This summer, my best friend Ed and I embarked on a ridiculous road trip. The plan was to visit every Sammy Hayne’s Haunted Café in the country over the course of eight weeks.
In case you’re unfamiliar, Sammy Hayne’s is a restaurant chain heavily themed to all things Gothic, spooky, and haunted. Each location resembles an old, Victorian-style estate or Gothic castle, festooned with cobwebs, gravestones, jack-o-lanterns, stone-faced portraits that seem to follow your every move, and all manner of animatronics—zombies, bats, ghosts, ghouls, you name it.
Sammy Hayne’s was started by its namesake, Samuel Hal Haynes, in the 1980s. Haynes had a strong affinity for Halloween and haunted attractions, and he worked to bring several to life during his storied career. His resume includes such events as Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios, Knott’s Scary Farm, countless small-scale local affairs, and even less frightening but still massive Halloween celebrations like Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party at Magic Kingdom. Sammy had never been in the food industry, but according to his life philosophy, every home, business, or public facility could benefit from some spooky décor. He conceived and spearheaded what he simply called “The Haunted Café.” No one thought it would work, at least outside of the Halloween season, but it ended up being a hit. Sure, business is slower outside of the fall, but year-round, Sammy Hayne’s hosts thousands of guests, dazzling them with their macabre decorations and tempting them with their unique entrees.
Ed was struggling in life when he proposed we take a cross-country trip to every Sammy Hayne’s in the country over the summer. He’d been let go from a high-paying job—his first job out of college, at that. After that, he spent time on rideshare apps and the like and even found some success as a YouTuber. However, the income from that channel began to slow before too long, and his subscriber count plateaued at around 10K. He’d been spending weeks frantically brainstorming surefire hits for videos, and he came upon vlogging during a summer-long road trip as an idea. The Haunted Café was something of a staple of his childhood (we used to have one here years ago that has since become some sort of temple for an obscure religion), and he decided on the final plan to visit them all, putting practically the rest of his money into the stunt, just certain it would pay off.
“I can’t do it alone, Teddy,” Ed told me. “No one’s going to want to watch some guy traveling across the country by himself. I’m gonna need someone to work off of, to keep things as interesting as possible, ya know?”
I was reluctant to join. I myself was going through struggles that couldn’t compare to Ed’s. When I was eighteen, I witnessed my mother being stabbed to death by the man she was having an affair with. They were at my childhood home, believing no one would be home until much later in the day. But I’d gotten off my job at the Dollar Tree early. Apparently, my mom was planning to end things with him, and he didn’t like that. After that, I had to delay my plans to go to college because I got a PTSD diagnosis and went to live with my dad. That was years ago. Counseling and meds helped somewhat. But I remained damaged. I found solace in spending time in the gym to distract myself. I actually ended up gaining a lot of muscle, which made me wonder if Ed also wanted me to tag along as some sort of “bodyguard.” He’d never been on any sort of cross-country trip before, and he knew he didn’t know what he was getting into. Eventually, I agreed to go. Maybe the trip would be good for me. Maybe it would put some nice distant between me and my trauma.
We set out in Ed’s 2002 Ford Tacoma, the same one he drove in high school. Its reliability was questionable to say the least, but it added to the absurdity of the trip, and the absurdity, Ed maintained, was what would earn views.
It took us seven hours of travel to get to our first Sammy Hayne’s. We left from our hometown of Chicago at 5:30 AM and arrived in Nashville, Tennessee at roughly half past noon, just in time for a haunted lunch. There were thirteen locations total in the U.S., with six of those located in Florida. The plan was we’d hit a few locations on the way down, the first one being in Nashville. Then, we’d proceed to knock out the Florida cluster before making our way back up the country. One of our final destinations was to be Atlanta, Georgia. And then there were a handful of locations in neighboring states we didn’t get to.
Now, I’d never been to a Sammy Hayne’s before in my life, and the Nashville location would be my first impression. I have to say, it wasn’t that impressive, at least not at first. Upon walking in, you were greeted by the host, dressed in a plague doctor’s outfit. He didn’t speak. He just stood, towering over us, his beak seeming like it might peck our heads.
