When I was a young child, I remember witnessing something horrifying; something that I believed to be merely a bad dream. I was in a kitchen, not mine, and in the fridge was a carton of milk with a child’s face and the word MISSING stamped on its side. Next, a clown in stark white grease paint took the carton and drank from it. What came out wasn’t milk but blood. Then the clown turned to face me, laughing maniacally, and wheezed, “GOT BLOOD?”
I went years thinking that this was simply a nightmare, some half-forgotten fragment of a rough night’s sleep. But then, as an adult, I learned that this was not the case. The clown was real. So was the kitchen and the “milk.” Only I wasn’t a witness to a maniac, I was simply a viewer of a television commercial for ‘The 13th Gate.’ And thus, my association with ‘Louisiana’s Ultimate Haunted House’ began.
Growing up in Baton Rouge, ‘The 13th Gate’ had a totemic hold on the lives of my schoolmates and me. It was a place spoken of in hushed tones on playgrounds, where whispered second-hand stories invariably ended with claims that friends of friends had gone inside and never left. It was a rite of passage to travel Downtown and wait your turn in clown-infested queues, to venture into the windowless chasm of that huge black building. Without the internet or YouTube, you were forced to stick your courage to the sticking place by crossing that threshold of darkness, unsure what you might find within its depths. Even to this day, you’ll never step into the haunt and find the same experience twice but the one thing you are always assured of finding inside ‘The 13th Gate’ is a window into the imagination of one Dwayne Sanburn; the mastermind behind one of the greatest haunted attractions in the country.
A devotee of Halloween from the first time his mother took him through a haunted house, Sanburn spent his high school years building haunts and putting on makeup contests, knowing that someday he would find a way to put his passion to good use. Ultimately, he determined that going into business for himself was the only way forward. But for that he needed money and a career.
“I went to nursing school at Louisiana College. The week I graduated I rented an old building in downtown Alexandria and a year later opened ‘Louisiana Nightmare’,” said Dwayne. “After that, I worked two jobs as a nurse to feed the beast, expanding the Alexandria haunt, before moving the haunt to LSU’s campus for four years starting in 1998 and finally finding our home in Downtown Baton Rouge in 2002.”
All haunts have their specialties. For Sanburn, the guiding force above all else is STORY; a cohesion of scares, environments, and tone that all come together for a full, sustained experience in terror. Taking inspiration from world-renowned immersive entertainment purveyors such as Walt Disney Imagineering and Universal Creative, Sanburn and his team are able to conjure scenes of ‘beyond movie’ quality; of living, breathing, horrific reality while each year adding to or replacing one of the thirteen eponymous ‘Gates’. A formidable standard to uphold to be sure, but all the better to scare you with.
“I have been lucky to have an incredible talent pool to utilize, from Hollywood set builders to world-class performers. There are so many fantastic haunts out there, we just hope to create the best version of ours that we can, something unique and special for our loyal customers,” said Sanburn. “While we do gauge guests on their hopes for new Gates, ultimately the cool factor reigns supreme. What could we create that would be cool that we haven’t done before? Or if we’ve done it before, how can we make something bigger and better?”
This mentality is what led Dwayne & Co. to build a ‘cobblestones and all’ replica of Jack The Ripper’s White Chapel, a true-to-life Pirate Ship, and even once, to this writer’s delight, a scale replica of The Nautilus from “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea” (1954). But environments are only half the battle. It takes much more to scare people today. That’s why Sanburn and his team are always looking for revolutionary ways to terrify an eager audience, while always keeping the core values of story at the forefront.
“Sometimes you’ll find a great scare and build a room around it but you’ll never build a single room just for a scare. Story takes precedence, always,” said Sanburn. “We love to draw our audience into a realistic scene to trick their mind into forgetting they’re in a haunted house. If everything looks, sounds, smells and feels real, when the maniac with a chainsaw comes running out, you begin to question whether or not he’s real too. But at the end of the day, our costumed performers and make-up department bring everything together. These fantastic performers, from local theater and even film productions, create that immersive experience that really sells the scares for our guests.”
Ever eager to top what came before, Sanburn and his team have crafted a brand new Gate for 2024: a subterranean nightmare in an abandoned sewer system. Guests will venture underground and maneuver between busted pipes and flooded areas where weird creatures have taken this god-forsaken place as their domain. Featuring live water features and even walkable bridges, The 13th Gate Team has outdone itself once again, adding one more chapter to a profound legacy of screams, bad dreams, and scary schoolyard tales.
“When I was a kid, I loved the feeling I got around Halloween. That feeling is what I’m chasing every year,” said Sanburn. “I hope to be able to create that feeling in kids today and keep that tradition alive for a very long time.”
The 13th Gate Haunted House, along with Carnevil Haunted Midway (across the street from the haunt), are open select nights starting Sept. 27 through Halloween. For more information, and to get your tickets today, visit 13thgate.com.
See y’all in the moonlight!
