The Boomtown Haunted House

In the mid-nineties, Boomtown in Verdi was the family stop on I-80, and its own corporate filings from the era brag about why: a 35,000-square-foot family entertainment center with a motion theater, an indoor nine-hole western mini golf course, an antique carousel, and a replica 1800s Ferris wheel, billed as the only lineup of its kind in Northern Nevada. Around 1994, local memory adds a haunted house to that list, and one detail above all: an electric chair effect from Distortions Unlimited, the legendary Colorado prop shop.

The timing checks out beautifully. Distortions released its animatronic electric chair in 1994 and sold 200 of them in the first year, the effect that founder Ed Edmunds credits with introducing dark, violent animatronics to the haunt industry. A Boomtown chair in fall 1994 would make the casino one of the prop’s first-wave buyers in the country.

The haunt itself still lives just past the edge of the searchable record: no ad, no listing, no archived page has surfaced yet, which is normal for pre-internet haunts. The record that would prove it sits in Reno Gazette-Journal microfilm from October 1994, and possibly in Distortions’ own archival customer footage.

Boomtown’s fun-center era is one of the most nostalgized things in Reno memory, and its haunted October deserves a place in that story. If you rode I-80 to Verdi for a scare in the nineties, or you kept a photo, tell us what you remember.