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Scariest Haunted House requires 40-page waiver, doctors note and safe word


Tailgate

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Need to fast forward to some of the footage of people who are quitting...no one has ever made it out. Someone described it as a torture chamber versus a haunted house and that appears to be the case from what I watched. Looks completely insane.

 

I also took one still from the video of a person quitting. WTF. 

 

 

 

 

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9 hours ago, Tailgate said:

Need to fast forward to some of the footage of people who are quitting...no one has ever made it out. Someone described it as a torture chamber versus a haunted house and that appears to be the case from what I watched. Looks completely insane.

 

I also took one still from the video of a person quitting. WTF. 

 

 

 

 

 

dd2d5272d348ab9d9ebc4131e230b577.jpg

 

Beetlejuice?

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Spoiler

Russ Mckamey, the owner and operator, is a super charismatic dude who for some reason gets his kicks from what is basically consented torture. From what I remember the neighbors love him, but just listen to the guy talk about something for a minute, he is definitely “off,” but he has a way about him that seems to cool people off.

I don’t remember being able to find too much on the guy’s that he hires to bash these folks up, but I do remember sexual assault came up quite often. That’s hardly a surprise however, considering the nature of the work. These dudes are literally there to break you until Russ decides you’ve had enough. As the victim you **do not ** get to decide when you’ve had enough.

Russ basically calls it when he thinks they are a tad too close to actually killing you. It’s said that they also stop when they’ve broken you psychologically, but I’ve never seen it not go past the person’s breaking point. People are definitely walking out of it with mental scars right?

Well that’s the thing. It is quite a difficult task to undergo the Manor. Russ puts every applicant through a series of interviews and such before picking the right people that he can torture. He most definitely chooses the least likely people to cause trouble after the fact. He chooses the weakest ones that he and his buddies can break in a way that makes them completely submissive to him.

Russ and his guys begin this process immediately The victims are kidnaped and the process of mentally and physically beating down participants begins before the waivers are even signed. The waivers, which would not even hold up in court, are signed under duress, and then the “actual” horror begins as they are moved to Russ’s back yard. The victims are subjected to acts including, but not limited to, beatings, choking, cutting, ingestion of foreign substances, forced vomiting, and water boarding.

All of this is filmed and heavily edited, as Russ only releases footage that wouldn’t harm his operation. The edited video footage is then ONLY released if the victim looks into the camera and makes a speech written by Russ about the operation and how everything was voluntary. If they refuse the speech at the end of the video then the footage is not released. This forces a choice on the victim to either be cooperative, say what needs to be said, and then have what happened *mostly * on video, albeit edited, as proof, OR not be cooperative and therefore not be filmed saying that they were okay with everything that happened, BUT the video is never released by Russ and therefore there is zero proof that they even touched you.

When Russ thinks they’ve had enough, and only then, as there is no safe word and no actual way for the victim to put an end to it short of dying, then they are released. Everyone puts on a happy face and they are free to go.

Russ has obviously had run ins with the police on this matter, but it was all settled smoothly in seconds and I believe it is now something that he informs the cops on with each session. He has basically found a way to feed a dark desire, and share that with his colleagues, in a legally grey way.

It’s up to your imagination what motivates Russ, his wife, and the guys that work for them at the moment, because they do put on a very nice face. As for the unedited videos there are a few theories including one that he makes a profit selling those to individuals that would pay for such a thing, as he doesn’t charge for the manor and only asks for a donated bag of dog food as form of payment from the participants.

This shit is bonkers. This guy is doing some normally very illegal, and definitely sick shit and operating in a legal grey area. Completely fascinating.

 

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46 minutes ago, hayden_horn said:

yeah, that's fucking ridiculous. i don't even much like normal haunted houses, but that's just sadistic shit.

Yeah, guess I kinda skimmed over that part.  I'm not giving anyone carte blanche to try and hurt me unless I get to hurt back.  

Agree the dude is fucked in the head.

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from that article above:

Quote

With McKamey manning the camera and calling the shots, the McKamey Manor “actors,” as he calls them — the staff who actually get physical with each participant — began the haunt. And it didn’t end for hours.

“I was waterboarded, I was Tased, I was whipped,” she says. “I still have scars of everything they did to me. I was repeatedly hit in my face, over and over and over again. Like, open-handed, as hard as a man could hit a woman in her face. … Even through them hitting me, I was just so numb by what had happened previous to that, I didn’t even make a sound, not even a grunt. Nothing. I didn’t cry, I didn’t scream, I didn’t say ‘ouch.’ ”

Brotherton says she was blindfolded with duct tape and submerged under water by her ankles for so long that her body started involuntarilty thrashing. They made her dig a shallow hole in a patch of dirt with her bare hands, then they made her lie in it while they covered her face with dirt, giving her only a straw to breathe through.

