WESTLAND, Mich. (AP) — It’s not enough these days for some Halloween enthusiasts to be scared by actors dressed up in spooky getups at makeshift haunted houses: They want the “real” thing.
At a former psychiatric hospital in suburban Detroit and a former funeral home in Toledo, Ohio, visitors can embark on guided paranormal investigations or even set out on their own with rented equipment, such as a handheld electromagnetic field (EMF) meter.
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“Guests that come here on our paranormal tours, they get touched, they get grabbed, handprints on clothing, whistled at,” said Justin Cox, founder of Michighost Paranormal, which leads paranormal investigation tours of the Eloise Asylum attraction’s upper floors, where patients were treated. “Everything that you can imagine has happened here, and we’ve heard it all.”
The facility began as a 19th-century poorhouse and operated under various names as it expanded into a complex with dozens of buildings. By the late 1920s, it was one of the nation’s largest public health facilities.
“In the paranormal field, we believe that trauma leaves energy, which creates hauntings. This place had a lot of tragedy, a lot of trauma, so we believe it’s super haunted,” Cox said.
Family members of patients and others with ties to Eloise have argued against offering for-profit amusement at a site where vulnerable people suffered.
Most of the complex’s buildings were razed in the 1980s, but a five-story, red-brick structure that came to be known as the Kay Beard Building still stands and is home to Eloise Asylum.
It’s there that Cox and his team lead guests on tours of the upper floors, including a room with a bathtub used in hydrotherapy sessions. It’s not uncommon for guests to get in the tub.
And if you "think you can handle the night here, we offer that as well,” Cox said about their overnight stays.
Eloise Asylum haunted attraction’s lead makeup artist and scare actor, Lexi Carter, has gone on the paranormal investigation tour. She said the upper floors feel alive.
Paranormal investigators use spirit boxes to scan radio frequencies for sounds they believe could be messages from spirits. They also use EMF readers to measure changes in electromagnetic fields that some associate with paranormal activity.
Carter said it was wild “watching those go off.”
“Oh, my God. It blew me away. I was like, ‘No way. This is real,'" she said. "'This is so cool.'"
Fifty miles (80 kilometers) south sits the former Urbanski Funeral Home, which hosted thousands of viewings and services from 1926 until its sale last year. Now called Mortuary Manor, the 60,000-square-foot (5,580-square-meter) building serves as a funeral home museum and much more.
Paranormal investigators can check out the embalming and autopsy rooms, as well as a morgue where it is standard practice for guests to take pictures of themselves lying on a slab that juts out from a basement wall.
Mortuary Manor will host its first wedding in November on Friday the 13th, of course. And guests who pony up $200 can spend the night in a five-room suite. Operations manager Cory Leibenguth lives in a neighboring upstairs apartment.
He said the building has modern amenities like indoor plumbing, heating, air conditioning and Wi-Fi. That "sets us apart from some of these other abandoned locations that don’t have any of that. And then there’s not a lot of funeral homes you can go investigate, either.”
Mortuary Manor visitors can also watch a horror movie projected onto the wall of the main sitting room while surrounded by caskets.
It’s all part of elevating the Halloween experience for hard-core fright fans.
“In today’s world where everybody is so stressed out … Halloween is a time that everybody can just relax and just enjoy the time with their friends and their family, maybe get scared along the way,” Cox said.
