The Lost Haunts of Reno: Where Did They All Go?

Ask any Reno local over 25 about haunted houses and you’ll get a memory. The one at the ballpark. The one in the mall. The one behind the roller rink. Then ask where those haunts went, and you’ll get a shrug, because nobody ever wrote the endings down.

We spent time in the news archives and the Wayback Machine fixing that. Here’s what actually happened to Reno’s lost haunts, as best the record tells it.

The empire: Slaughter House and Reno Fright Fest (2006 to 2019)

The biggest story in Reno haunt history belongs to a magician. Eli Kerr, a fixture of Northern Nevada stages since the early nineties, founded Reno Fright Fest in 2006 with a haunt at the Silver Legacy’s downtown pavilion billed as “Reno’s Only Haunted House.” His family ran the operation: his sister on production, his wife on the books.

The Slaughter House never stopped moving. It played the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, then spent 2009 through 2012 inside Meadowood Mall, where “Northern Nevada’s largest ever indoor haunted house” scared shoppers a few doors from the food court. In 2013 it ran in 18,000 square feet underneath the Rise Nightclub downtown. In 2014 it moved into the Aces ballpark and became the version everyone remembers: three stadium levels, 40 to 50 actors a night, 150 seasonal staff, eight semi-trucks of sets, and the Terror Train ride running through the building’s guts.

The 2019 season was the fourteenth in a row. Then COVID cancelled 2020, and Reno Fright Fest simply never came back. There was no farewell post. The website still advertises the 2019 show to anyone who visits, like a shop with the lights on and nobody inside.

The kingdom behind the rink: Kingdom of Horrors (~2011 to 2017)

On East 7th Street, next to the Roller Kingdom rink, Kingdom of Horrors ran 26 rooms wrapped in genuinely grim lore: the Kilburn Estate, a swamp manor where a fire killed the lady of the house and the grieving Mr. Kilburn opened a “reform school,” locking his sons in the basement. Twelve dollars got you in. A can of Rockstar got you two dollars off, which might be the most 2013 sentence ever written.

Its ending was the quietest of all. The website froze after 2017, the domain lapsed into spam, and no one ever announced a thing. The Facebook page is still up. If you worked there, we’d genuinely love to hear from you.

The remodel that never ended: Frightmare (through 2014)

Sparks had its own big-box haunt at Victorian Square. Frightmare claimed 100,000 guests entertained and ran four attractions under one roof in its final 2014 season, including a 3D Evil Clown Town and a Zombie Farm House built on a vanished-family backstory. For 2015, its website announced in all caps that it was closed for remodeling and would reopen in 2016.

That notice stayed up, unchanged, for years. The remodel never ended. Nobody knows, publicly at least, who decided it or why.

The castle that refused to die: Grimes Castle (~2006 to 2013)

Carson City’s Grimes Castle was run by Michael Grimes, a man who cheerfully admitted to the Nevada Appeal that he didn’t even like haunted houses. He grew it to two locations anyway, including a kid-friendly maze in a dead department store.

Here’s our favorite fact in this entire archive: when Grimes Castle closed, the Silver Raven crew bought its wood-panel walkthrough walls in 2014. Those panels have been reassembled in a Sparks yard every October since. Reno haunts don’t die so much as get organ-donated.

Update: the casino era surfaces

After this piece first ran, local haunters pointed us at the nineties, and the archives delivered. Carson City’s Ormsby House ran the Haunted House of Horror in 1998 and 1999: 12,000 square feet at its peak, 140 staff, $35,000 raised for charity in its first eight days, and a claimed number-one ranking in Nevada. Its producers simultaneously ran Frightmares at the Reno Hilton, a haunt so forgotten its only trace is one line in a business story. And around 1994, Boomtown in Verdi is remembered for a haunted house with a first-wave Distortions Unlimited electric chair, still unconfirmed on paper and exactly the kind of memory this archive exists to chase.

The ones we couldn’t confirm

Memory is a haunted house of its own. Some things people swear existed left no trace we could find: a haunt at Wild Island, a Halloween event at the old Park Lane Mall, a Jaycees charity haunt from the pre-internet era. The Meadowood Mall haunt was real, but it was the Slaughter House. “Terror in the Corn” is a Colorado attraction; Andelin’s haunt has always been Corn Creepers. And yes, the Grand Sierra really did have a zombie-shooting attraction; that one was Battlefield Live Z, and it was real.

If you have photos, ticket stubs, or first-hand stories from any Reno-area haunt, past or present, send them in. This town’s scare history deserves a record, and we intend to keep it.