Once upon an October, Leonard Pickel visited Utah to see how a haunted house ought to be run.

It was a March of Dimes-sponsored house, in an airplane hangar somewhere in the Salt Lake City area, back in the mid-1980s.

“I had never in my life seen any haunt so big. I lost count at about 40 rooms and it just kept going and kept going,” says Pickel, now the owner of Hauntrepreneurs, a Florida-based design and consulting firm for themed attractions.

Which all goes to prove that Utah has a long legacy of haunted houses, and that Halloween is big business in the Beehive State.

Pickel, who recently visited several attractions in Utah, says he’s found that the number of thrill seekers visiting haunted houses in our state is higher than the national average.

Many of the state’s largest haunts, such as Salt Lake City’s Fear Factory or Nightmare on 13th, bring in more than double the average national haunted house attendance of 5,000 to 15,000 visitors per year, he says in a phone interview.

“I’ve never seen as many haunted houses in the 30-, 40-, 50,000 people range as here in the area around Salt Lake City,” he says.

Going big

Still, Utah doesn’t claim the most spooky attractions in the nation, Pickel says.

The Detroit area has “more haunted houses per acreage” than any other spot in the United States, with 60-some offerings, he says, and other Midwestern states, like Ohio, also have huge numbers.

But Sean Murray, one of the owners of Castle of Chaos, which includes a venue in Riverdale, says, “There does seem to be something unique here.”

At a Midwest Haunters Convention three years ago, Murray says he discovered most attractions represented at that gathering averaged 2,000 to 8,000 square feet in size, while most Utah venues are spread out over 20,000 to 40,000 square feet.

“I didn’t meet anybody that had anything approaching the size of any haunt I know of in Utah,” says Murray, of Layton.

Since his own Castle of Chaos attraction alone sports three locations in the state, with each one offering 40,000 square feet of scares, Murray says, “It seems like we are playing in a different ballpark.”

‘Game on’

When Cydney C. Neil returned to Utah last fall — seven years after closing her award-winning Rocky Point Haunted House in Salt Lake City — she says she expected to see more haunted houses filling in the gap created by the exit of her attraction.

But Neil says she was surprised at the number of other haunted venues also open, from masquerade balls and races to zombie walks and home haunts.

“What isn’t haunted now? … Everything is haunted — everything,” says the businesswoman known as the “Queen of Haunts.”

Rocky Point was started by Neil’s brother in their father’s vacant restaurant in Pleasant View in 1979. Neil entered the scene a few years later, using her expertise as a large-scale event producer to turn the attraction, which relocated to Salt Lake City, into a nationally recognized attraction.

Back then, no one was doing a haunted house as a professional business, says Neil, adding, “For the most part, Utah was the pioneer of these big professional haunts.”

Rocky Point “raised the bar for haunts around the country,” says Patrick Konopelski, president of the Haunted Attraction Association, in a phone interview on the road in Wildwood, N.J. “(Neil) was doing things that people weren’t even thinking about doing.”

That means Utahns have been consistently exposed to the best in haunted house entertainment, at Rocky Point and also at its competing venues, Konopelski says.

“If you’re going to go into the haunt industry in Utah, you’d better have your game on — the customer demands it,” he says.

Frights of the future

Utah’s haunted scene stays on track with current trends in the industry, such as zombies, paranormal investigations and the usage of “creepy old buildings,” Pickel says.

But the state is also on the “cutting edge” of future trends, such as home haunts, the fastest growing segment of the industry, says the founder of HauntCon, a national trade show and conference.

Full-body contact is another new feature in Utah haunts and elsewhere, allowing patrons to choose whether or not characters in the haunt may touch or grab them, Pickel says.

Although that sort of interaction has been off limits for some 30 years, due to liability concerns, Pickel says that nowadays, “Kids are so much harder to scare than when I started that you have to keep upping the ante.”