Spider Hill is an annual Halloween event held at Three Sisters Park in Chillicothe, Illinois, and touted by the organizers to be Central Illinois' number one haunted house attraction. Spider Hill was launched in 1999 by the local Optimist Club and Three Sisters Park and featuring three main attractions: The Massacre Mansion; The Haunted Express haunted hayride; and The Trail of Terror, which walks visitors through the forest. Sponsors of the event remind visitors of the legend of Spider Hill and event's namesake where 23 individuals died at the site during World War I from poisonous spider bites. The event is run entirely by volunteers, starting with 60 in 2000 and increasing to 165 in 2007. Volunteers participate in organized workshops to share scaring techniques. The last attendance figures released were in 2004, when 20,000 visitors went through the various attractions during the October weekends and Halloween night. Event volunteers or actors reveal the biggest screams result from encounters with terrifying clowns, causing a grown man to faint twice in 2003 and another to spit at the circus specter for scaring his girlfriend.
Famous quotes containing the words spider and/or hill:
“This Frey seems thus to us:
Hells Spider gets
His intrails spun to whip Cords thus,
And wove to nets,
And sets.”
—Edward Taylor (1645–1729)
“Cole’s Hill was the scene of the secret night burials of those who died during the first year of the settlement. Corn was planted over their graves so that the Indians should not know how many of their number had perished.”
—For the State of Massachusetts, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)