Evangelical 'Hell Houses' Still a Thing This Year, Now With Additional Creepiness
For prices around $299.00, it is once again possible this year to buy a Hell House Kit for creating your own moralist haunted house. Halloween is a longtime bogeyman, if you will, for various churches, which criticize the holiday for what some congregations deem to be connections to devil worship. Never one to miss a marketing opportunity, the late televangelist Jerry Falwell hit on the idea of encouraging church communities to construct haunted houses anyway.
Not that the New Testament isn't a pretty good ghost story, but hell houses typically define sin less biblically than legislatively. In most hell houses you'll be scared not by a ghost, but a vision of a woman bleeding to death from between her legs—she's terminated a pregnancy, and now presumably pays Satan's price. The anti-gay streak in the Hell House narratives tends to be strong too....