The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition defines an urban legend as an apocryphal story involving incidents of the recent past, often including elements of humor and horror that spreads quickly and is popularly believed to be true.

For ScreamWorld’s Jim Fetterly and Mike Darling, one such urban legend they have heard constantly over the course of their nearly two decade long reign on Houston’s haunted house scene is that of the ‘Money-Back Guarantee’. “We are in a one-story haunted house, it may look like one and a half, maybe two stories, but they would walk right up to you at the front door, look up and say, ‘I hear if I can get to the top floor… the fifth floor or the thirteenth floor… I get my money back’,” Fetterly said. “For three or four years, I would say, ‘Well, actually we are just a one story building, so it is not true. You get to the top of the thirteenth floor, I will give you your money back and $100′.”

Although heard widely throughout Houston’s community of haunted house enthusiasts, the urban legend also covers much of the country, with new incarnations shooting out of the rumor mill each year. While the legend is a myth nowadays, Darling says it is based on an actual hoax in Illinois by a haunted house once concocted to drive more crowds into their attraction.

“There was a haunted house in Chicago where they said if you made it to every scene they would give you a golden token,” Darling said. “If you collected all these tokens, it was said you would get your money back and say, $20.” Darling says somewhere along the hallways of this Chicago area attraction, a secret pathway to scenes hidden from the general public made the challenge difficult for people to get all the tokens needed to regain their admission price, and a little extra. “They didn’t tell people about those trap doors, and then they told all these people [about this challenge] on their radio advertising…” Fetterly said. “… [It was] very deceiving.”

In addition, Darling also points the finger at radio DJs for continuing the tradition of this urban legend that has saturated nearly every town with a haunted house. “The DJs didn’t know what they were talking about, so [people] would call the radio station and the DJs would tell the callers all this stuff,” Darling said.

Regardless of how much information exists, Fetterly says he expects to continue to hear the tale for as long as he continues to scare Houstonians at ScreamWorld.

“People would say, ‘Man, I heard it on the radio… I know I heard it on the radio… I heard it on the Buzz’ and we would tell them, ‘We don’t advertise on the Buzz’,” Fetterly said. “And they always reply, “You need to call them because they are playing your spot!’ This has happened a hundred times and I am sure it will continue to happen every year we are in business.”

Update: October 15th, 2008
It has come to our attention that there is a haunted house in Denver, Colorado advertising a money-back 13th floor haunted house. From what we can tell from their web site, certain patrons DO get their money back. Every 113th visitor to make it through their attraction gets a refund…so, though this haunted house seems to fit, it missed the essence of the urban legend.

That is, the haunted house is SO SCARY that they are willing to offer a prize for any who can make it through. We we will recognize 13th Floor Haunted House here, but we still think they miss the point quite a bit (as did The Mansion a couple of years ago) in this bit of trick-or-treat marketing. Thanks GFREF and BAY for the heads up!