31 Days of Halloween | Day 12: The History of Haunted Houses

In 1888, a woman named Maggie Fox stood before two thousand people in a New York theater, removed her shoe, and demonstrated how she had spent decades convincing Americans she could communicate with the dead.

She cracked her toe joints.

Forty years of séances, spirit messages, and mysterious knocking sounds had helped create a nationwide obsession with the supernatural.

But the story didn't end when the trick was exposed.

Instead, Americans found increasingly elaborate ways to pay for the experience of being frightened.

Spirit cabinets. Optical illusions. Ghosts appearing on theater stages. Amusement park rides that carried passengers into complete darkness. Midnight horror shows where monsters wandered through the audience.

Eventually, those traditions would come together in the haunted attractions we recognize today.

Tonight, we're tracing the strange history of America's haunted houses, from the Fox sisters and P.T. Barnum to a New Jersey invention called the Pretzel, Disneyland's Haunted Mansion, and the tragedy that changed haunted attraction safety forever.

Welcome to Day Twelve of 31 Days of Halloween.