“Two please!” said Ed brightly. He had both a bodycam strapped to him and a selfie stick and was busy catching shots of our macabre surroundings and his over-the-top reactions to them. The plague doctor nodded, and with a gloved hand, produced two menus from behind the tombstone-shaped host’s stand. He then led us to our table.
Our table was in the shape of torture rack, and the booth we were in was upholstered to resemble the interior of a coffin. While Ed was busy vlogging away, I took in my surroundings. The ceiling was vaulted, like we were inside a Gothic cathedral, and covered in webs, both cobwebs and spiderwebs by the looks of it. I could clearly make out very real, quite large spiders crawling around on some of them, which caused me to wince.
It was hard to make out much anything else. The only lighting in the place was from torches that lined the grimy stone walls. The health violations this place had to be committing! It was a wonder it was still open.
“You used to come to this place as a kid?” I asked Ed incredulously.
He seemed annoyed to be interrupted from his filming of the restaurant and his exaggerated reactions to it.
“Yeah, all the time!” he told me.
“That’s kinda weird,” I mumbled. There didn’t seem to be any families here. The cliental, sitting in booths similar to ours and stools made of faux skeleton parts, all seemed like the kind of crowd you’d see at a dive bar. “Doesn’t look like a kid would…well…have a good time here, I guess you could say.”
At this, Ed’s face stretched into a mischievous grin. “Oh, just wait,” he laughed. “You haven’t seen the best part yet.”
A crash of thunder. I looked up to find the ceiling illuminated with strobe lights and a laser show meant to resemble a lighting storm. I screamed and jumped when an animatronic character sprung up out of a trap door right next to where I was sitting, right out of the seat of the booth! It turned to leer at me—a grotesque clown-thing with demented eyes, sharp teeth, and crazily-applied makeup. I swatted it at it, and it retracted back from whence it came. Ed was howling with laughter. Gazing around, I saw the entire place was alight with animatronic chaos: large bats on cables dropping from holes in the ceiling, hordes of zombies crashing through certain false sections of wall, giant snakes and centipedes popping out of the ground and striking at the ankles of patrons who screamed at the attacks with delight. This went on for a good minute or so before it finally, mercifully stopped.
“What the fuck was that?” I demanded.
Ed didn’t tell me, still stuck in a fit of giggles. After a moment, he said, “That was Sammy’s spooky storm. Happens every twenty minutes.”
I stared at him dumbly. “Is that just…is that just something that happens at this location?”
With a shit-eating grin, Ed shook his head slowly. He then aimed his phone at me to get my reaction to this news. Every twenty minutes? Thirteen locations? Eight weeks?
“Boooooooooooo! Mwah ha ha ha ha!”
It was our server. He was draped in a bed sheet with holes cut out for his eyes. How classic. Glancing here and there, I noted that all of the waitstaff were dressed in corny Halloween costumes: Lugosian Dracula’s, Hamiltonian witches, Karloffian Frankenstein’s monsters, and the stray ghost or werewolf or zombie.
“My name is Larry, and I’ll be…taking care of you today!” He erupted into a fit of maniacal cackling and produced a dagger from under his sheet. I leaned back while Ed leaned forward with his cameras. Larry promptly produced a pad of paper and tapped it with the butt of the dagger. He began scribbling. It was a fucking pen. “Now what can I get for you two ghoulish goblins?”
I realized I hadn’t touched the menu, which had a velvety cover and was shaped like a coffin. But I didn’t want to cause any delay in leaving this place, so I told Ed, “Why don’t you order for me?”
“Aw, that’s no fun!” Ed complained.
“Yeah!” Larry joined in. He leaned close to me. “What’s the problem, Teddy? You sca-sca-scared?”
I recoiled in disgust. I snatched the menu. As I expected, it was filled with food items with “spooky” names like “worm pasta,” “eyeball soup,” and “jelly brains” for dessert. I landed on eyeball soup, asking Larry, “So, are the ‘eyeballs’ in the eyeball soup meatballs or?”
“Excellent choice, my spooky friend!” he said, snatching my menu and not answering my question. “And to drink?”
