If you want to scare the daylights out of Troy Barber and Mike Henry, the men who co-own the Nightmare on 13th haunted house in Salt Lake City, don't go all fake dead on them or turn out the lights and play creepy music.

Simply ask them this: Hey, what if you guys HADN'T seen that classified ad for Halloween props?

Talk about life turning on a whim. Troy and Mike have spent the past 20 years forging a reputation as two of the best haunted-house purveyors in the history of, well, haunted houses. Their Nightmare on 13th was recently featured on the cover of Haunted Attraction Magazine and named one of America's scariest places by the Travel Channel.

Just last year, when USA Today rated the 13 best haunted houses in America, the house that Troy and Mike built came in No. 3.

And yet, it might have never gotten off the ground — might never have scared a soul or elicited a single scream — if Troy hadn't browsed through the newspaper classifieds in early 1990 and stopped in his tracks at the following:

FOR SALE: Halloween props, slightly used. Asking $9,000 obo.

At the time, the ink was just drying on the bachelor's degree Troy had received in marketing from Weber State, and Mike, a recent Utah State graduate in business management, was moving back to Utah from Louisiana, where he had just quit his first job working for an oil company.

"I hate this, I'm quitting and coming home," Mike told his buddy Troy. (Mike was single, so this was a perfectly viable option.)

"Why don't you find something for us to do?"

Troy, also single and splitting his time between playing golf and playing golf, agreed that looking for a job sounded like a good idea. But neither of them was looking for anything, heaven forbid, long term.

Running a haunted house for a month seemed like a good idea.

They offered $5,000 for the Halloween props, the seller said fine, and two young guys in their 20s who knew next to nothing about scaring people were in the haunted-house business.

In the fall of 1990, they rented a vacant building east of downtown, set up the props, opened for the month of October and charged $5 for entry. At the end of the month, they were shocked to learn they'd turned a profit.

The spell was cast. Two years later they moved to a location on — cue in the eerie music — 13th South.

The old Streator Chevrolet place was perfect. Two years after that, they bought the building, which, as Troy points out, gave them a big leg up on their competition.

"That meant that every year we didn't have to set up and take down, unlike all our competitors," he says. "We could build for the long term."