New York Nightmares

If being buried alive, overrun by rats, or encountering a sinister clown is your worst fear -- then welcome to your living nightmare.

In the lead-up to Halloween, off-Broadway producer Tim Haskell has set up "Nightmare: Face Your Fear" -- interactive haunted houses in each of New York City's five boroughs -- and is daring people to endure a psychologically terrifying experience.

Haskell polled thousands of New Yorkers to find the 13 obsessions, anxieties and phobias that frightened them the most and then designed room-by-room encounters around those fears -- and threw in a few actors to stalk and terrorize visitors.

Haskell said his survey found that most people were afraid of roughly the same 13 things, such as drowning, clowns, rats or cockroaches, as well as heights and closed-in spaces.

"People like to get scared," he told Reuters, making it quite clear that the aim of his houses is to terrify, not amuse, people.

"'Nightmare' makes visitors the stars of their own horror story, in a house that knows their worst fears and forces them to face it," the production teases in its advertising.

This is the third year that Haskell has set up haunted houses in New York -- and each year the number of visitors wanting to be frightened out of their wits increases.

Last year 22,000 people visited the one haunted house he set up in Manhattan and the popularity of the show prompted him to expand to five houses this year with up to 70,000 visitors expected to attend before the houses close on November 2.

Tickets, which are available through the Web site www.hauntedhousenyc.com, range in price from $15 to $25 or $50 for a VIP pass.

Haskell said the theatrical element of the house added a new dimension to traditional haunted houses and turned it into a unique fright-fest, too extreme for some visitors.

"We have had some fantastic reactions," he said. "Someone peed in their pants in Queens."

The houses have exits for those who need to make a speedy escape but most visitors seemed to know what they are in for.

"We're big fright fans," said Amy Pulchlopek, 25, who works in music publishing and visited the house in Manhattan. "I like live fright ... I think it's the fear of the unexpected."

Carlos Santiago, 29, said his favorite experience in the house was a murder enactment involving splattering liquids in a dark room.

"For me it's the gore, I just like to see the gore," said Santiago, who is planning to become a funeral director.

Half joking, Haskell said the act of being scared may have remedial benefits.

"I heard a group of women come out of the house in Brooklyn saying how therapeutic it was for them to scream so much," he said.