“[The dirt] started to go into my throat, and I started to swallow it,” she says. “I’m coughing and I keep saying, ‘I need water,’ and they would just splash water in my face. They wouldn’t actually give me water. That went on for, I want to say, 20 to 30 minutes.”

At one point, she says, they started scraping at her McKamey Manor tattoo with what felt like a file. She believes they used the same tool to scratch at her throat, and that’s when she broke.

“I didn’t panic, but I started to get a little bit emotional, and [one actor] is holding my throat, and at that point I just started to cry. I couldn’t help it. I started crying, and I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ whatever. But they don’t care if you cry. They don’t care if you pee or poop your pants, they don’t care because it’s all about the show. Not about a person’s safety.”

Brotherton says she repeated the safe phrase for several minutes before they finally stopped hurting her. They sprayed her down with a pressure washer, duct tape still over her eyes, and drove her back to the drop-off location.

“My arms and my hands were shaking so much from adrenaline, they thought I was seizing.”

Before she was allowed to leave, she says, she had to record an exit video. Everyone who visits the McKamey Manor does.

“Before Russ turned the camera on he said to me, if I do not say good things about McKamey Manor and I start telling what actually happened, he’s going to sue me for $50,000,” says Brotherton. “I signed a waiver saying this could happen. So Russ forced me into saying all these great things, like, ‘Oh my God, my tour was so amazing, it was exhilarating,’ blah, blah, blah.

“Like who is actually going to say that after getting hit in the face as many times as I did and going through what I did? At that point I was so distraught — emotionally, physically, mentally, psychologically. I mean, at that point I was just like, ‘I’ll do whatever you want me to say.’ ”

Brotherton went back to her hotel room and took a shower. As the adrenaline wore off, she began to realize how much pain she was in. So she drove herself to the hospital. She also took photographs to document the injuries. In one photo, Brotherton is in a neck brace and a hospital gown and her face is markedly swollen. She has scrapes on her cheeks and a lump on her forehead, her lips are red and puffy, and there are small cuts at the corner of her mouth.

In another image, you can see a large, bloody wound on Brotherton’s left knee. She says that’s an old surgery scar that opened up after McKamey’s actors cut off her knee pads and made her crawl on the ground. Her legs are covered in scratches, and there’s a large purple bruise on top of her left foot. There are also two pictures of her torso, showing large purple bruises that stretch across her hip and stomach. She says X-rays showed a hairline fracture in her foot, and the inside of her mouth was so scratched up from the hitting and “fish-hooking” (“Where they take their two fingers and they put them inside your mouth and they stretch your mouth open”) that the hospital sent her home with medical mouthwash, which she had to use every two hours for three days.

When she refused to tell the hospital staff how she was injured — McKamey’s threats to sue echoing in her head — they called the police, but she was discharged and left before any authorities arrived. Brotherton said she tried to go to the San Diego police later, but they told her she didn’t have a criminal case because of the waiver she signed. All she wants now is an apology. She’s happy, she says, and she and her husband have worked things out. But she wants closure.

She’s also tried to warn others about her experience, but McKamey, she says, has turned her into an enemy among his fans.

“He made so many people hate me and said I was crazy, and that I’m a liar, this and that, and that’s when I started posting my pictures,” Brotherton says. “I’m like, if I’m such a liar, here’s the proof. The pictures are proof in the pudding.”

McKamey doesn’t deny any of it, though he doesn’t believe she had a fracture in her foot. The fish-hooking happened, and he says that’s what caused the lip swelling. He also admits to outing her relationship before the tour.

“I outed her cheating, yeah, because my [Facebook] group is not a place to go cheating with other people in my group. Any personal information we have, we’ll use it against you in the tour. And you know that.”

McKamey says relationship drama wasn’t a part of Brotherton’s tour, but he says it didn’t affect her tour, either — her experience, he says, was as rough and tumble as any other McKamey Manor tour at the time. He admits that the San Diego shows were much more physical than what he’s doing now in Tennessee.

In San Diego McKamey had an army of “actors,” folks who would do his bidding throughout the day. McKamey never touched Brotherton. It was all the actors. In Tennessee, he doesn’t have the same staff, nor does he have most of his props — his ex-girlfriend took them with her when she moved out of the house last year.

