoners in turn, scrutinizes them briefly and makes hasty, uninformed decisions about their health care. Some are pulled away to undergo crude street vasectomies. Others are forced to impregnate drugged relatives and sire their deformed offspring. The elderly and the infirm are made to dig their own graves, while Obama firing squads wait patiently, guns at the ready.

Then, from behind the altar, an Islamic cleric emerges from the shadows -- covered in bloody dollar bills -- and mounts the lectern. Two men in purple and pink tuxedos approach. There, we are forced to witness the nuptials of an interracial gay marriage, followed by the newly wed couple’s adoption of an anchor baby wearing a onesie with the slogan “Baqiya Baby: Islamic State Will Stay.”

“It’s chilling, isn’t it, to think that Cuba Gooding Jr.’s 20-year marriage ended so abruptly because people like this destroyed the institution?” Baldhamer laments.

Although many residents of San Narciso County say they will not attend the event due to medical conditions or concerns about developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for three gut-wrenching, nail-biting hours, no event in California will rival the terror sure to haunt guests for many Halloweens to come.

“With elections coming just a few days after, we’re really hoping the Spooktacular scares conservative voters into making the most of their time at the ballot box,” Baldhamer said. “Otherwise, every ghoulish and godforsaken vision in this haunted house could become our everyday reality -- a literal Hell on Earth.”

For hours of operation and additional details about the event, please check the Community Events Calendar.

2014. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See disclaimers.