To start with, as we’ve already noted, an actual former slaughterhouse makes up the bones of this place. There’s no denying the authenticity, just the ‘real feel’ of how that sets up the whole experience.
Adding in the cohesiveness and artistry of the Karver Meats logo on signage, branded vehicles, worker uniforms, and shipping containers, as well as decades-old paperwork used in some of the office scenes and a legitimate, weathered flyer advertising the local amusement park tacked up on the employee lounge bulletin board, the attention to detail remained precise and all-encompassing all the way through, down to the retro/1950s feel – one of the humorous signs posted all around referred to nuclear annihilation in the era of mutually assured destruction.
Every scene felt packed to the brim with realistic details like hanging slabs of meat, a vintage soda vending machine, power tools and industrial equipment, and lots of barrels (including a flaming/exploding one!). Mangled bodies hung from hooks. Backpacks and lunchbags laid scattered on the ground in a room of unfortunate kid victims. Dummies of workers handling hazardous waste containers had bubbling faces, burns, or knobs on their heads as the radioactive results of their labor. The gore was thick as hell. If you want blood, you’ve got it here – the spattered, sprayed, and streamed red stuff appeared everywhere.
Aside from the copious blood and guts, accumulated filth and grime covered walls, floors, ceilings, and props. In fact, it looked like every single surface bore the effects of weathering, distressing, or age. From chain link fencing to livestock pens and real wooden structures, each environment looked real and convincing.
The children’s ‘living’ quarters in the shadow lady room contained their little skeletons clad in antique clothing set on caged beds. The table in a dining area featured a severed, scalped head with spoons dipped into the brains. We witnessed so very many bloody, mangled, and broken corpse mannequins and dismembered body parts, we could barely register them before the next ones appeared.
The huge facility contained enough area to comfortably house a school bus inside, as well as forklifts, a tow truck, and a whole fleet of victims’ cars, one of which had crashed through a wall. Outside, we crossed between two RVs in a hillbilly section and crept through a graveyard with aged iron gates and cracked concrete burial vaults. The grisly remains of the plane pilot hung on the wall where the aviator’s body had been nailed up in the cult cabin.
After passing by an ominous breadcrumb trail of sheared-off wings and other parts of the crashed plane throughout the outside area, we finally came across the bulk of the jet. Wow! We’ve seen a few planes in other haunts before and even one we got to walk through, but nothing like this massive 80-foot-long beast – and the most thrilling part was we had the opportunity to cross most of its smoking, shattered, emergency-lights-blinking length on foot!
What won’t you find in this attraction? Any squeeze tubes, vortex tunnels, laser swamps, or animatronics. They wouldn’t fit in and would actively take away from the overall milieu. Most everything consisted of exceedingly well designed, constructed, and presented old-school effects.
The Karver crew handled lighting really well. An overall dim lighting scenario accentuated the grungy surroundings, sometimes switched up with moments of bright illumination or strobing. Outside, flickering lanterns lent lovely shadows and spooky ambiance to the environs. A few sections of fog added to the creepiness. We smelled raw or rotting meat and, at one point, sniffed the heavenly aroma of bacon – but what kind of animal were these rashers made of? A slab of longpig, anyone??
Sounds were kept sparse, and for the most part proved pretty effective. A few musical selections included country-western tunes, a kid’s song, good old creepy keyboards, and banjo pickin’. We also heard hisses, mechanical clanks, and other machinery noises, plus electrical cracklers, news footage of the plane crash, staff announcements over a PA system, a loud phone ringing, and chainsaws ripping to life.
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