- So me and Tiffany loaded up the car and drove to Florence, Alabama.

We arrived around 4:30, 5 o'clock.

We are in a more rural part of the town.

All we could see is nothing but trees.

Nothing but trees.

Nothing but trees.

And then boom, there it is.

Arx Mortis, bright and shiny, sitting on top of the hill.

It looked like an old school Transylvania manor.

It had big fake wooden doors.

The walls are painted in this gothic like purple, but it's set in the sun so long it's kind of gray.

The middle part kind of has that Psycho-house steeple, and it had this circular window in it.

For someone with no budget, I was in heaven.

I mean, as a horror filmmaker, what better way to do that than going to a made up haunted house for your set design, your costumes, your wardrobe?

That was all there for me.

Me and Tiffany meet up with Hal in the parking lot.

He was a family friend who kind of managed Arx Mortis and help build most of it.

I'm talking about the shots that I want to get.

I'm telling how the story behind it 'cause he hadn't really heard it.

And that's when I, I realized I have no main actor.

I knew Hal had to acted a little bit.

So I turned to him and I said, "Hey man, instead of just helping me with this thing, do you wanna be in this thing?"

And Hal was gung ho as Hal always is, he said, "yes."

David, my producer friend, he showed up with his wife and these two guys I never met before that were also just willing to help and we're ready to rock and roll at that point.

Walking through Arx Mortis was like walking through a horror film.

The hallways were cramped and claustrophobic.

There were opening holes in the walls where the scare actors would jump out at you.

There was a body bag room and just had these fake chains in these fake body bags like hanging, you'd have to walk through to get to the next room.

We eventually ended up in this hospital.

You had the fake flooring, the curtains, the gurneys, and there were fake bodies there, and they were bloody.

Now I'm walking down this bridge and I remember it just being so quiet and the next thing I hear was this blood curdling scream like someone was being disempowered next to me.

I immediately turned to my left and jumped back and I see this animatronic hanging on this fence.

It was a guy who had his hands tied up to the top of a chain link fence and he had no legs.

His guts were being ripped out, and he was gyrating on the the fence.

I was told by Hal that that would happen.

We were warned as we were walking through the house that we may trigger some animatronics and that some were pressure-sensored on the floor.

It means as you step down, they go off.

At that point, I knew we would just have to avoid that guy at all costs.

I could not have dreamed for a better place to film a horror film, but Tiffany's getting kind of creeped out.

She looks at me and says, "I know it's a fake haunted house, but it's still creepy as hell."

I reminded her, this is just fake.

Don't let that psyche you out.

There was some makeup designers there that were fixing up the place for the upcoming Halloween season.

They saw what we were doing and got kind of interested.

So we let them take Tiffany into their wardrobe room and they started working on some makeup for her to turn her into this demon, this entity.

We started setting up in the haunted library because it was the only room in the house that we could make look like the inside of a abandoned cabin.

There was two bookshelves in the room.

It had a desk in there too.

And I remember thinking, it needs to look like this guy has boarded himself up inside.

So we need some boards.

Hal had told me about some rundown cabins located on the top of a hill, then almost like the backyard of Arx Mortis.

They were being used for storage and that's where we could find plywood, wooden planks, two by fours.

So me and David are walking up this hill.

It's gotten dark at this point.

We're in the middle of the woods.

And then I see the two cabins.

Inside they had just excess plywood that they need to build stuff inside the house.

David was shining his flashlight around looking for the perfect pieces of wood when all of a sudden I could hear this like gravelly noise, like someone walking on gravel.

It sounded like somebody was close to us.

And as I turned to look at where the noise is, it stops.

And I was like, you heard that too, right?

And David said, yeah, I did.

And he had this look of surprise on his face.

I'm kind of standing there frozen, wondering if someone from the building is following us, but I know everyone's back there, so this has gotta be just an animal.

We grabbed the planks that we needed and scurried back down the hill and about five seconds in our walk down the hill, we could hear the footsteps again following us.

We stopped, looked at each other and turned around.

And just like before the footsteps came to an abrupt stop, David looks at me and we both kind of have this silent agreement that we're going to hurry down the hill.

As we get back to the room, I remember dropping the planks down and seeing David's two friends.

And they were kind of shaking a little bit.

They were a little pale.

They were asking us, "were you guys in that other room?

Were you in that hospital over there?"

I was like, no, me and David were up on the hill.

"Is Hal in that room?"

No.

Hal's in the styling area with Tiffany.

They were like, "well, we heard footsteps in that other room, and then we'd hear scratching on the wall.

So we thought you guys were playing a prank on us at first."

I look at both of them and I'm telling them the same thing.

I told Tiffany, all of this is fake.

This is a fake haunted house.

Don't let it get to you.

When we began filming, it was around 10:30 at night.

I had a slip of sticky notes in my sweaty back pocket that had all my shots on him.

Different takes of how writing the list, how he was sweating, looking disheveled, closeups of the pen, moving frantically across the list paper.

We were speeding through the shots pretty quickly, but I was getting so many, 'cause I was so amateur.

Everything was coming out blurry or out of focus.

David is, he's in educator mode.

