STORY TIME!
I think they're called Hell Houses in my part of the country. Anyway... This is when I lived in Tulsa. There's a megachurch there called GUTS Church (takes guts to love Jesus), and they put on a hell house every year, and it's big. It's like a regular haunted house trying to scare you but with religious messages - gays burning in hell room, abortion room, drunk driving, etc. So the last room was the largest with about two dozen kids in it, and my group gets herded in (I don't know anyone in my group). It's a rave in Hell. Dark, spooky, strobes, electronic music that gets lowered to the background as the recorded, "You need to come to Jesus," message gets played over speakers. A light turns on in a hallway that is connected to the room. At the end, is a man in a tan suit. Lights off. Lights on. Man has moved further up the hall. Lights off. Lights on. The man is now right at the entrance to the room we're in, and... he morphs into Satan.
"OH, MY GOD! YOU'RE DOING THE PEPPER'S GHOST ILLUSION! THAT IS FANTASTIC! I MEAN SERIOUSLY!" I'm an amateur magician, and I'm just geeking out, and everybody in the room (my group, the ravers, even Satan has his head tilted quizzically) has stopped and is looking at me as I kind of explain Pepper's Ghost, and after about a minute where I'm talking over the message, someone in charge comes over and asks me to leave the room early.
So I'm led out to like the foyer of the building with glass doors leading outside where a huge tent has been set up so that once you do leave the building, you're under the tent. I wait for the rest of my group because I know there are going to be church members waiting to proselytize, and I didn't want to get swarmed. I walk out with them. One teenage girl has freaked out and is crying, and about six members surround her to "comfort" her. As I walk by, I catch two of them looking at each other, smirking, as if to say, "We got one." This young hipster and his girlfriend come up to me, and before they start, I ask them, "Can you look me in the eye and honestly tell me that Jesus would approve of this method to win souls?" Literally, they could not. They stared at their feet and said, "No, sir." I replied, "You might want to reconsider being a part of it then," and walked off. Got a hot dog at their concession stand. Then got another - whatever else I could say about them, they had damn good hot dogs. And they did a great Pepper's Ghost.
Whenever anyone talks about Hell Houses, I have two resources for them. First is a series of nine comics - you don't need to know the characters. The only main one is the old man.
https://somethingpositive.net/comic/a-haunting-we-will-go/
TlalocW
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