“Oh, um, water, I guess.”
“And I’ll have the jelly brains as my meal,” said Ed brightly, handing Larry his menu.
“The lunch or dinner portion?” Larry asked, even though Ed was ordering a dessert.
Not missing a beat, Ed replied, “The dessert portion, if you will. And the radioactive ooze to drink.”
“Excellent sir, excellent!” beamed Larry. And turning away, he began some ghostly wailing, waving his arms beneath his sheet as he bounded off to the kitchen to put the order in.
I fidgeted. I glanced over at the place next to me where the clown had popped up. I wondered what would have happened had I been sitting just a few inches to the right, directly on top of it. I could have gotten hurt! What the fuck even was this place?
“This place is a fucking nuthouse,” I grumbled.
Ed frowned at me. He dislodged his phone from the selfie stick and turned off his body cam. “I hope you’re not going to be like this the whole trip,” he said, more concerned than annoyed.
I relaxed a little. I certainly hoped I wouldn’t be like this the whole trip either. I forced a small smile. “I think this place is kinda weird but maybe it’ll grow on me.”
Ed seemed pleased to hear me say this. I didn’t mean it at all, but I didn’t want to be miserable on this trip. This was, after all, only our first stop, with twelve more stops and thousands of miles of traveling to go. I needed to find a way to enjoy myself. But I couldn’t think of one. All I knew at that moment was I wanted to avoid another one of those stupid “spooky storms,” or whatever.
“I think I’ll go wash my hands,” I said.
Ed was busy getting his cameras back in place and running. He nodded without looking at me, and I slumped out of the booth and began trying to find my way to a bathroom.
Looking before me, I could tell this wouldn’t be an easy task. The whole place was just so fucking dark and labyrinthine, with the stone walls twisting this way and that the deeper you delved into the dining room. Perhaps crotchety ol’ Sammy Haynes himself would turn out to be the minotaur in the center of it all. At times as I was navigating between the tables, I began to feel people’s eyes on me. One guy, evidently dining alone, was staring at me. Not with any malice or suspicion or even curiosity. He was just staring at me with sleepy, bloodshot eyes that glimmered in the torchlight, smiling at me, chuckling, and slowly shaking his head. He never broke eye contact.
Weird, I thought. But I had to press on, determined to get a break from the next “spooky storm” so I could gear myself up for the countless future ones I’d have to endure over the next eight weeks.
Eventually, I came upon two identical doors, standing adjacent to one another. They were featureless and painted a deep crimson color. I took them to be a pair of bathrooms, but there was no sign announcing so, nor even any signs designating which was the men’s and which was the women’s. At the end of my rope, I simply chose the door on the left and pushed through it.
I found myself blinking rapidly from my eyes being hit with a bright light. I wasn’t in the bathroom. That much was obvious. From the looks of it, I was in the kitchen. Almost immediately, all eyes were on me. But the odd thing was everyone acted as if it were perfectly normal that I was there. The cooks simply went on with what they were doing. Many of them were dressed in white coats, but not the kind associated with cooks and chefs. Rather, it seemed like they were wearing doctor’s coats—coats that were splattered with brown and red stains. They were wearing masks, but not facemasks like you’d expect from a doctor or even a cook in the post-Covid world. Rather, they had on the sorts of masks that you might find at a masquerade. Though most of the kitchen was spotless, the cooks’ stations were absolutely filthy. There were rusty, overflowing pots of thick, boiling green liquid on the stoves, and everyone was working with mounds of strange meat that they were dumping out of coffee cans and squeezing with their bare hands—hands that, on almost all of the cooks, were unusually hairy, almost like they belonged to chimps.
I stood there, dumbstruck. We weren’t continuing this trip. How this dump had slipped by the health department I didn’t know, but I wasn’t about to get sick eating their gross food made with ingredients that were well past their expiration date, if the kitchen’s pungent smell was anything to go by. I made to leave, but as I was on the way out, I was stopped in my tracks by the shock of all noise, all activity in the kitchen stopping.
