Brothers add fun without fear to high-tech haunted house

Pontiac — It’s not every day you find yourself paying to be locked in a room with a corpse or two, let alone an evil Ice Queen but at Erebus Escape that’s exactly what you’re doing and enjoying every minute of it. 

Brothers and co-owners Ed and Jim Terebus, who also own the nearby Erebus Haunted Attraction, have spent over 40 years in the business of fright, including three years with Erebus Escape, where teams of players work together in an interactive scenario to find clues and solve riddles and puzzles with the goal of freeing themselves within a time limit. 

Not unlike Erebus Haunted Attraction up the street, the scenarios and movie-quality design of the escape rooms are creepy and realistic, and two new scenarios, “Dragons Curse” and “Once Upon a Time,” are giving entire families, including smaller children, a chance to get in the game. 

"My brother and I have been doing haunted houses for over 40 years, so it seemed like every time we tried to build something, we kept going to the scary side," Ed Terebus said. "We actually called on some friends throughout the industry and asked for some assistance to have something more G-rated, more family-friendly but just as immersive, just really cool.”

  In “Dragons Curse,” you are an apprentice escaping the dungeon to free the wizard and in “Once Upon a Time,” you are the princess or prince trying to stop the Ice Queen from freezing over the kingdom.

  Now if you think the Terebus brothers are getting soft in their old age, a visit to one of the other ‘escape rooms’ will make you understand why it is you want to escape the room in the first place. 

Whether you’re sent back thousands of years to Ancient Greece searching for the "Eye of Horus," a prisoner locked down in maximum security, or a detective trying to solve a ghastly murder, there is plenty of frightful fun to go around at Erebus Escape.