Here's a money-making scheme: Scare people out of their wits - and out of their money
The term "house of horrors" has, perhaps, a different meaning to you than it does to me. I consider my modest villa was something of a house of horrors last week, for example, when two children had chickenpox, one caught stomach flu on the way to recovery, the baby screamed and cried for two hours a day, and the dishwasher and TV broke down in unison.
My house is one that people who relish their germ-free personal space - and their sanity - would avoid like the plague. Conversely, although I am quite sanguine about revolting nappies and vomiting pre-schoolers, I cannot stomach horror movies. I don't believe in ghosts but feel uneasy in a graveyard. And I would need to be drunk to handle a night-time visit to a "haunted" house.
This wussiness is out of sync, it seems, with the modern craze for the scary and spooky. I tried to imagine the headspace of someone who would visit the newly proposed "morgue motel" in Tasmania, where guests will be able to sleep on old autopsy tables or on bunks in the old pull-out refrigerator, formerly reserved for the deceased. I tried, and I failed.
Tasmania's morgue/motel arrangement is slated for an old psychiatric hospital - a venue that has provided rich pickings for tourism ventures based on scaring people witless. Developer Haydn Pearce believes the venture will attract Goths, emos and "pretty funky mums and dads". In fact, Port Arthur in Tasmania already does a rich tourist trade in what they call the Paranormal Investigation Experience, which centres on the area's historic penal settlement and asylum, where thousands of men and women were subjected to solitary confinement and worse back in the day.