Published: September 28, 2009 12:08 am      

Green Spring spookier than ever

Group’s annual Halloween haunted house features plenty of eerie additions

GREEN SPRING, W.Va. — After you have paid $8 to walk through The House of the Setting Sun, Home for the Criminally Insane as well as The Haunted Barn, kick in another $5 and you can take The Last Ride.

What’s another five-spot. After all, it is the last ride you will ever take.

Tucked in a corner of a 95-acre field at Green Spring, The House of the Setting Sun has made it through a lightning-caused fire, a cold shoulder from Extreme Makeover and a year without a home to come back bigger and better than ever, according to Saundra Stinnette, the longtime director of the eerie event that raises money for the communities of Springfield and Green Spring.

“We have had to raise the prices slightly from previous years, but we have so much more than we did before,” Stinnett said Sunday, surrounded by eager young workers from the area who have volunteered their services.

The house will be open Oct. 2, 3, 9, 10, 16-18, 23-25 and 29-31 from 7:30 to 11 p.m. Get to Green Spring and follow the signs.

The official name of the charitable effort is Community Involvement for Kids.

“Every high school senior who has put in 100 hours of work helping us gets a $500 scholarship for college,” Stinnette said. “We help the two communities pay their street light bills. We have purchased playground equipment including basketball equipment.”

There are a number of adjectives that describe a walk through the house. Morbid, dark, startling.

“You won’t find anything satanic,” Stinnette said. “That’s not what this is all about.”

Upon entering the house, the visitor is greeted by members of the hospital staff and then enters a room with nine doors. Only one of the doors leads away. The others lead to elevated heartbeats.

“Mommy put me in the closet and won’t let me out,” said a young woman behind door number (not to be revealed).

You will go through the Meat Locker, the Jail and even the Laundry where underwear left by visitors who became a little too startled is being washed.

Stinnette said the former haunted house, the one that became kindling after the lightning strike, would attract about 5,500 paying customers. In 2008, when the scare scene moved to a wooded area, the visitation dropped off a bit.

“I’m thinking we could get 10,000 people come through this year with all the things we are offering,” Stinnette said.

A little more than a year ago, the group applied to “Extreme Makeover,” the television show that pays for construction of new homes.

“Our situation is so unique and they told us we had a good chance to be chosen, but we haven’t heard a word back from them,” Stinnette said. “That’s OK. We applied again and will keep applying. We have an annual mortgage payment of $10,000 and we maxed a credit card to get things done this year so we are hoping for a great turnout. We appreciate all the donations we have received.”

The Haunted Barn is a project of the Baltimore Pike Volunteer Fire Department. “They used to have their own, but decided to join in with us,” Stinnette said.

Although there is a lot of fake blood throughout the tour, volunteer Matthew Ahern said some of the blood and sweat is real, coming from young volunteers who learned on the job how to use hammers and saws. David Fields holds out his hands showing the nicks and cuts of such effort.

Some of the money raised from the haven of horrors will be used to take the area’s young people on field trips.

“We’ve been to Idlewild Park and this year we will go to the Smithsonian Institute,” Stinnette said.

Best advice to first-time visitors. As you walk through the Vortex Tunnel, use the handrails.

Contact Michael A. Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.