It's Rod Zombie! Undead Blagojevich haunts halls
Statesville Haunted Prison helps celebrate anniversary in spooky style
The Statesville Haunted Prison has done a lot of time as one of the top haunted houses in the Midwest. The “prison” is on Siegel’s Cottonwood Farms in Crest Hill — across Weber Road from the real Stateville Correctional Center.
(Jon Sall/Sun-Times)
(Jon Sall/Sun-Times)
(Jon Sall/Sun-Times)
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Hot Halloween costumes 2009
The farm celebrates its 100th anniversary this year.
Cottonwood is named in honor of the tree that grows on the 40-acre spread in southwest suburbia. The farm is to agritourism what shady governors are to Illinois. Besides the prison, Cottonwood has a “Pirates in the Cornibbean Farm Maize.” The haunted prison and maize attract 75,000 visitors each fall. They’re open through Sunday.
“I want to stay on the farm, and we do this to value-enhance our product,” said Cottonwood owner Paul Siegel. “As we lose acres, the family farm needs to diversify. I want to keep the farm in the family.”
Siegel created the haunted prison in 1996. It has grown into a prison and a City of the Dead. The prison and city incorporate three large farm buildings. There are 30 maximum-security cells with nearly 200 actors portraying Hannibal the Cannibal, a clown, beady- eyed guards and other bizarros.
This creepy dark side is what motivated me to portray former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich for a prison tour.
Blago loves Elvis.
This is Jailhouse Shock.
The fine folks at Beatnix, 3400 N. Halsted, sold me a puffy black Blago wig for $22 ($1 extra for a hairnet). I felt like I was wearing a bedpan. I picked up a discounted copy of The Governor, Blago’s breezy memoir. I was in Halloween heaven, ready to descend into Mell (as in Ald. Richard).
The haunted prison is produced by Zombie Army Productions, a Chicago-based company specializing in acting, set design and sound and lighting. The army pays a beady eye to detail. Summer classes in improvisational theater, makeup and character development are required for Statesville participants.
“Some haunts are gorgeously detailed in sets and props with Disney-quality videos but they’re not scary,” said Chad Savage, who owns the 10-year-old hauntedhousechicago.com Web site, where Statesville ranks at the top. “Other haunts have no budget but are still good because the actors are so committed. Statesville has the one-two punch of great sets and original concepts. And they have psychotically committed actors.
“It remains the most intense haunted house I have been to in terms of being assaulted visually, audibly, every way they can short of punching you in the face. I was there opening night, and I would be surprised if they didn’t have to carry a couple of people out of the Maniac Ward this year. It is one of the top haunts in the Midwest.”
Actors arrive at the farm as early as 2:30 p.m. before the prison opens to the God-fearing public at 7 p.m. About a half hour before showtime, the troupe gathers in a barn for a warmup exercise. In costume as assorted ghouls and zombies, they chant, scream and dance to the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.”
I was already scared.
“If you try to outgore what people see, you’re going to be spinning your wheels,” said John La Flamboy, producer-director-designer of Zombie Army. “There are video games, television and film. So we produce an intense, aggressive show. We try to attack all of your senses.”
Just like reading The Governor.
La Flamboy, 34, is a theater graduate at Southern Illinois University. “We travel the country studying what’s out there to scare people,” he said. “But where we come from as theater people and filmmakers is that we’re creating a show. At the end of the day, you can’t scare everybody. But you can entertain everyone.”
Zombie Army employs five makeup artists. Bonnie White of Toronto had the challenge of taking my good looks and turning them into the ex-gov. She suggested rosy earth tones as she listened to the German industrial beat of KMFDM on her boom box. “It’s not every day I get to make a Blagojevich Zombie,” said White, originally from Darien. “I make up about 20 actors a night.”
She then blew compressed air and rubbing alcohol in my face, which reminded me of experiments with amyl nitrate in the early 1980s.
Fully made up as “Rod Zombie,” I buzzed out of the barn into an outdoor dog cage, where I waited with other guests before entering the freaky prison.
The large cage was once used for the Siegel’s black labs Blackie and Mugsie. “Even when they’re out in the cage, actors are trying to find the weak link,” Siegel said with a conniving smile. “The person who is scared. We have people that don’t make it through the line.”
The journey into the depths of depravity runs about an hour. Most disconcerting for my Blago getup were the dark, compressed “Claustrophobia Halls” made from air and vinyl. They messed up my hair. Anywhere from a third to half of the production is changed every Halloween.
Many people confuse Siegel’s Statesville with Stateville.
“That’s not by accident,” said Siegel, who is married with four children ages 21 to 28. “I grew up here. Much of the prison population is from the South. When they had more visitation on Sundays, people got lost. They’d come here and ask, ‘Where’s Statesville? They always put an ‘s’ in the middle. We field a lot of calls for them. We get a lot of hate mail. And love mail. I’ve been in there and in the roundhouse. It’s a very scary place. Its a maximum-security prison. What are you more scared of than being locked up in prison?”
Stateville (population 3,500) on Route 66 (Illinois 53) opened for business in 1925. Cottonwood was already growing corn, soybeans and oats across the street. The farm also raised cows, pigs and 6,000 chickens until 1980, when it burned down due to an electrical fire.
“Now we grow soybeans, pumpkins and sweet corn,” Siegel said. “When I was a kid there were guards on horseback that rode around the prison. That would have been a six-mile ride. Very often the guards would come in for a cup of coffee.”
Halloween is Siegel’s favorite season.
“I was born on Oct. 30, which was my father’s 50th birthday,” said Siegel, who turns 52 today. “In the mid-1940s, when my father was in his early 30s, two convicts broke out, came to the door with a knife and stole his car. It was a rainy night and 135th Street, about four miles up the road, used to make a 90-degree jog. They didn’t make the jog. They crashed into the cornfield. One convict got hurt and stayed with the car. One of my cousins saw this guy driving crazy with my dad’s car. He took off after them. When they crashed the car, the other convict took him hostage.” The men were quickly trapped and apprehended.
Just like guests from all walks of life at the Statesville Haunted Prison.