McKamey Manor in San Diego has been called the world’s scariest haunted house, where visitors submit themselves to an hours-long, horror-filled interactive nightmare that is ostensibly fun. But the attraction was apparently too much for one California woman, who says she’s been traumatized by her experience.
East County resident Amy Milligan told the San Diego Union-Tribune that she feared for her safety while participating in the scares at McKamey Manor, founded by 56-year-old Russ McKamey at his home in Rancho Peñasquitos.
Visitors to McKamey Manor are slapped around, soaked with water and fake blood, placed in straight jackets and cages and have cockroaches and tarantulas placed on their faces. The experience can reportedly last anywhere from four to eight hours, and because of its highly interactive nature, no visit is ever the same as the last.
(Warning: Disturbing Content)
But Milligan told the Union-Tribune that in her case, the scares went too far. She told the paper that at one point, when she was placed in a closed coffin with cockroaches on her face and tubes emitting an unknown gas, her fear of the attraction turned into an actual fear for her life.
“It clicked in my head, ‘I don’t know these people. It could be any kind of gas; I have no idea,’” Milligan told the paper. “So I was plugging my nose because I was scared, like, ‘I don’t know where I am; I don’t understand this. I thought this was going to be a haunted house.’”
Milligan added that she thought she was “going to die” of drowning after she was placed in a pool of shallow water with a cage on top, where she claims the attraction’s actors held her head under water even after she begged them to stop.
McKamey films each visitor he takes through his attraction and conducts “exit interviews” with them to see how they enjoyed it. In Milligan’s interview (seen below), she said she “never felt” that she was being tortured and said she had done everything of her own “free will.” But the woman told the Union-Tribune she had only said that so that McKamey would keep the videotape of her experience as evidence.
McKamey told Breitbart News that visitors know what they’re getting in to before they attend.
“That’s the problem with the haters, they don’t ever man up and talk to me one on one or confront me, so it’s all just a bunch of stories,” he said. “Amy’s a classic example of someone who begged me for months to get in, and then when she gets in, she can’t handle it.”
Milligan reportedly went to the police about her experience, but did not file a report.
Still, McKamey appears to be handling the increased scrutiny just fine; he told Breitbart News that the Manor currently has a 27,000-person waiting list and is in the process of moving to a bigger and “more extreme” location.
Check out the video of Milligan’s visit below (Warning: Graphic Content):