Nestled in downtown Baton Rouge, there is a house where psychotic janitors and undead Englishmen run wild. 
The 13th Gate is a haunted house where guests walk through room after room of frightening scenes. This month, the 13th Gate is celebrating its 13th year. 
“This year, the house features a new series of scenes taking place in Victorian-era London. There’s plague and death all over,” said owner Dwayne Sanburn.  
The scenes model the Whitechapel area of East London — the working class and slum area where Jack the Ripper famously committed a string of murders.
Each year, the 13th Gate adds new scenes and changes old ones to provide a new experience for returning guests. This determination to provide new content is much of why the 13th Gate has been able to stick around for 13 years. 
“We try to change about a third of the show every year. As soon as our season is over, we start getting story ideas ready for the next year,” said Blaine Quam, lead scenic artist.
Sets at the 13th Gate are created over months of meticulous work. Scenic artists do everything from building wooden boardwalks for the haunted house’s outdoor section to wiring an animatronic wooly mammoth to move when guests are near.
“A few years ago, we got these guys who have done tons of Hollywood sets to come in and teach us how to build seriously realistic sets,” Quam said.
Every year, the scenes get more intricate, and each scene is a piece of a different world. In a room with a knife wielding butcher, rows of fake raw meat swing around to make the scare feel more realistic in its environment. 
“We’ve been here for 13 years now. Simple is just not what we do any more,” Quam said. “We’re at the point where we have a lot of room, a huge budget, and the man power to make this the scariest haunted house in Louisiana, if not the whole country.” 
The biggest changes this year are the new scenes taking place in a demented clown’s house. After a period of being considered cliché and comical, clowns are now being re-imagined and resurrected in the horror world as a symbol of fear, like in last week’s episode of “American Horror Story: Freak Show.” 
“These scenes are different than what you expect out of scary clowns,” Quam said. “I don’t want to give too much away, but let me just say, they’re some of the darkest scenes we’ve ever done.” 
Every night, the house is open, actors and artists are busy doing things like painting holes on bodies and putting on bloody prosthetics. 
The costume and makeup process is long, and it takes the efforts of artists who sit at stations backstage, painting face after face and bringing character concepts to life. Once made-up, actors and actresses wait in a big room until it’s time to take their places in the house.
“We employ about 200 people every night that the house is open, a lot of high school and college kids,” Quam said, “Many of our returning actors come to us from the LSU School of Drama.”
One of those people is Drew Cothern, an actor from Baton Rouge. Cothern has been creeping out the 13th Gate lobby as “Frankie,” the psychotic janitor, for seven seasons. 
“Frankie has become such a fixture here that people come here expecting to interact with him. That means I can’t ever break out of character here, but I love that,” Cothern said.
Another reason the 13th Gate has been so successful is the thriving community of both employees and guests who frequent the attraction.
“The management gives us the ability to be creative, and we give them the scariest stuff we can come up with,” said makeup artist Sarah Bess. “It’s one big scary family.”
The 13th Gate provides jobs for many Baton Rouge locals. Some employees are needed to provide security or relay messages between stations in the house. Others are needed for odd jobs like working machines that provide smoke and other effects. 
“I just called this number and told them how interested I was, and they told me when to come in,” said Baton Rouge resident Gerald Hamilton as fake blood dripped from his sharpened teeth onto his “undead Michael Jackson” costume. “It’s my first day. I’m really excited. My job is basically to scare anyone I see.” 
Hamilton and Cothern are both characters free to roam between the 13th Gate building and Necropolis 13, a zombie-infested attraction that is separate but associated with the 13th Gate. Both haunts bring lines of people waiting to be scared out of their wits.
Necropolis 13 is modelled after a New Orleans-style cemetery in which the undead reach up from their graves. 
“If you’re looking to support your local community, Necropolis 13 and The 13th Gate is a great place to start,” said actress Tristan Reid. 
Together, the 13th Gate and Necropolis 13 are constantly evolving and pulling out all the tricks for an hour of entertainment meant to bring true terror to downtown Baton Rouge.
13th Gate
Date: Every weekend through Nov. 8
Time: 6:30-11:30 p.m.
Place: 832 St. Philip Street
Contact: (225) 389-1313

Gallery • 12 Photos

Raegan Labat

One of the nation's best haunted houses, 13th Gate, celebrates its 13th birthday. The 13th Gate is located at 832 St. Phillip Street.