"Oh, my God, don't go in there!" pleaded one man, as he emerged the other night.
"That's insane!" screamed his wife.
Erush loves such reactions.
"A couple nights ago, we lost half our visitors in the first room - a few actually wet their pants," he recalled. "It's sort of a good payoff when they do that. Some kid threw up in Mount Airy one year, but that wasn't so good because we had to clean it up.

Fear not, Allan Erush is not into guts and gore. In his haunted houses you find no blood, no chainsaws, no slashing.
He is more Boris Karloff than Freddy Krueger, and he frightens people the old-fashioned way - by surprise.
"We're a cross between Dark Shadows and The Addams Family - creepy, but we can be funny at times," he explained.
"We have our share of rotten corpses - but they're not moist."

After several years of haunting houses in Fairmont Park, Erush this year has converted the Courtesy Stables - an old barn owned by the Riders of the Wissahickon - into Grisly Gothic Gables. A portion of the $6 admission goes into renovation of the stables.

Erush, now 36, has invented an entire family - the Grisly family - dating back to Lithuania and the 13th century. All the relatives, dead and alive, occupy the 17 haunted rooms and are played by haunted house groupies - by day, normal working people - who Erush has befriended over the years. People leap from the most unlikely places, and victims are usually too petrified to notice the finer touches - the original spider webs on windows; the actual cat skeleton perched on a table; the glorious music, including Mussorgksy's Night on Bald Mountain.
Ask Erush why he loves horror, and he will just shrug.
But others have their theories.
"He likes to create his own world," says George Ledoux, his cousin.
"He's just the opposite of what he creates," said Janice Mininberg, one of the actors. "Sweetness, kindness and light."
"Mentally, he's about 10 years old," says Sarah, 34.

Born and raised in western Massachussets, Erush came to Philadelphia in 1984 to attend Temple, where he earned a bachelor's degree in theatre. He worked for five years as an exhibit preparator at the Academy of Natural Sciences, saving his vacation every year to work on haunted houses at Halloween.

Last winter, he left the museum to pursue his passion fulltime, spending three months working on a haunted house in Myrtle Beach, S.C., with another fanatic he met through Fangoria, the trade magazine for horror buffs.