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The coveted Gold Rush haul is long gone from the brick-walled, paint-peeling, stone-cold basement of San Francisco’s Old Mint building. But something else has moved in.
A dark and stormy figure looms from the shadows — San Francisco drag queen Peaches Christ, dressed to kill with a raven-black wig tall enough to rival the Millennium Tower, but clearly built on a more solid foundation. We’re in a room full of medical mechanisms and rusty prison-cell doors, ancient and decaying, with a foreboding darkness pushing through the corroded bars.
Someone’s pounding on a rear wall. What the devil did I just bump into, a body bag? OK, I’m officially creeped out, even with the house lights on, and I really want my mama.
This is Terror Vault, a new and delightfully haunted experience to spook the city this Halloween season, opening Wednesday and running through Nov. 3. We got a preview earlier this week, and while there are plenty of scares, spooks and startles, this is not your run-of-the-shopping-mall haunted-house maze with ghouls around every corner.
No, this is a show. A 45-minute show to be exact, that gives you your 60 bucks worth. It’s immersive theater, performance art gone to the dark side, with local actors of evil, who had to pass scream tryouts to get the job.
Be advised, what happens at the Terror Vault doesn’t stay at the Terror Vault. It follows you home to your nightmares, mostly because it gets you directly involved in the action – if you want to — with escape-room-style puzzles or by playing parts in scary scenes. And there’s booze to boot, cocktails like Bat Boy Guano or Zombie Puss at the pre-show bar, hence this is an over-21 experience.
But despite the adult atmosphere, the scares are not super gross-out gory. The Vault embraces the eerie. It’s more about morbid mood and macabre machinations than burned-up bodies and extruded entrails. And a separate section for kids — a Dead Zone zombie-tag game — opens Oct. 12.
“This whole thing is really art and theater,” says a gleeful Peaches, also known as Joshua Grannell, a big presence in town and in person, and the evil brainchild behind the Vault. Peaches, artistic director David Flower of David Flower Productions and Ryan Melchiano of event firm Non Plus Ultra formed a new production company, called Into the Dark, just for this haunt.
Peaches smiles sweetly, but evil lurks under those 10-pound locks. And it’s lurked there a long time.
“Since I was little kid, the first thing I really got excited about was Halloween. The ‘Wizard of Oz’ — I was obsessed with the Wicked Witch of the West,” Peaches says. Indeed even then, Peaches, as Josh, would put on creepy shows in the family’s suburban house, recruiting neighborhood kids, building sets and setting the stage for a long career in performance art. “But I never did this,” Peaches says, pointing to the prison doors and meat slicers. “This is a dream come true.”
So here we are at the Old Mint on Fifth Street. The building is creepy enough in its own right. Built in the 1870s, it stood strong through the 1906 earthquake and fire. Vault victims enter through the massive stone pillars and gold-leafed doors, before being separated into small groups and led through the building by a tour guide, perhaps Lisa McHenry, a parks-and-rec tour guide in real life.
“But I always wanted to lead people into the depths of hell,” she says in a frighteningly serious way.
She leads guests into the depths of the Mint, sharing the building’s “untold story” — untold because most of it’s made up by Peaches, including the tale of a wealthy serial killer who did surgeries on human-animal hybrids, Dr. Moreau style. So you’ll go through his storage rooms of body parts and open lockers of brains and potions. You’ll continue “outside” into a prayer garden — and you’d better say your prayers – where stone statues bear severed doll heads.
Then you’ll pass through a mansion of dim chandeliers and take your seat in a pew, learning the tale of a Satanist cult leader who used children to do her bidding. Cue Peaches in a special scene here and, trust me, Peaches alone is worth the price of admission.
If You Go
Terror Vault: Open 6:30 to 10 p.m. nightly (except Tuesdays) through Nov. 3. Ages 21 and up only. Tickets are $60; reservations are encouraged. 88 Fifth St., San Francisco; www.intothedarksf.com.
Dead Zone: Zombie Tag, a zombie-themed, high-tech interactive game of tag designed for children over 10 and adults, runs Oct. 12 through Nov. 3 on Friday and Saturday nights. Tickets are $19.95.
