BY NICHOLAS LUCCIANTONIO
The famous four-storey haunted attraction Erebus is back for the Halloween season.
Located in Pontiac, Michigan, Erebus is one of the scariest haunted houses in the world. What kind of place would lock you in a room and bury you alive? This one can and will.
Zac Terebus has been part of the haunted house scene for as long as he can remember.
“My father, Jim Terebus has been doing haunted houses since 1981. He started in Oakland Mall with a little four-room haunted house, but they didn’t let him make it the way he wanted to, so he left that and made one for a nickel in my grandparent’s backyard which was 10 mobile home trailers for 22 years,” said Terebus. “After selling that in 1998 we bought the building here, cause we needed a permanent establishment.”
The family started Erebus, the haunted attraction, after many years of trial and error with different ways to scare people. Specifically, Jim Terebus and his brother Ed are partners, and created Erebus together. The idea of a four-floor haunted house was created by Jim. It still is today something that makes Erebus extraordinary.
Michigan resident and connoisseur of all things spooky Charles Nagle thought the haunted attraction was nothing less than spectacular.
“It amazed me, the construction of the building was almost perfect for that kind of an attraction. The inside looked rustic, it looked like what I picture a real haunted house to be like,” said Nagle.
The attraction has 250 scare workers every fall and at least 95 a day to terrify anyone willing to take their chance in the haunted house.
There’s something about haunted houses that makes them so popular. In the theme of Halloween especially, it gets people in the spirit of getting scared by monsters and such.
“Once you step into the world of being haunted or scary, people like the reaction where they don’t know what their reaction will be. People feed off that energy,” explained Terebus.
The multi-level feature of the attraction had many haunted house goers left impressed and pleased, including Nagle himself.
“Honestly, it made me feel like I got more for my money. It was a very long attraction to go through and it was really unique how you went up and down multiple times so you really didn’t know what level you were on,” said Nagle. “That way even for people who saw how it looked online or something, it still had them wondering.”
The name Erebus was decided upon because of the similarity to their last name Terebus. They realized it was the right name when they found out it had a meaning. In Greek Mythology it means: “The darkness beneath the earth which the dead must pass through to reach hades.”
