We, me and Moose, arrived at 13 Stories around 8:00 on Friday night. The parking lot was busy, but not full, fooling me into thinking the haunt wasn’t busy. We bought general admission tickets to the main haunt, the Hellavator add on, and the Zombie Apocalypse laser tag feature.
Haha, the joke’s on me. The virtual queuing system means you can buy tickets anytime and get in a virtual line when you’re ready. Even then, the wait wasn’t bad. There were a couple of wandering scare actors keeping the customers on their toes. The guy on stilts was easily spotted, chasing anxious patrons around with a car horn / head light combo. A ‘slider’ was also prowling about.
Now, a word about haunted houses and Covid 19 mitigation. To me, and your mileage may vary, the key elements of a haunt are actor interaction, props, and setting. Actor interaction is strongly affected by the group you are in. My experience is that actors go for the best reactions, which usually come from the younger, clearly already nervous, patrons.
Covid mitigation turns that upside down. Actors are trying to maintain distance. Groups are not formed randomly from the assorted customers waiting in line. Your group is who you come with.
So my son and I were a group of two, an old guy and big guy, ambling through a haunted house. We occasionally caught up to the group in front of us, and the group behind us frequently caught up to us.
13 Stories had several actors stationed to prevent bunching up, holding a group with their act and blocking passage long enough to create some space. I would have loved to hear their lines and respond, but the ambient noise level in 13 stories is intense and most of the time rendered the actors essentially mute.
We encountered about 40 scares, some in fixed scenes and some roaming. The roamers were able to cut through the sets and scare the same group multiple times. Memorable actors were the pair in the ‘kitchen’ scene and the very nimble guy at the entrance to the clown house.
13 Stories uses a lot of animatronic monsters to supplement the actors, so be prepared for roaring creatures of all types to lunge out from hiding. As always, the props and settings range from mild to gross, running the gamut from graveyards to abattoirs.
Zombie Apocalypse The 2020 version of this feature has several updates. Gone are the old M4s, those solidly built replicas whose physical mass probably led to the occasional accident. I know I had a couple close calls in years past. In their place were compact, plastic, lightweight, bullpup style laser tag guns.
The other change was the course is now a loop, so while you have unlimited ammo, you now have a limited time to play as you walk through the course.
The zombies were quite lively and aggressive, and ‘died’ with energetic antics when lit up by the activation of their target necklace. They’d wait a few, then come back for more. Watch your back, they almost always attack from behind or down low to the side.
Hellavator Now I wish I had done this last year so I’d have a good comparison. This is an add on feature that I’m going to guess was meant to be a little more intense than the main haunt. During our visit, there were only 3 or 4 scare actors in the haunt rotating through the scene to scare us about 10 times. The intensity was about the same as the main haunt. Aside from the ‘elevator’ ride, the scenes and settings could have used more work.
13 Stories is a huge space with a lot of open area, and felt a little emptier this year, mostly thanks to the pandemic, I think.
We got to chat for a few minutes with the 13 Stories boss, Allyn Glover. It was nice to meet him after all these years of visiting his work. Everyone at 13 Stories was friendly and helpful, from the ticket window to the gift shop folks, and especially Crystal, the lady directing traffic on the walk up to the line.
Bureau of OverAnalysis 