Slaughter House (Reno Fright Fest)

For 14 straight Octobers, the Slaughter House was Reno Halloween. It was the flagship of Reno Fright Fest, founded in 2006 by Eli Kerr, a professional magician who had worked Northern Nevada stages since the early nineties. The operation was a family affair: his sister Katie ran nightly production, his wife Heather ran the books, and a core crew of makeup and effects artists stayed with it from the first season to the last.

A haunt that never stopped moving

The Slaughter House’s venue history reads like a tour of Reno itself. It debuted in 2006 at the Silver Legacy’s downtown pavilion as “Reno’s Only Haunted House,” spent time at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, then settled inside Meadowood Mall from 2009 to 2012, where it billed itself as Northern Nevada’s largest ever indoor haunted house. In 2013 it went underground, literally, into 18,000 square feet beneath the Rise Nightclub at 2nd and Sierra. In 2014 it found its final and most famous home: the Aces ballpark, later Greater Nevada Field.

At the stadium, the operation hit a scale no Reno haunt had touched: three levels of the ballpark, 40 to 50 actors a night, roughly 150 seasonal staff, and eight semi-trucks of sets moving in every fall. The Terror Train ran a ten-minute ride through the stadium’s guts, upgraded with zombie laser tag for 2019. A cut of the proceeds went to the Washoe County School District’s Children in Transition program.

The quiet ending

The 2019 season was billed as the fourteenth straight year. Nobody knew it was the last. COVID erased the 2020 season, and Reno Fright Fest simply never came back: no farewell announcement, no final show. The website still advertises “The 2019 Slaughter House” to this day, frozen mid-sentence, and Google eventually stamped the listing permanently closed.

Its “largest haunt in Northern Nevada” title sat vacant until Dark Prison claimed it inside an actual state prison. If you worked a Slaughter House season, we want your stories.