‘This ain’t safe’: KC ‘Haunted Hotel’ charges $40 entry but has rotted wood, no license

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Aaron Jacobsen and his adult children love a bone-chilling Halloween scare. That’s why the Douglas County family has been to Kansas City’s popular haunted house attractions like The Beast, Edge of Hell and Macabre Cinema in West Bottoms warehouses more times than they can recall.

But last Saturday, Jacobsen said, nothing prepared him for the real-life, deeply concerning experience he had after paying $40 cash per person for the three of them to tour a nearby warehouse marketed online as the Blossom House Haunted Hotel and presenting itself as a real and not simulated paranormal experience.

But when Jacobsen, who is 53 with 20 years’ experience in the construction trades, entered the warehouse at 817 Santa Fe St., it wasn’t the prospect of a true ghostly encounter that frightened him (he didn’t have one).

What scared him, he said, was the unsound condition of the five-story warehouse, replete with wood rot and decay, limited electricity and plumbing, no sprinkler system, no emergency exits, a leaking roof evidenced by rainwater caught by plastic kiddie pools, broken joists and no bathrooms. At one point, the host of the tour opened a trapdoor in the floor for customers to descend a shaky, unsecured ladder into a dark hole.

As of early this week, tours of the Blossom House Haunted Hotel were still being offered online on at least two websites. When a reporter for The Star made a reservation, a confirmation text was returned that included the following recommendation: “Use bathroom before coming but we can supply bucket and toilet paper.”

“The building was not safe. It made me nervous. It made me uncomfortable,” Jacobsen said.

The Star, through state and city records, confirmed this week that the warehouse has no license to operate as a business in either Missouri or Kansas City.

It has no permits to operate as a haunted house attraction. It has passed no inspections that would allow it to take in customers and operate on the same level as legitimate attractions such as Edge of Hell and others.

Reached by phone Tuesday, the owner of the building, Luther Glenn McCubbin, who said he works as a bellhop at a Kansas City hotel, confirmed that the warehouse is not a licensed business and has not had a fire inspection for that use. He said the building does not have a working sprinkler system.

McCubbin also insisted that, although the warehouse is advertised online and has been charging customers in cash, it’s not an operational business.

“We’re not totally open yet,” he said. “I’m just testing the waters kinda whatnot. … I don’t have the big license yet. I got to get licensed. … I got to get the fire department OK. I had a business license about two years ago, but I don’t have that up, have to renew it.”

Asked about the business on Tuesday, city spokeswoman Sherea Honeycutt said the city would look into the licensing and get back to The Star later with information.

McCubbin suggested that he currently is only “doing some paranormal stuff” on the warehouse’s outdoor concrete loading dock. Jacobsen and his two children, however, said they paid $40 each to receive a tour of much of the warehouse from a tour host, Paul, whom McCubbin identified as Paul Phillips, his “business partner.” McCubbin conceded, “Paul loves the paranormal stuff.”

The Blossom House website features photos of numerous rooms inside the warehouse, a number decorated with old furniture as hotel bedrooms. The confirmation text to The Star said the experience included “tour to 5th floor with history” and also says, “the building will be warmer or colder on the upper floors.”

McCubbin suggested to The Star that the haunted house industry runs in his family, claiming he is a cousin of Monty Summers, the president of Full Moon Productions, which owns Edge of Hell, The Beast, Macabre Cinema and other West Bottoms real estate.

“That’s a lie. He’s not a relation of ours whatsoever,” said Amber Arnett-Bequeaith, vice president of Full Moon. Arnett-Bequeaith is also a member of the family that established Edge of Hell in the West Bottoms in 1975, The Beast in 1991 and Macabre Cinema in 2007.

“From what I can tell by looking at city records, it is not a legitimate business,” she said of the Blossom House. “It is really not a legit anything.”

Heath Perkins, a deputy building official with the city’s Department of City Planning and Development, said any new haunted houses are required to submit plans and receive permits for construction and inspection by the department. Existing haunted houses are inspected every year or more often.

“Just because we are in the haunted attraction industry, it is no different than any other business,” Arnett-Bequeaith said. “You have to get a business license, you have to have architectural drawings that need to be permitted, you have to have construction permits. … You have to have fire suppression. You have to have fire escapes. Then, depending on the number of floors, how many you have to have and on which sides of the buildings.”

In texts to The Star, Phillips said the business had received good online reviews and suggested they are wholly different from other haunted houses.

“The fake haunted houses are afraid we are taking business from them,” he texted. “We have real ghosts, not actors!!!”

Regarding the lack of a sprinkler system or other safety equipment, Phillips said they have fire extinguishers and their customers are there “strictly doing paranormal investigations.” He said all the money they take in goes back into fixing up the building.

Blossom House, while not licensed as a commercial business, also is not a registered nonprofit. And Jacobsen and his family were not paranormal investigators.

Jacobsen, who had contacted The Star to relate what happened, repeatedly called his experience “weird” from the time he, his son, Anson, 21, and daughter, Avery, 19, arrived for what was supposed to be a paranormal tour lasting a couple of hours. They met the host outside the building near a hand-painted sign, he said. The host, Paul, insisted they pay in cash and sign a waiver.

“Trust me, if you sign a waiver and you’re in a building that should be condemned, that waiver don’t mean (anything),” Jacobsen said. “As soon as I walked in that room, I thought this is really weird. There’s a bed, a couch, a couple of recliners, wood split, piled up and a freshly used fireplace.”

In the main room, they were shown about 30 minutes of videos of supposed paranormal activity.

“If you want to enjoy it,” Jacobsen said he thought, “OK, you got to play along. So we did. Then he stands up. He goes, ‘Move those chairs.’ He opens this door to the basement, this trapdoor. That’s when I thought, ‘This is really frickin’ weird.’ We’re all looking at each other.

“There’s a ladder. It’s like a foot, a foot and a half below the opening. I’m like, ‘Jeez, this isn’t safe.’”

They descended the ladder and needed a flashlight.

“Then we start going from floor to floor and I just start seeing more and more structural flaws,” he said.

Jacobsen took photos of wood rot, a broken joist held together with a two-by-four, a major beam supported by a temporary, metal brace. Several rooms had been outfitted with old beds and worn furniture, as if it was once a hotel, although it never was.

The Blossom House Hotel, opened in 1882, was an elegant hotel in the West Bottoms, but it was located at 1048 and 1050 Union Ave., not on Santa Fe Street. It survived two major floods, including one in 1903. The hotel eventually closed in 1920 and the building no longer exists.

“There’s no electricity on any of these floors except the room that he was in,” Jacobsen said. “Every floor, he says, ‘Don’t walk here.’ There’s one floor, he says, ‘Don’t walk there.’ I say, ‘Where?’ He says, ‘Where that hole is.’ And there’s like plywood laid over it.

“Then we get to the top floor and there are like 13, 14 baby pools all over the place to catch the water. Over in the corner, the roof is falling in.”

McCubbin told The Star that he recently got the roof repaired.

Jacobsen said that the tour guide eventually left to allow Jacobsen, his children and a couple other people on the tour to move through the rooms on their own.

Jacobsen said he shuffled instead of stepping through the building because he was concerned about being injured.

“I turned to other people and said, ‘This ain’t safe.’ This guy is delusional. I mean he thinks he’s going to turn this into a hotel with $40 tours? He’s delusional about his goals and what he thinks he’s going to do with this building.”

McCubbin, after speaking to The Star, said he might have to rethink his websites.

“Might have to pull that now,” he said. “Like I say, I got to get it coded. But it’s going well. We’ve got some good publicity there.”