'Naked and scared': Haunted house welcomes nude thrill-seekers

From:  Today

A new attraction at Pennsylvania's "Shocktoberfest"
invites thrill-seekers to enter a haunted house while naked.

A new attraction at a Pennsylvania "scream" park aims to scare the pants off thrill-seekers before they even enter it.

Shocktoberfest, a “haunted scream park” in Sinking Spring, Pa., has added an attraction called the “Naked and Scared Challenge.’’ For $20 per person, participants can experience the haunted house while being completely naked.

“It’s the first time it’s ever been done anywhere in the world,’’ Shocktoberfest president and owner Patrick Konopelski told TODAY.com. “The whole idea is to create this vulnerability and get their defenses down. It can be hard to scare groups, and you usually have to get louder, more chaotic, and more tense, but now if they’re not wearing clothing, it can be more intimate. You can scare with a whisper rather than a scream because people will only huddle so close to one another.”

Konopelski, who has run Shocktoberfest for 22 years, got the idea when he saw his four teenagers watching the Discovery Channel show “Naked and Afraid,” which puts one man and one woman together to survive for 21 days with no food, no water, and no clothes.

“The people on the show were genuinely scared, and I thought, ‘I have to do something to try to emulate that,’’’ Konopelski said. “Of course, I ran it by my wife and she hated the idea, but I kept going with it as most husbands do.”