Oh, the horror! The horror!

Isn’t there enough of it in the world?

Apparently not; not around here, anyway. Zombies are scarce. Mummies stick to their sarcophagi. Pythons aren’t really a problem. If Satan’s around, at least he’s decent enough to wear a hat and keep his tail tucked in.

If you really want horror around here, you need to either do it yourself or pay to have it done.

The DIY approach is just going to get you in trouble, and it isn’t nearly as much fun as the paid-for pandemonium at The Dark Manor in Versailles.

Let us pause for a moment of etymological reflection.

First of all, “Versailles,” pronounced just the way it looks, isn’t in France, where it is grotesquely mispronounced. It’s the village in Sprague where the Vers Woolen Mill was bought by the Sayles family in 1871, when it became the Vers-Sayles Mill.

Second of all, “pandemonium” is derived from the Greek “pan,” meaning “all,” and “daimon,” meaning “demon.” And that’s what people have been experiencing at the Dark Manor for the last 16 years.

The Dark Manor has all the demons the horror-starved need.

A cackling “mistress” welcomes the doomed. She warns them about the one truly deadly demon that lurks in the hellscape they are about to tour.

They won’t even see it. It’s just 100 nanometers from head to toe, the coronavirus demon, lying in ambush on any given surface. The creature warns the imminently terrified not to touch anything, and she assures that no one will touch them … at least no one alive.

So sanitize and abandon all hope, ye who enter there.

Once welcomed, the brave enter a infernal labyrinth of hair-raising distress. Animatronic monsters lurch up from nowhere. Windows snap open and zombies screech point-blank into the ear. A mutilated cadaver turns its head to greet you. A real, live predator warms up a real, live chainsaw.

And the clowns…

“Clown Town is the most terrifying,” said Jonni Illinger, who lives in Hanover, on the other side of Sprague. “This is where we get the most wet pants.”

Illinger is one of the 28 actors who do their best to tap bladders and purge intestines large and small. This year she’s a plague doctor, scarier than a corpse of festering buboes. Her job is to enforce social distancing in that most unsociable place.

Masks are mandatory. Infractions are punishable by death.

Other job titles: Chain Saw Guy, Grass Man, Michael Meyers, Shovel Girl, Creepy Nurse/Skilsaw operator, Drop-Down Guy…

The actors are trained for emergencies. They have fire extinguishers. They know what to do when a guest freaks out. They know how to mop up.

The dim path of the labyrinth winds through a dismal swamp, a murderous mining camp, a catacomb of bones, a graveyard, a Blood Shed, a surgery room, a conclave of spiders the size of schnauzers.

Screams, screeches, roars and cackles, distant and near, unsettle the air. Webs dangle. Slimy fingers beckon. Germicidal fog slithers along the ground.

Among Illinger’s projects this year is to re-dress an animatronic alien as a giant praying mantis.

“This is not for children,” she warned. “I wouldn’t let a kid under 13 go in there. No [freakin’] way.”

The Dark Manor is the twisted brainchild of Rick Peirce. Peirce had never been especially interested in the horror industry, or even aware of it, until about 20 years ago. He was at a costume trade show when he started talking with a vendor of horror products.

By the end of the conversation, he knew he could make a business of a haunted house.

He started on Long Island, where people lined for three hours to get in. Then he bought an old brick Masonic Temple in Versailles. Over the years it became more and more sophisticated.

“You can’t just build a place like this,” he said. “It takes 15 years.”

Fifteen years and a lot of creativity. Each year he and Illinger and other associates accumulate more and more artifacts of ghastliness. Today they have dozens of animatronic devices, extraordinary costumes, scores of skeletons, guts galore, ghouls out the kazoo.

As they brew up each year’s new program, they find stuff they forgot they had, stuff not found in the average place of business: a bag of bats, a head with a knife in it, a box of bloody feet, a bin labeled simply “Hands.”

They are the home decorators of Hell. They take the real and make it unreal, but as realistic as possible.

“It’s art,” Peirce says. “Horror is art.”

Glenn Alan Cheney of Hanover is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com.