Knott’s stirs up its 25th year of Halloween chills and thrills.

Boys and girls of every age

Wouldn’t you like to see something strange?

Come in close and you will see

This our town of Halloween

--From “Halloween Town” by Danny Elfman, from “The Nightmare Before Christmas”

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If any place has earned the honor of being called “Halloween Town,” it’s Knott’s Berry Farm.

For a quarter of a century, the park’s Halloween Haunts have filled the night skies over Buena Park with the screams of millions of delightfully terrified visitors each October, inducing theme parks everywhere to follow suit with haunted attractions of their own.

On Friday, the 25th anniversary edition of Knott’s Scary Farm’s Halloween Haunt begins with the biggest display yet of spooky mayhem and spirited fun, spread over 16 nights through Nov. 1.

“It gets more and more fun every year,” said Haunt veteran John Kennedy, a 39-year-old registered nurse from Burbank who, along with a handful of other “old-timers,” has worked the streets and mazes of Ghost Town for 17 years.

“It’s gotten a lot scarier. The quality of the mazes has gone way up. They use a lot more lights and sounds and equipment. And there are a lot more monsters involved,” he added.

More monsters indeed.

Matt Schliesman, Knott’s director of entertainment, noted that Halloween Haunt began on Oct. 31, 1972, almost as an afterthought, when a handful of employees thought it would be fun to decorate Ghost Town for the spooky holiday. With some fog machines and about 30 costumed characters, an institution was born.

“It began very humbly, but it received a tremendous response,” Schliesman said.

This year, a cast of 1,000 will be outfitted as live monsters; many of them veterans who have returned year after year as the same characters. (Costumes are strictly for park employees; guests are urged to leave theirs at home. Knott’s officials also advise parents that the Haunt is not recommended for children under 12.)

“We all started doing this when we were rug rats just out of high school,” said Wade Gordon, whose green-faced Goblin character has been a Ghost Town fixture for nearly 15 years.

“It’s just an unbelievable experience. It’s the closest you can physically get to walking into a horror movie yourself,” added the 35-year-old biomedical engineer from Lake Forest.

“Being there, with the sound, the ambience, the music, the smoke, the characters--it’s a one of a kind thing. It’s a Haunt thing,” he said.

Bobby Albright, a musician from Laguna Hills who has played the Lion Man character since 1989, agrees.

“It’s fun and it’s a challenge,” he said. “The creativeness of all the characters. . . . You’re constantly trying to entertain the people one notch higher than the year before.”

For many of the performers, the entertainment works two ways.

“I have more fun being a character, scaring people, than anyone who pays money to come,” said Kennedy.

As do the other veterans, they have plenty of stories: Albright’s visage once sent a young guest scrambling to find a trash can to throw up in; Kennedy boasts of the time he frightened a woman so badly that she fled blindly for safety--straight into the men’s restroom.

“I wear that one as a badge of honor,” Kennedy said. “If they’re so frightened that they don’t even look where their going . . . that’s the best.”

Such reactions raise the question of why people would pay good money to be terrorized to the point of throwing up.

Jay Martin, a psychoanalyst and psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College, says the Halloween trick-or-treat tradition represents a way of assuaging guilt for not adequately paying our ancestors back for all they bequeathed us.

“Our children assume the role of our deceased ancestors by appearing as skeletons and unliving creatures,” he explained.

“In giving them treats, we are symbolically paying back to our children what we got from our parents and grandparents. What frightens us is the idea that we would not be able to pay our ancestors back.” The spirit’s trick is the response to an insufficient treat.

The desire to be frightened, says Martin, is a kind of psychological tool to remind ourselves of that debt.

For Kennedy and company, it’s all just fun.

“People come in anticipation of being frightened,” he explained. “They say, ‘Scare me as much as you can,’ and we do. It gets more and more fun every year.”

In addition to the antics of Kennedy and his fellow ghouls in the Ghost Town and Festival of Freaks fright zones, the Haunt will feature eight elaborate walk-through mazes, three rides refit for Halloween and seven live shows.

Special anniversary attractions will include the “Years of Fears: XXV Anniversary Maze,” a special effects-laden romp with scenes from mazes of years past, and a special edition of “The Hanging” combining elements of the park’s bizarre execution spectacles dating from 1978.

Camp scream-queen Elvira, the “mistress of the dark,” returns to host a new “Graveyard Rock ‘n’ Roll Revue,” combining parodies of deceased monster musical legends with “living-but-dead” pop artists of today.

Among this year’s additions are “The Inquisition,” a tour of an underground dungeon and torture chamber from the Dark Ages, and “Bigfoot’s Revenge,” where guests stumble on the hairy biped’s latest victims before taking a moonlight raft ride to safety.

Also debuting are “The Underworld--Unearthed,” the Calico Mine ride redressed as a nightmare torn from the pages of “Bulfinch’s Mythology” and “Cyber Insanity: The Resurrection,” a multimedia showcase of music, lasers, smoke and nightmares.

“Today,” Knott’s Schliesman said with pride, “we have a certain amount of ownership with the Haunt as a Halloween event.”

The success has not gone unnoticed. In recent years Universal Studios, Magic Mountain, the Queen Mary, Sea World and even longtime Halloween-holdout Disneyland have stepped into the ring with haunted events of their own.

Jim Benedick, an amusement park industry consultant with Tustin-based Management Resources, says Knott’s stumbled on a great promotion that led to substantial increases in ticket buyers at a time of the year when attendance is typically low.

“Other parks saw the success and basically saw a great opportunity,” he said. “That’s why so many are copying it. Any time a park can increase attendance during a slow period, people are going to notice.”

But for Gordon and his colleagues--and the thousands of fans that return year after year--none of the imitators has topped the original.

“I’ve never seen or even heard of anything that’s even close to it,” said Gordon. “I mean, people have tried, but they don’t really seem to quite catch the Haunt Thing.”

BE THERE

Knott’s Berry Farm’s Halloween Haunt, 8039 Beach Blvd., Buena Park. Begins with “Freak Previews” from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday. $25, includes commemorative T-shirt. Continues at 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. Oct. 10 and 11, 17 and 19, 23 through 26 and 29 through Nov. 1. $31.95 in advance; $36.95 at the door. (714) 220-5200.