I looked over my shoulder. The masquerade masks, hiding the eyes of their owners, all staring at me. Smoke from the stoves and ovens clouded the air. I heard the crack of thunder. Another spooky storm, it appeared, was starting. And then, I felt something behind me. I couldn’t be certain of what it was, but I swore I could feel its breath, which was wet and warm. I imagined it as a great mass of dirty, tangled fur. I began to turn around but was assaulted by the unmistakable sound of a roaring chainsaw, right next to my ear. I screamed. And when I did, in the next instant, there seemed to be a great flash, and then everyone in the kitchen was back to their usual work, as if nothing had happened.
I bolted out of there and found that the next spooky storm was well underway, and right outside the kitchen, a masked figure with a faux chainsaw was popping out of the wall. Breathing heavily, eyes wide with fright, I searched around. The patrons were all eating and chatting away, as if nothing were amiss. The waitstaff, in their ridiculous costumes, were serving them dutifully.
I stood for a moment. A waitress with vampire makeup looked at me, slightly concerned. “Do you need any help, hon?” she asked, in a kind and genuine voice.
“No,” I said. “No, no. I’m fine. Thanks.”
***
We were in the truck. Ed hadn’t been vlogging at all since I sat back down at the table, still shaking with fright, he told me, even though I’d tried my best to regain my composure after the incident in the kitchen.
“What the fuck happened to you?” he’d asked.
I’d told him the whole story. He seemed skeptical but genuinely concerned. This trip was important to him, but he proved in that moment that he thought my wellbeing was even more important. What a pal.
“Look,” he’d said. “You wanna pay and get out of here?”
Our food came almost the instant he said it. I stared at it. My soup actually looked rather good: a chicken broth base, pieces of potato and kale, and meatballs with little pimentos in their centers—the “eyeballs” for the eyeball soup, it seemed. Ed’s jelly brains looked like a fancy gelatin dish, expertly molded into the shape of the head-based organ for which it was named. Not something the grubby, hairy hands of the people in the kitchen would be likely to achieve, that’s for sure.
“Can we take this to go?” Ed asked Larry, our waiter. “Something came up. A bit of an emergency, honestly.” To my mild surprise, Larry dutifully obliged, getting us to-go containers and telling us he hoped everything would be okay. “It will be,” Ed had assured him with a smile, and then we were out the door.
To Ed’s surprise, I seemed reluctant to leave once we were out in the parking lot. “Could you go look?” I implored him. “Just take a peek into the kitchen to make sure?”
Ed obliged, but not before stealthily turning on his bodycam. I could see the clickbait title now: “I SNUCK INTO A HAUNTED KITCHEN.” It infuriated me, but I didn’t show it.
“So, everything looked completely normal?” I asked in disbelief as we sailed down I-75.
Ed had concocted a new plan. We were going to skip the Florida cluster and hit the Atlanta location. We would film things as if we had finished the trip. Then, we’d be on our way back to Chicago to deposit me at my dad’s house. After that, Ed didn’t know how he’d proceed. He doubted he could cobble together the impression that we’d been to more than just two Sammy Hayne’s, though he estimated his editing skills were fairly good. He’d have to make the rest of the trip solo, he said with some sadness, and work around my absence when it came to editing the footage. I could tell he wanted to ask me to go with him after having a respite at my dad’s. But I guess he could tell I was angry despite my best attempts at hiding it because he ended up not mentioning it.
“Yeah, bro,” Ed told me. “Peeked inside, completely normal. What any restaurant kitchen would look like. No weird masks, no nothing. Everything looked clean. Looked like they knew exactly what they were doing. Even got mad at me once they noticed I was spying on them.”
I remained silent. Ed didn’t sound like he was lying, unless his acting skills were better than I knew.
“Look,” he said, trying to sound sympathetic, “I know you’re still fucked up from what happened to your mom.” He glanced at me. When I said nothing, he went on, “So, maybe it was a mistake taking you along on this trip. I didn’t—well, I had so much fun at Sammy’s when I was a kid, I didn’t know it might be triggering for other people.”
I sighed, frustrated. Leaning against the passenger window, I said, flatly, “Yeah, I didn’t know it would trigger me, either.”
