Boards creak as a torture device grinds against rough wood. A patient groans as an evil dentist leans over the chair. Zombies stumble through smoke, lit by ghoulish light.
Every Halloween night, screams of terror emanate from George Forcier’s house at 10 Pine Hill Road in Conway. For the past 25 years, Forcier and a small group of neighbors have hosted the “Baptist Hill Haunted House” — since their children were young. The free haunted house begins around 5:30 and operates until about 8 p.m. the night of Halloween. It is open to all.
“Back in the day, the line was queued out to the street,” Forcier said one recent afternoon, dressed in paint-splattered overalls as he prepared his Colonial-style barn for next Wednesday’s night of terror. In one corner, a creepy mannequin stared blankly at the ceiling. Elsewhere, a medieval-style torture device, reminiscent of “The Princess Bride,” hung from a ceiling covered in cobweb lace. Outside, Forcier pried open a large black coffin, preparing it for selfie-taking trick or treaters.
Forcier, 65, retired as the editor-in-chief of the Greenfield Recorder in March after 39 years at the newspaper. These days, he works as a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The haunted house originated as a way to put the “tricks” back into the holiday. Forcier says he felt the need to revitalize this part of the holiday after countless children would come to his door, one after the other, meekly mumbling “trigger treat.”
“What is that?” Foricer asked. “It’s ’trick or treat.’ ”
After a quarter of a century reminding the neighborhood about the fun of tricks, Forcier says this may be the final year for his haunted house. Forcier, along with neighbors George Butler, Kathryn Butler and Joan Haley, all Conway residents, are the core organizers of the free, fright-filled spectacle. However, Forcier is quick to point out the haunted house has relied on dozens of volunteer tour guides and actors to run smoothly for 25 years of tricks. The haunted house, which Forcier described as, “Low-stake theatrics,” has been a community event since its inception. In the early days, most of the volunteers and actors were neighbors and their children, three of them Forcier’s own kids, K.C., Maggie and Jeff Forcier.
Some have professional acting experience, such as Mike Haley, a Hollywood director who played the umpire in “A League of Their Own” and has led a number of local performances as well, including the short comedic play, “Betty Baker’s Buttermilk Biscuit Barn.” That performance was inspired by daily life at Baker’s Country Store and put on in honor of the town’s 250th Anniversary Celebration in 2017.
“I think everyone has a little bit of thespian in them. It’s fun to have this chance one time a year,” George Butler said at a recent round-table interview with the organizers. Beside him, Katheryn Butler added, “Especially when you’re in costume.”
At the house, guests are greeted — or rather haunted — by actors from the moment they step on the premises, as screams slip through the doors of the barn. When it’s their turn, guests enter Forcier’s adjoining house and travel through a handful of unique scenes before entering the barn for a terrifying finale. Pulley systems throughout the building’s corridors allow props to be manipulated and guides to quickly pull doors shut — as if pushed by a ghost. The haunted house’s route changed slightly after a room was added nine years ago. This limited the garage space leading into the barn, where an emergency exit is hidden for anyone who gets too frightened. Part of the trick with strong scene design and the dark of night is that it’s nearly impossible to tell just how large or small the corridors truly are, Forcier says.
Each year, the haunting follows a loose theme. Sometimes, the fright spills outside. One year, for example, Forcier said they built a sandbox and buried a volunteer. Then, when the volunteer’s “wife” came outside looking for him, garbed in a ghost-like dress, he clawed his way out of the ground like a zombie. To reset the scene, Forcier said he’d pretend to hit the volunteer over the head with a shovel and re-bury him in the sandbox.
Joan Haley recalled one Halloween when she was a patient in a dentist’s chair and lost her voice from yelling.
“I screamed for the whole night and spit chiclets and fake blood out of my mouth,” she said.
Originally, Foricer says he wanted to have attendees come in through the front door and travel through more of the living space. His wife, Ann Forcier, quickly nixed that idea in anticipation of the mess caused by heavy traffic. She ended up making the right call, he admitted.
“In later years, we got some pretty messy floors,” Forcier said. “I remember one night, after our party, we went out into the mudroom and cleaned up all the spaghetti that was squished onto the floor.”
Leading up to the horrifying holiday, Forcier says Haley, the Butlers and other volunteers brainstorm ideas for each section of the haunted house and figure out what contraptions and props might be needed to bring the concepts to life. He then gets to work searching for costumes, scene design pieces and machines from past years. If he can’t find something he needs, he constructs — or “MacGyvers,” as he describes it — props to suit the requests, drawing from his experience running a small and part-time furniture business, Furniture By George.
For example, an idea for a “Stranger Things”-inspired scene prompted Forcier to build a couch with a hidden compartment that someone could push the “Demogorgon” through.
While that modification was relatively simple, Forcier says, others required more elaborate work, such as a windshield pump that squirts fake blood. Forcier has even built a faux guillotine and a torture machine in the past. “The rack,” as he calls it, incorporates dryer vent-arms that appear to stretch to painful lengths as a volunteer torturer turns the machine.
The props bring to life terrifying and sometimes humorous scenes, George Butler recalls. One year, a group of young children was coming through the haunted house as George Butler was trying to make a witch confess on the rack. After repeatedly denying being a witch, she finally confessed to being an elementary school teacher and Butler began cranking the machine furiously to pander to his audience.
“As soon as she confessed that, he started cranking the machine quickly, like he was really pissed off,” Forcier said, noting the children thought it was hilarious.
Having smaller volunteers, especially when their children were young, allowed for more creative scenes, according to Joan Haley. Once, for example, as part of a fractured fairytales theme, a scene based around Hansel and Gretel saw a child being captured by witches and tossed into an oven.
“There was an actual old oven that had some kind of orange paper fluttering so it looked like fire,” Kathryn Butler said. “They would stick the kid in the oven and it was set up so he would come out the other side.”
Another time, a small coffin was built to fit one of the regular child actors, Willy Zale. Now, however, most of the then-child actors are in college and pursuing various careers. Nobody fits inside the coffin or the oven anymore.
“They’re all 25 years older. It’s got to end sometime,” George Butler said.
In commemoration of the “Baptist Hill Haunted House’s” final year, however, a number of the original ranks will be returning for the final year of festivities — including Zale, neighbor John Crowely and Forcier’s daughters, K.C. and Maggie Forcier.
After the night comes to an end, all of the volunteers and actors take turns traveling through the house so that they can see the other scenes. It is often the first chance they get to see everything that was created.
This year’s theme is under wraps (which, Forcier noted, is not a hint at a mummy theme) — the organizers asked the newspaper to keep it a surprise. As Halloween approaches, Forcier will be hard at work on the final layers and elements of sets, with “lots of duct tape and staples,” he said, noting the neighbors are currently “working out their scenes.”
Forcier and company say it is the right time to be bringing things to end after a successful, lengthy run. He and Ann may both be retired in the near future, at which point they may enjoy being freed from an academic or holiday calendar. Additionally, he’ll be able to throw out the props he’s saved and get his barn back.
“It feels right to end things on a nice round number like 25,” Forcier said.
Zack DeLuca can be reached at zdeluca@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 264.