The Fear Factory

Fridays & Saturdays throughout October 7 PM 'til Late | Admission $10

Long ago, before the turn of the 20^th century, The Factory stood proud and tall, the metaphorical center of a thriving industrial town. It could have been the setting of any number of books, with workers happily and busily earning their take, filling Main Street with the din of commerce and the roar of machinery. Nothing about these halcyon days foreshadowed what was to come, a grim series of mysterious accidents and haunting mysteries that linger in local legend a century later, with the Factory long dead, a shadow of a bygone age.

The Accidents Begin...

The first recorded incident at the Factory happened in May of 1883. It was a gentle spring day, and the air was warm with the first tinges of summer. The surrounding town was steadily growing, largely untouched by the War and feeding off the bounty of the railroads. A monument to the times, the Factory was a bastion of modern technology. The summer before it had made the papers by installing an automatic elevator, a shiny reminder of the prosperity and novelty of the Industrial Age. On May 23^rd, the elevator again made headlines. This time, however, the news was grim: a cable had snapped, letting the car loose to fall all three stories, and seven workers had died.

The Birth of Legend

Scarcely a month later, the Factory's image had recovered, though the sad tragedy was still fresh on many people's minds. The heat of summer was fully upon them, and many were busy tending their crops. But soon shouts were heard over the serenity, and the sky was blotted with a plume of black smoke. When the fire subsided, three more were dead, and five badly burned. The Factory remained closed for a week as machines were cleaned and an investigation was performed, but though rumors circulated, no concrete evidence of what started the fire was ever uncovered.

Over the course of a year, three more tragedies struck, each as mysterious as the first. Each time, a worker died, and soon conspiracy theories about the Factory were appearing in newspapers as far away as Lexington, Kentucky. At one point, a federal investigation was even proposed, but the need for it evaporated as the Factory closed for unstated reasons in November 1884. Though it was never revealed why the Factory actually shuttered, most suspected its history of tragedy had finally caught up with it. Conspiratorial bar patrons prattled about ghosts, while more reasonable folk pontificated that the liability was simply too great for the owner to bear. Whatever else was true, one thing was clear: the Factory's legacy was sealed, and it had become synonymous with Fear.

The Fear Factory

Forty years later, in 1926, the town was much different than it had been. Now a few automobiles lined the unpaved streets, and electric lights criss-crossed downtown. All that remained of the Factory was the husk of its long-abandoned form, with windows broken out and empty silence within. The machines had long ago been dismantled and sold, so that now all that was left was the ghost stories of a few grandfathers, now the only ones old enough to remember the Factory as it was. The public, for the most part, had no knowledge of the Factory, though it remained an eerie presence and a topic of local conversation. Nothing new had inhabited it, and so far as anyone knew, no one had been inside for decades, though there were no plans to tear it down.

Then, on Halloween night, three children — a brother and sister, and a young friend of theirs — sneaked into the Factory. They had taken their flashlights and stolen inside, in search of haunts and spooks and the stuff of Halloween legends. No one quite knows what happened to them inside the Factory, but when the boys escaped, they told horrible tales of what they had seen. Curiously, neither agreed on what had happened, and both seemed to have had quite different experiences. Both, it seemed, had faced their greatest fears inside, and one was driven mad with fright. That boy died young, never having recovered. The sister, poor girl, was never seen nor heard from again. Investigations turned up nothing, and she was eventually presumed dead. The Factory had claimed another victim.

Modern Day

Despite a century of progress, the Factory remains, much as it was, casting its ominous shadow over the central railroad crossing. With commerce drawn elsewhere, and the town's prosperity waned, the local mind has once again shifted away from the legends of mysterious disappearances and deaths that have always surrounded the terrible place. No one knows for sure what began on that otherwise calm spring day in May 1883. Speculation aside, one thing has always been clear: the Factory is evil. Do you dare go inside? Few do. But if you choose this path, be warned. Once inside, you will face your worst fears, and the stuff of nightmare will become your reality. What do you fear?