Ocean
City, MD in the 70’ and early to mid 80’s was really something else. It was a
great beach to vacation at as a kid. Part of the appeal was the amusements. On
the pier you had shops, food, roller coasters,
games and then there was, Morbid Manor!
It was a real, 2 ½-story Victorian
Haunted House that first opened in 1975. It was decked out with skeletons and monsters and even had a crashed plane on one side! Eerie organ
music would lure you towards the house and up to the front doors, where a creepy
looking host would usher you in to your doom. The manor was designed by the
great Fred Mahana who was responsible for many similar attractions along the northern
east coast. (http://www.fredmahana.com/EarlyYears.htm)
This wasn’t your typical Haunted House, which for the time usually meant sitting in
a cart and riding along a rail through various scenes. Morbid Manor actually
was a walk through Haunted attraction that used actors to scare guests as they made
their way through dark corridors, up creaking stair cases and down into
foreboding dungeons.
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Guess I knew a good thing when I saw it! I remember bits and pieces of that first visit like sitting in a room next to my mom as a guy dressed in black robes came out and talked to the crowd. Then the crowd of people was split into groups to go through the Manor. I remember hugging my mom’s leg and a guy dressed as Frankenstein talking to me and trying not to be scary. But the one room I remember most was, the Hallway.
The
group moved into a room with a long corridor painted all white with checker
pattern on the floor. A strobe light effect disoriented everyone. Then from the
other end came a hideous looking figure. Her hair was horribly messy, her eyes
were dark and hollow and she wore white. She moved slowly towards.
The movements she made looked jerky and quick. The strobe created this eerie
effect as she crawled down that hallway, again SLOW. The group was terrified,
screaming and huddled up in the corner of the back wall. At the last moment, just
as the creature was about to get to all of us, another door opened and we escaped. It
was one of the scariest things I’ve seen to this day in a haunted house. I don’t
know why this technique is not implemented more. I guess in today’s world "slow" just will not work.
Morbid Manor was one of the most popular attractions
on Ocean City's amusement pier for 20 year s until 1995, when sadly it burned to
the ground in a winter fire. That beautiful Victorian facade would never
dot the skyline of the pier again. There have been new Haunted Houses since
then, but none of them could ever compare to the original. It was one of the
moments in time that “you had to be there.”
I mentioned at the beginning of this post this is my Holy Grail of Haunted Houses. The reasons start with; it was scary and fun at the same time. It had great art direction and a theme. It's actors were good at scaring you. When there was a section without an actor you were still scared of what was to come. It had multiple floors! You would take a stair case up and around a corner into new areas or descend down into a crypt. It was claustrophobic at times and pitch black in other parts. The sounds were classic. The music was reminiscent of the Haunted Mansion but with more edge. They played around with the types of scares like the slow moving creature in strobe vs just a guy jumping out at you. And the facade was a full 360 Victorian Manor! It really doesn't get better than that!
I loved Morbid Manor and still miss it to this day, but it’s a fond memory of my childhood and family and that can never be burned to the ground.
I mentioned at the beginning of this post this is my Holy Grail of Haunted Houses. The reasons start with; it was scary and fun at the same time. It had great art direction and a theme. It's actors were good at scaring you. When there was a section without an actor you were still scared of what was to come. It had multiple floors! You would take a stair case up and around a corner into new areas or descend down into a crypt. It was claustrophobic at times and pitch black in other parts. The sounds were classic. The music was reminiscent of the Haunted Mansion but with more edge. They played around with the types of scares like the slow moving creature in strobe vs just a guy jumping out at you. And the facade was a full 360 Victorian Manor! It really doesn't get better than that!
I loved Morbid Manor and still miss it to this day, but it’s a fond memory of my childhood and family and that can never be burned to the ground.
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| "Morbid Manor - Ocean City, Maryland" by Paul McGehee |
Tonight's movie is The Possession
'The Holy Grail of Haunted Houses' indeed, at least in our neck of the boards. I loved that place. But you forgot to mention the intro rm where guy I think would conduct mock seance in circular rm which would start spinning & your chair would rise & the cloaked speakers head lower & get deeper. Then there was the guy w/ chainsaw at end of tour which scared the #!* outta me but the intro part was best/awesome/thx for posting pics. Russ
ReplyDeleteI should have mentioned that Russ. That was certainly one of the most unique aspects of the house. I still to this day have never seen anything like it.
DeleteI knew a few of the originals that worked there when it opened..as a matter of fact I still talk to one of them regularly...he loved working there as much as people loved coming. Every so often I would get to hide in the forest part and jump out and scare people..I was 15 and a local and loved every minute of it!!
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DeleteI would love to get more photos of the house inside and out. The photos in this post are pulled from the web. I haven't been able to find any in my mom's photos. So I don't know if she ever took any.
DeleteWhen I was a kid in the 80s, my younger brother and I entered the Manor foolishly, and it scared me to death. My little brother ended up protecting me while I clung to him and cried. He was yelling, "Fuck you! Leave my brother alone!" He had to have been six. He still tells that story. I recall a dark hallway where loud noises and bright lights would momentarily flash on to illuminate some ghastly scene; I even remember things lighting up in glass panels in the floor, though I could be embellishing the memory. A fond piece of my childhood.
ReplyDeleteI remember the glass floor panels! It was a great Haunted House. A classic! Thanks for the comment.
DeleteMy memories of this are pretty foggy, but I definitely do remember how the haunted mansion, hazily visible down at the end of the beach, even when we were pretty far north of it, was deeply creepy to me as a little kid. I never went in; presumably my parents didn't want to deal with soiled pants on their watch. It feels like a HUGE hole in my life experience repertoire - we used to go to O.C. in the late 70s and early 80s, but for whatever reason my parents started doing other vacations when I was 9 (1984), so I never really got a good look at the mansion as an older kid.
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine's family who I met as a teenager had a little beach place outside of Rehoboth, and in my late teens/early 20s spent a lot of time there. I don't know why we never drove down to O.C., but we never did. On the other hand, though, the ride-through haunted house on the Rehoboth boardwalk is a masterpiece of a different sort. I try to get down that way once every couple years at least, and ride it as many times as I can manage.
I didn't know there was a Dark Ride at Rehoboth. Growing up it was always OC for my family so I never went elsewhere. The House at the OC Boardwalk though was a masterpiece. Granted my nostalgic mind could be making it 100 times better than it was, but I have compared every single haunt to it since I was a kid and nothing has come close for me at least. Thanks for the comment!
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