The Slaughter House Story: 14 Years of Reno's Biggest Haunt

Every city that takes Halloween seriously has one haunt that defines an era. For Reno, that was the Slaughter House, and the story of its fourteen-year run is really the story of how Reno learned to do Halloween at scale.

A magician starts an empire

Eli Kerr had been performing magic on Northern Nevada stages since the early nineties when he founded Fright Fest Productions in 2006. The first Reno Fright Fest opened that fall at the Silver Legacy’s downtown pavilion under a claim that was actually true at the time: “Reno’s Only Haunted House! 13 Nights of Terror.” Proceeds shared with the pediatric ward at what’s now Renown. The operation was family from day one: Kerr’s sister Katie ran nightly production, his wife Heather kept the books, and a core crew of makeup and effects artists stayed for the whole ride.

The wandering years

The Slaughter House never stayed anywhere long, and each move made it bigger.

After a stretch at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, it moved inside Meadowood Mall in 2009 and spent four seasons scaring shoppers a few doors down from the food court, billing itself as Northern Nevada’s largest ever indoor haunted house. If you grew up in Reno and remember a haunted house at the mall, this was it. Nobody misremembers that one.

Then 2013 got weird: the whole operation went underground, literally, into 18,000 square feet beneath the Rise Nightclub at 2nd and Sierra. One season in a basement, and then the final move, the one everyone remembers.

The stadium era

From 2014 through 2019, the Slaughter House took over the Aces ballpark, later renamed Greater Nevada Field. The scale still sounds made up: three levels of a professional baseball stadium, 40 to 50 actors a night, roughly 150 seasonal staff, and eight semi-trucks of sets rolling in every fall. The Terror Train ran a ten-minute ride through the stadium’s interior corridors, and by 2019 it had zombie laser tag bolted on. A cut of proceeds went to the Washoe County School District’s Children in Transition program, which supports homeless students.

For a decade, if you asked anyone in Reno where to get scared in October, the answer was the ballpark.

An ending with no ending

The 2019 season was billed as the fourteenth straight year. It closed on Halloween weekend like every season before it, with every reason to expect a fifteenth.

Then COVID hit, 2020 was impossible for the entire haunt industry, and Reno Fright Fest simply never came back. No farewell post, no final announcement, nothing. The website still advertises “The 2019 Slaughter House” to anyone who stumbles onto it, a flyer for a party that ended years ago. Google eventually marked the listing permanently closed, and the biggest haunt Reno ever had exited without a bow.

What it left behind

The Slaughter House proved Reno would show up, in stadium-sized numbers, for a professionally built scare. Its “largest haunt in Northern Nevada” crown sat unclaimed through the pandemic years until Dark Prison took it in 2025 inside a real state prison, and the audience the Slaughter House trained for fourteen years was still there, 15,000 strong.

If you worked a Slaughter House season, acted in the Terror Train, or have photos from any of its five venues, we want them for the archive. This haunt earned a better ending than silence.