Haunted House of Horror (Ormsby House)

Local haunters remembered a haunted house at the Ormsby House somewhere in the mid-nineties. The newspaper record finds it a few years later, and bigger than anyone told us: the Haunted House of Horror, staged inside Carson City’s most famous casino hotel in 1998 and 1999.

The first run lasted eight days and raised $35,000 for area charities, with lines reported up to three hours. The hotel’s marketing chief, Mike Hyams, told the Nevada Appeal it was named the number-one haunted attraction in Nevada in a Haunted Attraction Magazine poll. Planning for the sequel started two weeks after closing night.

Haunted House of Horror II, “bigger, longer and uncut for the millennium,” filled 12,000 square feet in 1999: 33 rooms on the adult side, nine kid-friendly rooms with Winnie the Pooh scenes on the other, 140 employees, and double the nightly performances. Hyams’ pitch to the paper still holds up as haunt marketing: “The adult side is going to make you wish you’d never set foot in the place.”

The producer was Hyams’ own New Century Entertainment Group, working under general manager Bob Cashell during the hotel’s receivership years. The same company ran Frightmares at the Reno Hilton in fall 1999, which means one producer briefly operated casino haunts in two counties, and both vanished within a year.

Whether a third edition ran in October 2000 is unknown; the Ormsby House closed for renovation that October 30 and famously never reopened. The building has now sat dormant for 25 years, which the haunters among us consider a waste of a perfectly haunted hotel.

One gap remains: the years between the hotel’s 1995 reopening and the 1998 haunt. If a smaller haunt ran in those shaky Silverton years, it lives only on microfilm and in memories. Got either?