Lifestyle Features

Crypt keepers

The geek ghouls of the lost Haunted Mansion hang on to their wicked years

By SARA DONNELLY | June 22, 2006

SEE DEAD PEOPLE: The haunted mansion before its untimely demise.

It was a hot summer night in 1993 in the Haunted Mansion’s crypt, when 19-year-old “Sweeper Dave” of Saco pressed his thin back against the wall of his hiding spot behind the bookcase, dusted lint from his black shirt, his black cargo pants, and his newly-dyed black hair, and opened his notebook to write a love poem. The crypt was the most remote spot in the Mansion at Cascade Water and Amusement Park, located along Route 1 in Saco next to its rival, Funtown USA. While monsters in the Mansion’s winery on the ground floor could surround customers in the hallway and send them scampering back and forth like mice between tigers, the crypt shift was by nature solitary, since a dead guy in a tomb would, realistically, wake up alone. Sweeper, a/k/a Dave Gagne, didn’t mind the time by himself. Except for the pasty black and white makeup which made him break out every summer since he was 15, Sweeper actually didn’t mind anything about the job — least of which these hours zoning out to the looped crypt soundtrack of gusting wind, or writing notes to hide for other crewmembers to find. Sweeper peered through the peephole aimed down the darkened stairs. Seeing no customer making his or her wobbly way up, he crouched over his page and wrote to the House that he believed helped him become a braver man:

“I always sit alone
But not really
I read and you read along
When I’m lonely, you stay with me
When I’m happy, you keep men from getting off my guard
How can you be oppressive and friendly?
Only you
I understand your deception now
You won’t take just anyone into your confidence
They endure you until they can understand you
When they can, with your help, they can try and understand themselves.”

In 1996, the Haunted Mansion was given to the Saco Fire Department and burned to the ground during a training exercise while Sweeper — so named because he used to sweep the park — and most of the core crew watched from across Route 1. Ten years later, the crew is still blissfully haunted by the house.

Path of horror
The Mansion was one of those rare efforts in life which exceeded the best intentions of everyone involved. While most amusement parks in the new millennium call a creaky ride through a mechanized trailer a “haunted house,” the Mansion, which opened in 1979 and closed after the summer of 1995, elevated terror to a kind of religion thanks to a core group of self-described outsiders who worked there through high school and college and graduate school and into the beginnings of their real-world careers. At Cascade and Funtown, the jocks and the pretty girls stuck to the jobs outside, in the sun, where chatting it up with other unusually good-looking teenagers was as important as running the Galaxi Roller Coaster or handing a pink stuffed dog to a kid who just flipped a rubber frog onto the center of a lily pad. But inside the haunted house, the crew tended to be of a different breed — these were guys who liked math more than sports, who spent their free time making elaborate contraptions and then dismantling them, who doodled pictures of spider webs and skeletons all over their notebooks during English class. In short — these guys were weird.

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