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You can’t talk about Halloween haunts in metro Detroit without succumbing to the intimidating Erebus, the 2005 World's Largest Walk-Through Haunted Attraction according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
Pontiac’s Erebus, operated and conceived by brothers Jim and Ed Terebus, has provided four floors suburban screams since 2000.
“The cool thing is, Erebus is the darkness beneath the earth which the dead must pass to reach Hades. Put a ‘T’ in front of that and you get Terebus. We’ve got a little wickedness in us, so we were destined to do this,” says the 45-year-old Ed Terebus.
The brothers, who grew up in Warren, now live in Pontiac.
“We scare people for a living. How fun is that?” asks 54-year-old Jim Terebus.
You’ve been in the fear industry for about 25 years now so you know a little bit about fear and what makes it work. Why do you think haunted houses and other Halloween events go over so well?
Ed: It’s all about fun, hanging out with a group of people, experiencing something different. You can go to a movie and sit back but over here you experience the movie, things are coming at you, you’ve got 35 to 45 minutes of things coming to get you.
Everybody loves being scared. Over here, it’s almost a safe environment but you’ve always got that twist of what if someone snuck into the haunted house and is not suppose to be there? If you were in the haunted house and you screamed for help as loud as you possibly could -- the question is: Would anybody help you?
You want to make it a little insane and take away that feeling of safe.
Ed, you graduated from the Macomb Center for Creative Studies with a degree in fine arts and sculpture and Jim, you got a degree from Oakland University in management and engineering. How did you manage to translate that into a full-time career in the scare business?
Jim: One of my employers made me join the Jaycees so he could get a recruiting patch and it just so happens that they had this little four-room haunted house set up in front of the Oakland Mall.
It was just an incredible experience, and I was thinking “we should try this and we should try this” and they said this is just the way we do it.
I went to them the next year and said I want to build (a haunted house) for you and whatever you make up and above what you guys always made; I’ll split it 50/50. And they said that’s not the way we do this thing. So I said, “Ed, we can do this” and we went out and built our first little one.
Ed: We started this thing in 1981. We charged $1.50, and the haunted house was 1,200 square feet (and grew each year). We ran that for 13 years and jumped up to 9,800 square feet. This was a mobile building set up for two weeks, operated for a month and torn down in two weeks. We figured this is crazy. We had 10 mobile home trailers, 14 ft. wide, 70 ft. long. We said we need a building. This building was vacant for 40 years and was used as an indoor junk yard for 20 years.
With four different floors, including a basement, you have to come up with a lot of ideas to fill this place. How do you come up with stuff?
Ed: Ideas come from other haunted houses and movies. Everyone contributes ideas. For scare labor, we have 50 to 60 a night. With managers and everybody, it’s 85 people a night. By the time we’re down talking, the table’s full of ideas.
With all the haunted houses in the metro Detroit area, how does Erebus stand out?
Ed: Michigan is the haunted attraction capitol of the world. What makes us different is we realize where we’re at -- the competition we have to overcome. We try to raise the bar.
Everybody’s doing the same stuff. A lot of people my age have gone to haunted houses and stopped because they never change. The cool thing is over here, you’ve got people bringing their kids and then a week later they’re back with two other adults. Our demographic is actually getting older.
We design, build, create, and develop our own stuff here. We have things here that we invented 20 years ago that other haunted houses are copying. The bottom-less pit is one of our staple displays.
I’ve got things that will grab you, bite you. I mean how fun it that? It’s like an obstacle course with monsters.
You were named the World's Largest Walk-Through Haunted Attraction according to the Guinness Book of World Records in 2005. How did that happen?
Ed: I bought my niece a Guinness Book of World Records book and I looked and there was a record held by a haunted house in Japan. I said to Jim, “We’re 110 feet short of the record.”
It took a lot to get that 110 feet, but we beat it by 160 some-square feet. We’ve got 2,189 linear feet that you’re walking (about seven football fields) inside a building where monsters are attacking you.
