Last night I tried out that haunted house on the Lower East Side, Nightmare: Bad Dreams Come True, “America’s #1 Haunted House”.

Man was it lame, with a capital Man Was It Lame! I’ve seen scarier things watching Dora the Explorer with my kids. It was just a bunch of college kids paid to jump at you wearing bad costumes. It was too dark to actually see anything that might’ve had a chance to be scary, and yet not dark enough to actually unsettle you. Even just the photos in this old article of 13 Haunted Houses That Will Make You Wet Your Pants (in which this one was named #1!) are scarier than anything that was actually there. The scariest part of the whole time I was there was seriously when I got a text message from my job saying there was a glitch on the site.

Not that I didn’t have a blast last night. I was there with a bunch of friends and the crowd was having fun. Random girls were grabbing onto my hand, which was cool and all, but distracting from the (theoretical) scares. Besides it was too dark to tell what the girls looked like.

Dinner at Cafe Katja beforehand rocked. It’s a tiny Austrian place where they serve pretty much nothing but pork, in a hundred different ways with a thousand different words for them like bratwurst, bernerwurstel, and hefespatenplockasteiner. I made that last one up. And of course, great beer in various and comically large sizes. Check it out on Orchard, between Broome and Grand.