By Denise DePaolo
Photos by Liz Painter
Fittingly, Guy Burdick’s life took a sharp left turn on a Halloween night about eight years ago. The lifelong lover of spookiness was handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, with the Discovery Channel on in the background. When a show called The Top 13 Scariest Haunted Houses in the U.S. came on, a light bulb went off.
“I’ve always loved haunted houses, but I’d never been to a good haunted house. They’d all been Walmart masks and no budget.” said Burdick. “I was watching that and I was totally blown away. I was like, ‘Oh my god. Look what these people are building!’ So I started researching it and found that no one around this part of the country does this. I decided I was going to see one of these really good haunted houses. To make a very long story short, I decided I was going to build my own haunted house. Thinking, ‘How hard can it really be?’
That was the day Fear Asylum was born. Burdick began by getting in touch with the people behind some of the nation’s biggest, scariest haunted houses. After several conversations, he was invited to a trade show in St. Louis, where he found the tools and inspiration to bring his vision to life.
“When I walked in, I just couldn’t believe it,” he remembered. “I couldn’t believe, A – how much everything cost, and B – I couldn’t believe what people were doing. The stuff that you see at this trade show is nothing that you see at a Halloween store in Sioux Falls.”
Above all else, Burdick knew that he wanted to create a fearscape that looked and felt as authentic as possible. Basically, a haunted house that people wouldn’t dream of bringing their small children to see. After the initial trade show, he traveled around the country touring the attractions he’d seen on TV, going behind the scenes, and befriending the movers and shakers of the industry, before going home and giving it a shot.
The Fear Asylum’s first year, Burdick says, was a disappointment. “It wasn’t what I saw on TV. But I made more friends and kept progressing and the budget became bigger and we became better at what we do. Now we’re in our sixth season and we’re ranked the number one haunted house in the entire state. I have people who travel from Chicago, Omaha, Lincoln, California, Florida, that come every year to this haunted house. It’s a big production.”
A big production it is. The Fear Asylum alone is a 10,000 square-foot hellscape, comprised of more than a dozen meticulously crafted individual scenes, which take people like Wyatt Robbins the entire rest of the year to build. Robbins started working for Burdick in high school. Now an SDSU student, he helps to bring many of the disturbingly authentic sets to life, works to control animatronics as guests walk through, and even does some acting.
When asked what would surprise people the most about what goes on behind the scenes, Wyatt immediately thinks about the money. “People wouldn’t believe how much it takes to create something like this, but as soon as they walk in, they know it’s not like any other haunted house they’ve ever been to. They look at the detail and it’s above and beyond anything they’ve ever even imagined. And then I think what really everybody takes away, they come in and see all the cool scenes we make, and then the actors actually interact with everybody out in the queue line and in the scenes. It’s incredible.”
Read the full story in the October issue of 605 Magazine or click here.
