EDITOR'S NOTE: The following story appeared in the October 1998 issue of Arizona Highways.
All Hallow's Eve at Old Tucson Is Bloody Good
By Kathleen Walker
Nothin' like a hanging to bring the folks to town. At the last one I attended, they stood five deep, a semicircle around the gallows. Their appetites had been whetted by the scene at the nearby guillotine a few minutes earlier when a severed head was held aloft.
Bang went the trapdoor, spoong went the rope, and the deed was done. The crowd turned tail and ran for the Grand Hotel or the mission or the outdoor human butcher shop down the road. Men, women, and children moved quickly, some carrying maps as though on a treasure hunt for horror. One voice called out, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to see that show, Mom." They were heading for something called The Bloodletting.
"Get out of Nightfall if you can," a voice cried from the mission, where a man fed body parts into an incinerator. What, and miss a dismemberment? I also needed to search out the blood-drenched laboratory, where someone was going to chase me with a flailing arm, not his arm, somebody else's. Such is the nightlife in Nightfall, Arizona, the evil twin of Old Tucson.
Two hours before, I had been sitting on the veranda of the Grand Hotel in Old Tucson Studios, the Western town theme park and film set southwest of Tucson. Music from the movies and television series filmed there played over the audio system. Tourists wandered the streets and shops. A chicken crossed the road and found absolutely nothing of consequence on the other side.
Then, at 5 p.m., a man sat down next to me. Conversation was limited by the large black spider in his mouth. I was relatively blessed. They told me there was a woman near the town gate who had a rat in hers.
At 5:30 I noticed a body being strung up from the roof of the mission. The last glow of the sun may have been turning the mountains behind Old Tucson a deep pink, but the oncoming night, October 31, Halloween, promised to be colored blood-red. The transformation from the bucolic to the odd had begun.
During the month of October, the daytime town of Old Tucson becomes the nighttime town of Nightfall. Ghouls take over the darkened streets. Witches sell candied apples. Asylum escapees are chained to poles or walk free. Instead of panning for gold, people are invited to pan for fingers, ears, lips, eyeballs. The town is filled with gore galore, and the visitors love it, up to 40,000 of them.
"It's our most anticipated special event," Tim Bentley, Old Tucson's film and marketing director, said of the twilight switch to Nightfall.
The price of admission includes a continual show, not only extending across the evening but the years. Played out before the crowd is the saga of Dr. Jebediah Hyde, a man who has definitely partaken too freely of locoweed. Now in its seventh season, the story had a two-year intermission due to the fire of 1995, which destroyed much of the park. However, like the town, the evil Hyde has arisen from the ashes.
As the story goes, Hyde runs the asylum in Nightfall, using the inmates for his evil experiments. Every year brings new chapters with the action taking place in different parts of Old Tucson. The crowd moves with the story, from the town square to the mission, meeting characters like the journalist Meg Taylor, the soon-to-be-hanged Judge Bailey, and the brave sheriff.
Inmates run amok, creatures get loose, blood is splattered everywhere, and everything — guns, fireworks, explosions — goes bang in the night.
The audience can become part of the action. Costumes are welcome. Two Trekkies in the full-dress uniforms of "The Next Generation" dropped in while I was there. A woman dressed as a pumpkin, right up to the stem on her head, ate her dinner while I stared. A staid-looking woman stood outside one of the shops, nothing unusual, if you were willing to ignore the large bullwhip she held.
White face paint and black lipstick are de rigueur for the true inmates of Nightfall, as are blackened hollows around the eyes. Before this night began, Old Tucson employees lined up in front of mirrors to make their own transformations. In one dressing room, two of Dr. Hyde's henchmen applied paint, pleasant faces disappearing under chalky white, a bloody scar created on one from forehead to cheek.
The man of three heads, his own and the skulls that sat on each shoulder, stood with them. He dabbed at his face with two-inch-long magenta fingernails. Close to seven feet tall — six feet eight inches on his own and two more added by the Frankenstein boots — Curt Booth called himself The Creeper. He earned his pay by sneaking up behind people in the crowd.
"Some run outright," he said of the flight his appearance may cause. Others will resist.
"Mostly they say, 'I'm not scared of you,'" said Booth.
Some younger visitors were hard-pressed to show such braggadocio at shows full of explosions and buckets of blood and giants with two skulls too many. They chose the puppet shows and the storytelling sessions. They painted pumpkins at the gazebo. There, the background moans of the doomed on the audio system were replaced by music from the carousel. Add the twinkling lights of that endless colorful horse race, and this part of town proved a far less frightening place than Nightfall.
But, back in Dr. Hyde's dark town, other children had all the scary stuff figured out.
"It's not real," John McGraw, age nine, assured me with great solemnity, referring to the head that had been cut off by the guillotine. "The eyes are not real."
At the mission, Kyle Gillette, five, watched as Dr. Hyde's story unfolded with fireworks and a fountain bursting into flames. With his hands over his ears, his face lit by the fiery glow, Kyle's eyes darted from one pyrotechnic display to another. Then he laughed, a sound full of pleasure and fun.
There we were, amidst all the bangs and the booms, the fake fights, the nut-case doctors, and other nasties, and, like young Kyle, or because of him, we laughed, too.
On Halloween in Nightfall, I stood near the front gate watching the families arrive in costumes and the teenagers arrive in bunches. A group of foreign students from the University of Arizona Center for English as a Second Language came.
The group's leader was Gonzalo Valenzuela of Chile. As we talked, an inmate who looked like a crazed cossack rattled the chain that held him to a nearby building. He begged every passerby for a nail file, a paper clip. A woman moved into our conversation, getting much too close for comfort, her eyes eerie, her black cape fluttering in the night wind. A train rolled through the town crossing, a hollow-eyed ghoul at the wheel. Cries and moans filled the air.
"This is something very typical," Valenzuela informed me of the reason his group had come to Nightfall. Sure it is, I thought as I tried to avoid the strange woman's stare. But only at Old Tucson's Halloween party.