The clowns come at you quickly at Fast Splash Car Wash in Detroit, Mich. They tap on the windows of waiting vehicles, jiggle locked doors and cackle at the dozens of automobiles in line for scares served with suds, sprayers and sponges. Chamois, meet chainsaws.
If as a child you cowered in the back seat during trips through the local car wash, terrified of giant rotating brushes and mitter curtains slapping against the family car, a haunted car wash will trigger those ancient memories. Take the roaring machinery and darkness, add a strobe light and a guy in a hockey mask, and you've got a primal fear package perfect for vehicular adults with a taste for Halloween thrills.
"This is going to be the biggest year we have for this," says Joel Fullmer, a retail marketing manager at Tommy's Express, a car wash chain based in Holland, Mich., with 260 locations across the country. Nearly half of them, from Alaska to Wyoming, will be running a Halloween-themed, trademarked "Tunnel of Terror."
The trend has grown across the country for years at independent and chain car washes. A grinning skeleton in a trucker hat might clean your car at the Wiggy Wash in Orem, Utah, or a team of demonic clowns might do the job at the Whatta Wash Car Wash in Greer, S.C. The origins of the haunted car wash trend are murky. The phenomenon is especially widespread in car-obsessed Southern California but Fullmer says he first heard about haunted car washes in Virginia and Florida.
"Our car wash is known for being bright and open, not the claustrophobic brick tunnel feeling," Fullmer says. "But for this event, we black out the windows, we turn down the lights, we run fog machines. Our team members will dress up in costumes. We'll have them walking around our pay lanes as cars drive up for the event, staring in windows, pulling on door handles, seeing people jump from one side of the car to the other."
Fullmer himself has worked the line, disguised as a ghoul. "Yeah, it's a fun experience," he says. Some Tommy's locations, he adds, double their business the week before Halloween. One location washed over a thousand cars in eight hours. Many haunted car washes across the country charge $25 to $30 for the experience.
"Unfortunately, we haven't directly analyzed 'haunted' washes,'" says James Risley, research manager of the International Carwash Association. In an email, he noted that industry surveys found that creating a "memorable or differentiated wash experience is 'very important' to 85% of car wash businesses" and "Halloween transformations can keep a car wash location top-of-mind for the community." Not to mention scaring up plenty of customers.
Edited by Meghan Sullivan, produced by Chloee Weiner.
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