Pittsburgh has long been a mecca for haunted attractions. The boom began in the 1970s, and before the era of theme parks and big-budget Hollywood effects, “haunted” houses were mostly do-it-yourself, and for charity. Alongside the usual haunts at churches, schools, and firehouses, the region turned hockey rinks into “terror domes,” decked out trolley cars and buses, and even sailed a creepified Gateway Clipper, the U.S.S. Nightmare, replete with gory scenes and strobe lights.
From 1984 to 1993, Phipps Conservatory also got in on the spooky fun. The glass greenhouse and botanical gardens hosted an annual haunted house called Fright Nights. For 10 seasons, thousands of visitors lined up at the Conservatory, paid a couple bucks, and traipsed through the flora to get scared.
Given Phipps’ renown for its world-class garden and seasonal flower shows, Pittsburgh City Paper had to learn more about a time when costumed teenagers popped out of the plants. We looked into the origins of Phipps Fright Nights and what terrors once lurked inside.
The Conservatory provides a brief history of its Fright Nights — originally named the Phipps Haunted House — on its website, noting the event debuted in October 1984 with “eight rooms full of haunts and spooky sights.” The one-dollar admission price (50 cents for kids) came with a treat-or-treat bag. An event listing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette promised “goblins and beasties,” a fortune teller, magician, and costume contest.
Before 1993, Phipps Conservatory was managed by the City of Pittsburgh — which eventually extended the scares into Schenley Park — and, at least in Fright Nights’ early years, it was CitiParks employees who were pressed into service as actors and set decorators. They dressed up as witches, hung prop limbs to create a “Wall of Arms,” and put together a spooky soundtrack that included “Monster Mash” and recordings of whale songs.
For Fright Nights’ second season in 1985, CitiParks employees and a staff of 40 hit their stride. They concocted a mad scientist lab, a haunted pumpkin patch with 250 lit pumpkins, and mummy catacombs. According to the Post-Gazette, the Conservatory’s Fern Room transformed into “an eerie spider’s lair” and a “collection of manacled prisoners” lay in wait among the philodendrons. Fright Nights’ inaugural year brought 2,300 people, and that number more than doubled to 5,000.
Phipps’ program coordinator told the Post-Gazette that though the event was intended to be family-friendly, “with Spanish moss dripping from above and moonlight streaking through the windows,” the Conservatory was “the perfect place to scare up a scare.”
Hoping to again double attendance and draw 10,000 people, the next Fright Nights in 1986 was billed with a “goblins under glass” theme. The Conservatory enticed thrillseekers with an appearance from Dracula, a “poltergeist room,” and the moss wall’s hair-raising return.
Most of what can be gleaned about Phipps Fright Nights comes from Halloween event listings in local newspapers (“an a-boo-dance of holiday activities” one was titled). In the pre-internet era of haunted houses, those looking to get spooked would grab the paper and some cash and hop between attractions. Some haunts stayed open until people stopped showing up, and based on its ads, Phipps Fright Nights stretched until at least 11 p.m. and sometimes after midnight.
Characters and sets also started to recur.
“Horticulture becomes ‘horror culture,’” a 1989 P-G listing reads, teasing the ever-popular mad scientists, a swamp creature, a “Garden of Ghouls,” and “the blood-thirsty vampire jaws of Venus d’Fly Trap.” Once a Little Shop of Horrors theme was introduced at the Conservatory, it apparently became an instant lock. The Venus flytrap stayed on as a signature character, alongside “Phippsy Moth,” a human-sized insect with a painted face and psychedelic wings that would dart among the flowerbeds, pop up, and scream.
In Fright Nights’ final years in the 1990s, the production had a fully professional air, and performing arts majors from Point Park University worked as the haunted house’s scare actors. A 1990 Pittsburgh Press article offered a look behind the scenes, detailing how actors arrived to an appointed dressing room to apply full-body makeup, blow-dry hair into place, and spray on glitter. Phippsy the Moth met its match in The Exterminator, a college-aged actor donning a safari hat, lab coat, and a painted-on “half-deformed” face, who would squirt Phippsy and passersby with a spray bottle.
That year, horrors included a “horde of howling zombies, grim reapers, giant insects, and other unspeakable things,” according to the Press.
Phipps notes on its website that, although Fright Nights remained popular after 10 seasons, the annual event was “deemed potentially harmful to the plant collections” and discontinued in 1993. The same year, the Conservatory became a privately managed, though still city-owned nonprofit, and the handover may have also impacted the event. Phipps tells City Paper that the Conservatory still loves to celebrate Halloween and is hosting a Fright Nights-adjacent Phipps After Dark: House of Haunts event on Fri., Oct. 11.
But Fright Nights harks back to a golden era of haunts. Before high-tech gimmicks and computer-generated anything, you could scare someone by jumping out of a plant, armed with nothing but face paint, fake blood, and some bad puns.
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2024.