But he’s not fazed. McKamey Manor is always evolving, he says, so no one really knows what they’re going to get, and his latest haunt is more psychological than ever. Which isn’t to say you won’t leave Summertown with some injuries.

“You’re gonna get fish-hooked, you’re gonna get swollen lips, you can get black eyes — it’s all in the contract,” he says. “You’re agreeing to that. That’s what they’re signing up for … extreme physicality.”

No one who’s taken a McKamey Manor tour in Tennessee has walked away looking as beaten-up as Brotherton. At least not yet.

seriously. fuck. that. shit.

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Some additional reddit posts. Betting angle could make sense. 

I've been obsessed with his story. Oddly enough in friends with him on FB. I believe he makes his money doing live streaming betting. He uses very specific cameras that look like live streaming cameras. I bet he is routing these live streams to underground betting places.

I've been so encompassed with this that I actually created my own horror podcast based on him called Exposing McGrimey's Manor. Check it out if you like that sort of thing.

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The thing Richard Garrison did back in the day was great.  I don’t need anything more than that.

My girlfriend back in the day was close with Garriott. I got kind of a backstage tour of that deal. A guy in a mask jumped out and scared us and she whispered to me, “that’s Luke Skywalker”.
“Huh?”
“The actor.”
“Mark Hamill”
“Yeah. They’re friends.”

Yeah I know, user name checks out.
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I watched the same doc that @Deej did. What's fucked is that they interview people that go through this shit and want to do it again. I can understand being depressed or suicidal, but to want to be tortured for hours on end, then enjoy it, then want to go back for more just astounds me. 

Yeah the guy running McKamey has a few screws loose - but in the end I feel like these people (that run "haunted houses" like this) are just catering to nutjobs that enjoy that shit. 

I don't think it's that unlike slinging hard drugs like heroin or meth to be honest. 

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Yeah human beings are weird as fuck. You can basically find someone out there that's in to literally anything. This being Exhibit A.

Seems inevitable that eventually someone will get seriously injured or killed. I can't imagine that the target audience for his videos (including McKamey himself) wants to watch the same stuff over and over again, so it'll get more and more extreme as time goes on. I'm tempted to say that's just Darwin at work, but my guess is that at least some of the people that willingly sign up for this have enough screws loose that they technically shouldn't be making these kind of decisions.

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Reading around on this, especially on Reddit, it seems there are two possibilities:

1) the owner is nuts and has found a way to legally torture and film folks who are willing to volunteer to be tortured and filmed.

2) this whole thing is nothing more than a really, really well orchestrated marketing campaign for his haunted house.

There are a few folks on Reddit who say they know people who have gone through Mckamey Manor and it's no big deal. They say that the stuff on the YouTube clips is all staged to make it seem much more extreme. They also say that the people online with the worst horror stories about the place actually work there and do so to stir up controversy.

On multiple threads, the same stories come up from different users. About how the police were called and thought a real abduction was happening, the woman who went to the hospital and has tried to press charges, the heart attack, how he's making money on streaming the video and taking bets (five years ago it was streaming to Vegas, now people say streaming to the dark web, but the streaming to gamblers story is the same), etc. It's either that everyone is reading and parroting the same stories across all these threads, or it's an organized campaign.

Probably the most damning thing I saw was someone claiming they were "going in to the manor" and would report back on the experience. Later, they updated to say how extreme it was and how Russ really got in their head, how he's a such genius, etc. Only later in the thread, they forgot how they started the story, and began referring to Mckamey Manor as "us." When questioned about it, they admitted they run social media for the manor, which seems like a huge detail to leave out of your original posts, and supports the theory that workers post fake stories about the place.

Maybe I just have trouble believing this place could really be all it claims to be without having been shut down or seriously injuring someone by now. If it's true they don't give you a safe word (and if they do, they don't listen when you use it as people claim), it would just take one undercover sting for the place to be gone forever. For all of the press the place has gotten over the years, it's surprising that hasn't happened if the stories are true.

I hope the truth eventually comes out about the place either way. If it's a mirage they've done a good job keeping it quiet for this long. If it's legit, it's amazing they've been able to last so long with so much national attention.

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Follow the money. The guy isn’t making a living by giving away dog food. The underground betting thing is unlikely (especially if most people only last a minute or two) so I would put my money on social media as well. My neighbor’s YouTube channel has made $1M in three years and all he does is film people talking about cars.

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3 minutes ago, austingirl said:

What in the everlasting fuck would compel someone to want do this?

I mean, Jesus Christ. I got jumpy walking through a dark room in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, after watching the TRAILER for Paranormal Activity.

$20,000 reward might have a little to do with it

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