Ex-Banker's $15 Strip-Mall Haunted House Became a Multimillion-Dollar Empire

Chris Stafford paid roughly 4,500 seasonal workers last Halloween through Thirteenth Floor Entertainment Group, a multimillion-dollar company that started in 2002 as a $15-a-ticket haunted house in a Denver strip mall.

Stafford was 15 when a friend invited him to help scare visitors at a haunted house for Halloween. The experience hooked him immediately. "I was bit by the bug," Stafford tells People.

The hobby stayed with him through a banking career in Colorado. There he reconnected with Warren Conard, a fellow haunted house alum, and in 2002 the pair opened their own attraction in a Denver strip mall. They funded the venture themselves and charged about $15 a ticket. The early days delivered results, though not always the polished kind. "It was terrifying," Stafford recalls. "People were running out the exit."

When did a side hustle become a full-time business?

For years, the haunted house ran alongside Stafford's banking job. The 2008 financial crisis changed that calculation. The downturn convinced Stafford to leave banking and commit to the business full-time — a bet that a seasonal scare attraction could scale into something durable.

It did. Thirteenth Floor Entertainment Group now operates 18 seasonal Halloween properties, including the LA Haunted Hayride. The portfolio stretches beyond October: the company runs axe-throwing venues, escape rooms, and an immersive art installation in Philadelphia. Headcount tells the growth story — about 80 full-time employees anchor an operation that swells to thousands of paid workers each Halloween season.

What comes after Halloween?

This year, Thirteenth Floor is pushing into Christmas attractions. The new offerings are deliberately less scary, extending the company's calendar beyond its core horror window and testing whether its immersive-entertainment model works outside the Halloween franchise that built it.

Stafford frames the business as more than jump scares. The experiences his company delivers, he says, let people step outside their day-to-day realities and bond with one another.

"It's not just about how you screamed in the haunted house," he told People. "It's about remembering how your friends screamed in the haunted house."

Why the numbers matter

The trajectory from a self-funded strip-mall attraction to a company with 18 properties, roughly 80 full-time staff and 4,500 seasonal paychecks shows how far experiential entertainment can scale. Stafford and Conard started with their own money, a $15 price point and a rented retail space in 2002. Two decades later, the seasonal labor bill alone ranks the operation among the larger employers in live entertainment's Halloween niche.

The Christmas expansion marks the next test. If the formula transfers, Thirteenth Floor stops being a Halloween business with add-ons and becomes a year-round immersive-entertainment operator — the kind of platform that doesn't depend on a single holiday for its revenue.