He is helping me the whole way through.

And Hal was, he... he just had to look nervous, anxious, and depressed and scared.

That's all he had to do.

And he did that fine.

He was okay.

At 2:00 AM we finally get Tiffany back in.

She's in full makeup.

They airbrushed her face to make it seem very pale and gray, like she'd been dead for a very long time and they accented her veins with this hint of navy blue.

She looked like a tortured demon that was coming back from hell.

Everyone else has left at this point.

It's just Tiffany, me Hal, David and his wife.

We were all in the room finishing the final shots of the night.

I was preparing for the climax of the story.

We were setting up the camera to shoot a wide angle shot of Hal with the door in the background, we'll see Tiffany's hand come through the door and slowly open it.

I'm about to yell action when all of a sudden the lights go out.

My first instinct was to look into the hallway that goes to the haunted hospital and I see it has power.

I think we've blown a fuse.

We can't trust this outlet and we need to start looking for another power source.

David runs the extension cord down the library hallway.

He plugged the extension cord to another outlet, plugged in all the lights, and we begin filming again.

We were now moving on to our main shot, the shot where Hal looks up from his paper and the demon is right over his shoulder.

I'm peering down my camera about ready to call action again, and then all of a sudden the lights go out again.

I can feel this faint gasp behind me from Tiffany.

David looks at me with this peering glare.

So I said, I'll go see what's going on.

And I walked down the hallway, but as I'm walking, I could feel the air change.

I could feel the chills with every step.

It almost felt like there were eyes on me.

I turned around to see if someone had joined me in the hallway and no one was there.

So I kind of made a hurry walk and that's when I noticed that the plug had been ripped from the wall.

It is a commercial grade extension cord.

It is a hundred feet long for that to happen.

Someone had to use force.

Maybe someone kicked it, but there's no way someone kicks a cord 50 feet away and it comes straight from the wall.

I am trying to repeat in my head what I've been telling everyone else all night.

It's fake.

It's fake.

It's fake.

I remember plugging it back in.

I made sure that there was plenty of slack.

I moved quickly down the hallway and I just said, let's keep shooting.

I grabbed the camera, started rolling.

Tiffany puts her chin on how shoulder at the segment where she is supposed to scare him.

And as Hal turns to look at her, the lights go out again.

At this point, no one's making a noise.

We're just kind of looking around in this dumbfounded state.

We're running out of explanations and there's only so many times you can tell yourself it's fake.

So we all start walking down the hallway together and we're walking briskly.

We arrived.

The extension cord was plugged in.

Hal didn't say anything.

He was calm, cool and collected.

But David looked at me and was like, what the hell?

David plugged in all the lights again and they were up and running.

We got back to the room.

We only needed 30 seconds of a shot.

We filmed it as quickly as possible.

We started packing up the equipment.

Al was on a knee putting his camera in his bag.

The girls are standing in the corner wrapping the extension cord.

David is to my right, standing in the hallway when all of a sudden... that damn animatronic starts screaming.

I felt this massive chill in my bones.

I was frozen in that moment 'cause I knew how it was set off.

And this time there was no logical explanation on that.

Hal looked at me and said, "what the hell Set that thing off?"

Mr.

Calm, cool and collected was no longer calm, cool and collected.

We packed our stuff up in silence, threw it in the back of the truck as quickly as possible and got out of there.

I woke up late in the day.

We still needed to pick up the outdoor shots so we can finish the whole shoot.

We get there and we finish filming As we're wrapping up some of the makeup artists from the night before were coming back, they were asking us how the shooting went.

They asked Tiffany how the makeup worked out and then Tiffany brought it up.

Yeah, we had some weird stuff happen last night.

We briefly told a little bit about what happened and next thing I know when the makeup artist is like, "yeah, that's just Old Joe."

I looked at her like a dog trying to understand a human voice and said, what do you mean it's old Joe?

"She said, yeah, old Joe.

He's a janitor that used to work at a flea market.

When the flea market closed down, he had nowhere to go.

So we hired him an Arx Mortis.

He was quite the prankster in the day.

He would come in and scare the staff.

He would wait till the actors were in place and no one was around and knock on the walls.

He would yell at the top of his lungs when you thought no one was around.

And then he passed away from a heart attack.

They claim he's still there pulling his pranks.

To this day."

I don't react.

I'm zoning out because I can't believe what I'm hearing and is tying so much together.

I was completely dumbfounded.

But all that kind of went by the wayside because my career in filmmaking had just begun and I was super excited about it and also completely wiped from the night before.

I think it was the fall of 2022, I finally went back to Arx Mortis as a guest.

Screams had filled the air, the fog machines were on, the crowd was heavy.

We're going through the haunted hospital, Hal was in his dentist costume, telling people he is gonna rip their their tongues out.

And we round the corner of the library and as I'm walking down the bridge, that same animatronic got me this time like it did the last time.

And I just remember smiling 'cause it brought back so many great memories.

I hope Old Joe is scaring the new guests like he did me.

And as for the finished product, I do watch it occasionally if I'm ever in the need of a good laugh.

The film itself, it sucks, but hey, at least for now, I have a great story to tell.