psychoceramics: Helloween

[Room 101 <room101 @ teleport.com>]

Churches Offer Shocking Scenes at 'Alternative' Haunted Houses

AP
28-OCT-97

VACAVILLE, Calif. (AP) The images of death and despair inside the "Hell
House" are shocking simulations of a funeral for a gay AIDS victim, an
abortion operation, a teen's suicide. 

"Everything they see here in Hell House is the work of Lucifer's hand,"
Pastor Scott Brooks said as he put the final touches on the Harvest
Church's version of a haunted house, set to open tonight. 

Four years ago, there was just a lone Hell House in Roswell, N.M. As of
this Halloween, 231 churches across the country have ordered the Hell
House kit from Arvada, Colo.-based Abundant Life Christian Center. 

For $150, churches receive a 270-page manual on how to scare visitors
straight to heaven by frightening them with images of sin. There are
construction plans and even an audio cassette of ghoulish noises. 

Keenan Roberts, the associate pastor of Abundant Life, opened the first
Hell House in Roswell. He stands by the material and the message. 

"Nobody said that the church is supposed to be tolerant," Roberts said in
a telephone interview. "Homosexuality is perverse. It is wrong." 

Despite threatened protests by gay rights and abortion-rights activists,
Brooks defends the approach as a way to spread his church's belief that
the Bible is the final judge of character. 

"It specifically lists homosexuality as a sin that will keep (gays) from
entering into eternal life," Brooks said. "We're not gay bashing. We don't
hate homosexuals. God doesn't hate homosexuals. God hates sin." 

Jim Mitulski is a gay pastor at the 450-member Metropolitan Community
Church in San Francisco, 46 miles west of Vacaville. Mitulski, who has
AIDS, said the fear-based message of Harvest Church is repugnant. 

"I think it's a gross misuse of the spirit of Christianity," Mitulski
said. "He's using religion to justify prejudice. It's ignorance at best,
prejudice at worst." 

Brooks said Hell House is not recommended for children under the age of 13
and parental discretion is strongly advised. 

Visitors walk through a dark hallway and into a room where a casket sits
on a stage surrounded by cardboard flames, red lights and eerie wisps from
a smoke machine. It is a mock funeral for a gay man dead from AIDS. 

The group is then led to the "abortion room," where a young woman lies
screaming on a hospital bed, surrounded by red towels and medical
instruments. A small TV shows videotaped footage of a real fetus inside a
womb, until the last moment when doll parts are discarded into a metal
bowl and the screen goes black. 

"If showing a simulated abortion keeps one young lady out of the back seat
of a Camaro with her boyfriend, we've done our job," Brooks said. 

Pam Chaloult, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood in Northern California,
called the scene appalling. She said it is the church's attempt to
sensationalize a "religious political agenda rather than educate." 

In another room, a teen-age boy sitting in a room full of empty beer
bottles and "grunge" music posters commits a mock suicide, despondent over
a lost girlfriend and a lack of communication with his father.