By Jarrod Barry
For Charleston Gazette-Mail
Ghosts and gore are coming to the Woolworth Building in downtown Charleston this Halloween season, offering brave souls the chance to test their mettle against monsters, murderers and more than a few mutilated bodies.
That’s thanks to the new Capitol Horror Haunted House, set to open Friday. Tonya Perry, the spook show’s owner and creator, also runs Tickers and Timbers, the escape room and ax-throwing venue across the street. She sees the haunted house as an extension of what she wants to do at her main shop — offering families in town a fun, exciting way to spend time together.
It was in that spirit that Perry tried to add as much variety as possible to the design.
“I think I’m scratching a lot of people’s itch with a lot of different things,” Perry said.
It should take visitors about 30 minutes to creep through the house, although some scaredy-cats might take longer. Along the way, they’ll pass through a bloody hospital ward, a foggy graveyard and an offal-filled dining room, all brought to life with props, animatronics, audio-visual projections and live actors leaping from the shadows. Scream seekers can expect classic Halloween haunts like skeletons and witches, as well as some famous Hollywood fiends. One part even nods to West Virginia’s local folklore, with a possible cameo by a certain cryptid creature.
“Everyone has their own thought of what’s scary,” Perry said. “I think you need to combine that in some way that makes sense in the entire space.”
The building’s haunted history only adds to the atmosphere. In 1949, a fire broke out in the basement, and while city firefighters worked to contain it, the first floor collapsed, burying many of them alive. By the time the flames were extinguished, seven firefighters had died. Some say the building is still haunted by their spirits.
“Who builds a haunted house in a haunted house?” Perry said. “I do, apparently.”
‘I love horror and I love Halloween’
Building this house of horrors is a creative outlet for Perry, something she said can be a welcome relief from the typical grind of business ownership. Her experience designing the escape rooms at Tickers and Timbers helped as she was crafting the space, and she planned each part out as a scene, creating a flow that takes visitors through a kind of story with a beginning, middle and end.
The work hasn’t been easy, though. Transforming the roughly 7,000-square-foot space into a macabre maze in just six weeks has been an enormous undertaking, and Perry and her niece, Layla Martin, have dedicated nearly 100 hours per week to pull it off. The two of them, with the help of a construction-worker friend, double-handedly designed the scenes, assembled the rooms, built the animatronics and constructed many of the monsters themselves.
With just a few days before opening, Martin was busy painting gruesome masks for the actors. Like her aunt, Martin considers herself an artistic type, and despite the 12-plus-hour days, this haunted house is a chance for her to put her energies to work. For inspiration, she turns to some of her favorite horror films, like 2013’s “The Conjuring” and “The Nun,” released in 2018.
“You definitely gotta have an imagination,” she said. “I love horror and I love Halloween, so it’s kind of my thing.”
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