Lee Pulaski, lpulaski@shawanoleader.com
Leader Photo by Lee Pulaski The Panic Chambers Hotel will hold its third and final season this fall at one of Gresham’s oldest buildings, at 1295 Main St., before moving to bigger accommodations in Menominee, Mich., in 2015.
It wasn’t holy water, a carefully worded incantation or a silver bullet that brought the Panic Chambers Hotel to a shocking end.
It was its own success.
The Panic Chambers, a haunted house in Gresham that generated sweeping acclaim in its first two years, will be back for one more round of fear in 2014 before moving north to Menominee, Michigan.
Although organizers are in the middle of a five-year lease for the former hotel, gentlemen’s retirement home and bath house for loggers, the unexpected popularity of that haunted house prompted the move to a larger site.
Zach Boyea, a Green Bay resident who started the Panic Chambers with business partner Lance Williams, said that attendance at the haunted house in 2013 was more than double the 2,000 people who visited in the first year. Organizers had originally expected only 500 people in 2012.
“The hotel is not able to physically hold the capacity we had in the last season,” Boyea said. “This was doing next to nothing in marketing.”
The Gresham hotel, which is more than a century old, is more than 4,000 square feet. Visitors often waited in long lines outside in cold weather.
The Menominee facility, formerly a factory, is 18,000 square feet and includes a heated waiting area and arcade for patrons, Boyea said.
“We want to grow. That’s our ambition,” Boyea said.
This year’s haunted house is expected to be open 17 nights, four more than last year, and Boyea and his crew plan to make it the scariest yet. He said he couldn’t divulge full details yet but promised that some of the features would be things not seen in other area haunted houses.
“We’re going to have an extended outdoor attraction that’s going to be part of the haunted house,” Boyea said.
The Gresham Village Board and community in general welcomed the Panic Chambers crew with open arms in 2012, anticipating it would boost visitation and business dollars at a time of year when tourism was winding down.
Board member Tom Madsen said he had heard nothing about the haunted house leaving until the Leader contacted him Thursday for comment.
“I’d seen them working on some new stuff at the hotel in late spring,” he said. “I didn’t know they were leaving.”
The hotel could still be utilized as a haunted house in the future. Boyea said some of the local volunteers have expressed interest in doing a haunted house of their own, but no formal arrangements have been worked out.