The first time he turned into a monster, Ben Armstrong was in elementary school. His parents took him to a Jaycees Haunted House and lost him in the dark maze. Gargoyles and clowns scared Armstrong silly, and he wanted in on the show. He put on the googly-eye glasses and vampire teeth he brought from home and screamed around corners, scaring other kids and his parents.
Armstrong had caught the bug. For his next monster, he chose a gargoyle, donning wings and a rubber mask to help his parents run the elementary school’s Halloween haunted house. Armstrong ran his classmates to a refrigerator, where they plunged their hands into a bowl of spaghetti brains.
Fifty years later, Armstrong plays the same gargoyle, and many other monsters, at his own creation—Netherworld Haunted House in Stone Mountain.
“I’m sorry for the mess,” he says to me, stepping over a zombie head and vampire dress that still need gluing. We’re walking through one of this season’s attractions, Wake the Dead, where apocalyptic warriors must seal the Netherworld from element-stealing ghosts. Netherworld’s haunts change each year, building on decades of proprietary lore. “A successful haunted house is all new, and rides a razor’s edge of Halloween and horror,” Armstrong says. “I avoid human gore, but I love the supernatural: monsters and cosmic horrors that are just beyond our comprehension.” We walk over sinking floors, with walls of moving hands reaching toward us, until my tour guide disappears in front of me. As I turn the corner, a zombie princess flies on a zipline at my ducking head. “I had to,” Armstrong says.
The urge to haunt never left Armstrong, who had a childhood subscription to Famous Monsters of Filmland. For years, he worked a “real-world job” as a television studio supervisor—first in Tallahassee, then at Atlanta’s Fox 5—but worked on the side at haunted houses in season. While helping out at the national haunt chain Silo-X, Armstrong met Billy Messina, a special-effects artist; in 1996, when Silo-X closed its Atlanta location, the pair teamed up with several others to launch Netherworld. The original location was a 4,000-square-foot space in Kennesaw that they could use for the season.
After two decades of success, in 2017, Netherworld purchased a 10-acre property in Stone Mountain that operates year-round. Five escape rooms, featuring aliens and Bigfoot, are always open; for the Halloween season, Netherworld builds two haunted attractions in a 70,000-square-foot warehouse, with a midway between them for guests to take a breath. The expanded operation has called for more staff in both the attractions and “front-of-house world,” handling new features such as online tickets and timed entrances.
On opening night, Armstrong dresses in plain clothes and joins one of the first groups through the haunted house to make sure fog machines are blowing and no actor is missing a mace. He also scopes out where it should be scarier. “Then I throw on my suit, usually some vampire, and go into the haunt,” he says. “Later I take off my mask, all hot and sweaty, and I’ll switch back into the real world to order the staff a pizza.”
This article appears in our October 2024 issue.