BLADDERS BEWARE

WASILLA — Consider bringing a change of pants and underwear to this year’s Gateway to Darkness haunted house, 1241 W. Melanie Ave. No. 4.

If you are lucky, you won’t have to use the dry clothes. But if you do, you won’t be the first to pee your pants or puke in fear of the frights inside the Gateway Asylum.

So far, the tally board shows six hash marks for people who’ve peed their pants passing through the haunt and 31 marks for chickens, people who paid the admission price, but ended up being too afraid to go though the haunted house.

“We’re not going to scare everybody, but we’d like to,” said Michelle Marsh, who has planned, built and operated a haunt with her family for the past seven years.

It started in their garage, but the year 1,500 kids showed up at their house, they decided they had to move it to a bigger space.

“They wanted to go through it again and again and again,” Marsh said.

For the past four years they’ve converted the Wasilla Splatter House business they own into a haunted house that’s open only on weekends during the month of October. Their indoor paintball business will re-open Nov. 13.

After deciding to expand from a haunted garage to something larger, Marsh said she did an Internet search and found a Halloween conference in Los Angeles that they attended.

“That’s where we lost it,” she said.

They shipped home a pallet full of props from that first conference. But these days, they find potential props in all sorts of places.

Like the old refrigerator in this year’s spooky kitchen scene. At first they were angry to discover someone had dumped it on their property.

But after a second thought, Marsh said, “Hey, we could use that.”

Each year the husband and wife team starts by having the fire marshal approve that year’s floor plan for the various rooms in the haunt. Then around April, they start framing in rooms inside the Quonset.

“Some people spend their money on snowmachines and four-wheelers,” Marsh said. “We spend our money on a haunt.”

She said her husband is already working on the floor plans for next year.

The two have played a variety of characters over the years, but she has settled on a clown character and he is the “Stinky Tall Man.” Tall because he is on stilts and stinky because his costume can’t be washed or it would completely fall apart, Michelle Marsh said.

They said it takes about two hours of preparation to get the 20 to 30 actors in costume and makeup and ready for the show each weekend night in October. There are 21 rooms in this year’s Gateway Asylum, including a doctor’s office, kitchen, meat locker and waiting room.

“It’s amazing how much the actors add to it,” she said.

The Marsh family spends the winter building props.

Michelle loves the details.

“I just putz in there forever. I made a lot of guts and skin this year,” she said.

The haunted house has a couple of rules: no touching the actors and they won’t touch you. And, no children under 12 are allowed during the regular shows. The haunt opens early on Sundays — from 4 to 6 p.m. — for children’s tours. The lights are on and there are no actors or automated scares.

Tickets are available at the door or online at gatewaytodarkness.com. Tickets through Oct. 24 are $12, and Oct. 28-31, tickets are $15.

“We want to do it for the whole family, but at night it’s just too intense,” Marsh said. “I don’t want to traumatize small children. But teens and adults — I hope you can’t sleep for a week.”

Contact Heather A. Resz at heather.resz@frontiersman.com or 352-2268.