This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

From horror films to haunted houses, a lot of us have a perverse attraction to fear. Few want to be in actual death-defying circumstances — though some do, like BASE jumpers or cave divers — but we like to experience fear in an environment where it can be safely escaped. It gives us a rush, and it allows us to explore the darker aspects of our consciousness. Bringing our fears to the surface, perhaps, can allow us to understand them better.

Haunted houses — that old fairground staple — have a dark modern cousin: extreme haunted houses. Here, the scares are bigger, and more vivid, and more interactive. (This critic attended one interactive house a few years ago, and almost elbowed an employee in the face when they popped up behind him.)

Few of us want to see something genuinely horrifying — though some do, like necromaniacs or viewers of Piers Morgan Uncensored — but people want to test themselves and shake up their perceptions in the knowledge, again, that such places can be escaped. Yet one haunted house has an infamy above all others: McKamey Manor, in the USA.

Inside Mckamey Manor is a new podcast series that asks when entertainment becomes crime. Russ McKamey’s vile interactive experience demands that entrants sign forms consenting to all kinds of harrowing mistreatment — and pledge not to discuss their experiences. Is this recreation, or is it torture?

Freelance journalist Elizabeth McCafferty, who hosts the series, is a self-confessed true crime addict. “Most of my evenings are consumed by the online forum Reddit,” she claims, which is itself amongst the most terrifying things I’ve ever heard.

McCafferty provides some interesting informational nuggets about the background of the scare industry. For example, I learned about the “hell houses” — “attractions” hosted by evangelical Protestants to scare the pants off sinning patrons. I suppose they are the modern equivalent of Fra Angelico’s The Last Judgement.

Soon, though, McCafferty ends up outside the doors of McKamey Manor. Russ McKamey was a wedding DJ, of all things, before he became a bizarre torturepreneur.

A bearlike man with an unsettling grin, he began with a fairly standard haunted house before ramping up the traumatic nature of his establishment until it became unendurably horrendous. Rumours of violence and degradation haunt online discourse about the Manor.

The podcast is interesting on the dynamics of controlling relationships. Allegedly, at one point in the McKamey Manor experience, the horrors will end, and the participant will be invited to eat pizza with McKamey and his volunteers. Unexpected kindness amidst mistreatment, as victims of all sorts of toxic relationships will know, can inspire undeserved gratitude.

McCafferty is a clear and lively host but the podcast is impaired by the lack of visual elements. The “spooky” background noises — the screams, the howls et cetera — bear the whiff of cheese. They don’t sound like the stuff of the world’s most frightening haunted house. They sound like something your local theme park would reject for sounding too corny.

If you watch the videos McKamey has released on YouTube, on the other hand — in his search for participants, and for attention — his interviews with shell-shocked entrants who have left the “Manor” are viscerally disturbing.

Their eyes are haunted, when they are not covered by tape, and their skin is pale. They mumble lines — clearly fed to them — about how McKamey Manor “ate my lunch, took my milk money and kicked my butt”. “You really don’t want to do this,” they gasp. McKamey, it is patently clear, gets off on vicious humiliation.

But the haunter can become the haunted. Whilst the police did not, or could not, act against McKamey Manor, amateur sleuths on Reddit and YouTube were documenting the allegations against McKamey.

Outraged individuals were working overtime to expose his alleged lies and sins against good taste and basic human decency. Later, this would inspire news reports, documentaries and, of course, McCafferty’s podcast.

It is good to know that McKamey has faced some of the pressure that he inflicted on other people. Social media might itself be comparable to an enormous haunted house. Strange, and often faceless, critical voices emerge from the darkness.

Frightening and underhanded forces are lurking in the ether. Many are the unsuspecting souls who have swaggered in, considering themselves indestructible, and then emerged shocked and traumatised.

Perhaps we want to end on a lighter note? In podcast news, it has been reported that Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, the hosts of The Rest Is History, are making more than a million pounds a year — each!

Good. Yes, this column indulges in cynicism, but I see no reason to be negative here. No one bats an eyelid at people making big bucks in film and television. So, why should podcasting not be profitable too? Besides, The Rest Is History remains a very good podcast.

Sure, you might disagree with the opinions of Holland and Sandbrook (to the extent that they actually express them). You might disagree with their approach to history. But every approach to history grows out of a rich enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is what Holland and Sandbrook undeniably emanate.

I can imagine their cheerfulness being aggravating in large doses. But it’s not as if we lack things to feel dark about.