Horrors! Dreaded day near for Rocky Point

You know what adrenaline feels like. Your heart races, your spine tingles, you breathe faster, your eyes dart around wildly, and you sweat.

Even when you think about impending doom, your body reacts to make you more alert so you can escape the man with the chainsaw.

Fortunately, it's all pretend.

Rocky Point Haunted House, which has scared people for the past 27 years, is giving Utahns two more chances to feel the fear — Friday and Saturday.

Renowned as the "Disneyland of Haunted Houses," Rocky Point will close its doors for the last time Saturday, to be followed by a public auction of hundreds of items April 28.

Gone will be various animatronics, including the living corpse, rolling mummies and Walt in the Wall. Gone will be props, such as headstones, black lights, sides of beef, body parts (sold separately) and coffins. And gone will be the sets: the morgue freezer wall, the insane asylum and the psycho clown carousel.

So Utah will say goodbye to the No. 1 haunted attraction in the United States for 2006 and 2007, as selected by HauntX, an annual Halloween convention in Los Angeles. Other honors include HauntWorld magazine's best haunted attraction for 2005.

Not bad for a haunted house that wasn't supposed to last — a haunted house Cydney Neil originally wanted to shut down when she first became involved with it. But one more year became 10 years and now 20 years.

"I really don't know what the future is," Neil, who is owner and producer of Rocky Point, told her cast of 100 actors Friday. "But we're not going to die, and we're not having a funeral."

The cast cheered, as Neil had originally planned to have a funeral for her "baby," the maze of spooky rooms in an old warehouse at 3400 S. State.

Some of the sets and props come from Hollywood films. There are scary clowns, Pinhead, Freddy Krueger, Jason, Leatherface and Michael Myers.

"There's nothing like this in the world," Neil says.

But maybe it's good to let Neil have a much-needed break. She likes golf, though it's been 15 years since she's played a round. And she has a boyfriend, also for the first time in 15 years. So, it's like a lot of signs are telling her — the Queen of Haunts — to move on.

Although one might think Neil gets her kicks from scaring people, the frights are actually the least part of what she does. "It's a full theater program," she says.