View: The 17th Door
You’re a prisoner at the Perpetuum Penitentiary and making it through the prison’s seventeen tortuous chambers will be a test of survival. Your sentence, though only a
half-hour long will, however, feel like a lifetime of hell.
A Halloween Scene Los Angeles View
I’m not going to say The 17th Door in Buena Park is the most intense haunted attraction in America, but I’m not going to say it’s not either. All I know is that after a 30-minute endurance test in seemingly just trying to stay alive, it took two hours for my pulse to get back to a healthy level.
The many-years-running psychological torture tour starts with ample opportunity to turn around: the list of triggers on a wall poster at sign-in rivals a mortgage application – it’s long, with every imaginable possibility of insult and injury spelled out clearly for all to read. Inside, you’ll realize that sign wasn’t just a bit of show biz – the warnings were all too real. If you sign the waiver, consider yourself forewarned.
For the next half-hour you’ll willingly subject yourself to rooms that shake, rattle, squeeze, and torment your body, mind and spirit. You’ll face mild electrocution (mild being a relative word here), 100-mph winds, walls and ceilings that close in and on you, being shot at with pellets that actually hurt when they land in sensitive regions, and don’t even ask me to relive the cockroaches. Oh, and that’s only four of the seventeen rooms.
What did we get ourselves into?
But people eat this up. The family we went through The 17th Door with – or I should say, did time with - were back for their third year-in-a-row and clearly reveled in the fact that they were going through the gauntlet with two rookies who had no idea the limits of legally pushing the entertainment envelope that happens here. My wingman, B, nearly bowed out at the sign-in, but after getting a “mercy” light that supposedly would give him a pass on the most threatening things inside, he went for it. And in we went for our stay as new inmates at the ferocious facility.
After a brief welcome to incarceration by a German-accented, water-spraying matron, we were ushered into the prison’s outer room and subjected to a rules-enforcer who barked out three important rules with military-like authority. Only problem was, with the machinery-bass soundtrack blasting at Spinal Tap 11, we couldn’t hear a word he was shouting, though our very survival might have demanded it. Then the first green light of the night popped on, and we were rushed through Door # 1: a prison bus that would take us on some very rough road and a head-bruising trek to the prison. No cheap visuals and pleasant ride here. It was a lurching, hurling, no-seatbelts-provided uncomfortable entry into the experience. We were three minutes in and I was already feeling the pain.
Was is too late to turn around? Were we going to?
Hell, no. You only live once, even if those maniacs inhabiting Perpetuum might try to jolt you back to life to do it all over again if your heart stops during the haunt. So we pushed on, with B’s “Mercy” ignored at least once (they just couldn’t hear him over the constant noise; he couldn’t hear himself), having had a cockroach put in my pocket (I thought it was still in there at the end, but it turned out to be my key fob), having been subjected to a freezing air blast that made the preceding frigid meat locker feel like a sauna, and having felt like a helpless plaything for some of the most committed and potentially insane haunters that I’ve ever been around. Oh, and some of them are pretty damn funny too, a perfect balance of humor and pain. They make you laugh, then make you cry. What a wicked recipe.
The longest half-hour-in-history ended with us being buried under an onslaught of rubber balls as a clown DJ insulted us then forced us to dance, probably for having made it through all 17 doors alive. Fifteen actually, as on the night we went two rooms were temporarily shut down for something that I didn’t even want to imagine. And fifteen was plenty, especially after we met the warden who made sure the shocking night would stay with us. On the way out I looked down at my hand at the “17” that had been ink marked on me at entrance as a rookie and wondered whether it was some timed-release drug as a last laugh that would forever make me return to the haunt.
After spitting us out into the freedom of the main hall again – now able to revel in the fact that we’d made it out in one piece – I was jump scared by a stilted creature – as final a going- away present. It had no effect on my now numbed subconscious. After having seemingly survived electrocution, snakes, being thrown about a metal room in an earthquake scenario, and the insult of all insults, the truly terrifying suffocation chamber, I was toughened up beyond the level of any scare actor trying to get one last gasp out of me. B and I looked at each other. We’d survived.
Back outside in the cool of night, I thought, could all of that actually be legal? How far can an entertainment be allowed to test the boundaries? And yet, there it was, an excited line of people still lining up on opening night to experience the terror we’d just lived through. I clutched my copy of the waiver-from-hell and decided I’d never read the fine print, because making it through the experience felt like it wasn’t a guarantee, no matter what the words on paper had to say.
It’s not for everyone, but for the many that it is for, The 17th Door will no doubt leave an indelible mark on your soul. It might even leave a literal mark on your body….and stay away from Cochino the prison barber or you might end up with a “17” souvenir shaved into your hairline. Lastly, if you do go, take my word for this: practice holding your breath beforehand. It will serve you well.
Now, take me to the nearest bar, therapist or oxygen-supply store
at Buena Park Downtown Mall
8420 On the Mall
Buena Park, CA
Tickets: $39.00 and up
also Front of Line and Behind the Scene Tours available