And triggered I truly must have been. Ed told me there were no spiders crawling around in the ceiling. He told me that the clown animatronic had not, in fact, sprung up next to me, but behind me. He ate the dishes we took to go in the truck, despite my warning that they might be contaminated, but he didn’t get sick, at least not yet. It all pointed to one thing: I’d been hallucinating, something I had a bit of a history of ever since witnessing my mom’s murder. That had to be it. But I couldn’t risk tripping again at the Atlanta location. I firmly told Ed I wouldn’t be going inside. He agreed to this, saying he’d just pop in for a quick dinner and some quick footage, and then we’d swing by a McDonald’s for me and get to the hotel he’d booked. I didn’t protest but only because I knew that was the only way I was getting back home.
We found ourselves in a horrible traffic jam as the result of an accident, one that added hours to the trip. Ed nervously checked the hours for the Atlanta Sammy Hayne’s. They closed at 9:00. We’d just barely make it at this rate. Finally, at around 8:45, the Tacoma rolled into the parking lot like a sad, limping dog. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. Ed took a long, sad look at me. Then, he took his selfie stick and promised he’d be back soon while hopping out of the truck.
I watched as he walked to the entrance. The interior looked dark—too dark to be part of the theming. I felt a wave of dread come over me. I wondered how Ed would take this. I saw him struggling to open the door. He kept trying, refusing to accept that the trip was officially over. A woman, dressed in a black polo and jeans with her blond hair tied in a neat, no-nonsense bun, opened the door. She had to stop Ed from walking inside and was explaining something to him, with a twinge of annoyance on her face. In the next moment, the door shut, and Ed, head bowed in defeat, came shuffling sadly back to the car.
“Are they closed?” I asked as the driver’s side door closed.
For a moment, Ed said nothing. Then, he sighed and said, almost as if he were on the verge of tears. “I told her I had ten minutes. I told her it would be quick. I told her I was on a mission to eat at every Sammy Hayne’s in the country…”
I stared at him, waiting for more. “And…?” I said.
“And she didn’t give a fuck,” Ed answered. “She said they closed an hour early tonight…wouldn’t say why.”
Slowly, defeatedly, he reached to start the truck. He turned the key. A clicking sound. He tried again. Nothing.
Fuck.
***
We got to the hotel by midnight. The tow truck took us there. How we’d deal with the dead Tacoma, we didn’t know. We figured we’d pay for a tow to a Firestone to get it checked out.
Luckily, since we were cutting the trip short and were going to be spending less on gas than we thought, we had enough money in the trip budget to pay for any repairs. Well, Ed believed so, anyway.
We sat on our beds, stunned by the turn in our fortunes.
“The video’s dead,” said Ed tonelessly. “It’s dead. It’s dead as the car. I’m not going to have any money left to complete the trip once we’re back in Chicago. The video’s fucking dead.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It was dead from the start.”
He looked up at me, offended. “Hey, fuck you!” he spat.
“And fuck your vid,” I seethed. “Fuck this trip.”
We decided to just go to bed after that. I noticed that Ed stayed up for a while. He kept his bedside lamp on. I heard him scribbling on a notepad frantically and crumpling up every other page he wrote upon. At one point, he hurled one of the balls of paper at me, and he let out an annoyed grunt when it was clear I wasn’t going to react.
Finally, at three or four in the morning, Ed drifted off to sleep. When I was certain he was out, I stood. I fished through my bag for my laptop. I set it on the table in the corner of the room. Then, I took one of the papers from his nightstand. The moonlight streaming in from the window showed me what it said: “MY FRIEND LOST HIS G**DAMN MIND ON THIS ROADTRIP.” His new clickbait title. His new video. His way of salvaging the trip. And an accurate description of what had happened to me.
I grabbed a pillow and forced it onto Ed’s face. He gasped and started struggling and screaming. But he didn’t have the strength to overpower me. When he finally stopped struggling and relaxed as he met death, I unhanded him. And as he lay limp in the bed, I went over to the table in the corner, not bothering to turn on any of the lights.
I opened my laptop, and I started writing. Let’s hope that soon someone will come to take me away from all this. Once and for all.