TAYLOR — Amy Broadnax is a woman on a mission. The Taylor native wants to reinvent the concept of theme parks by bringing a spooky venue to the area that also offers educational and social opportunities.
Haunted Texas & USA History Preservation Project, an idea still in its initial funding stages, will feature advanced virtual reality built into the experience. Social messaging, natural-resource sustainability and workforce development to help the people of East Williamson County are also baked into the formula.
“It goes beyond the haunted genre. You’re going to be walking through a livinghistory museum,” Broadnax said.
The elevated haunted house concept is intended as family fun, but there also is a justice aspect Broadnax has planned for the park. That includes presentations on past injustices such as unsolved crimes through history and the lynchings of people of color.
She also wants the park to be a home for Civil War statuary and other Confederate States of America monuments that have been removed from public spaces in Texas and give them interpretation.
The plan also includes producing a movie for the park about the gap between President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth.
Long celebrated in Texas, Juneteenth recently became a national holiday commemorating the day Texas slaves first discovered they were freed long after emancipation was declared.
The long list of goals for the park includes some items that for most entertainment companies would be tangential: Providing affordable housing, supporting 100 new black-owned businesses in Taylor, establishing both child and adult day care centers, and helping save women from human trafficking.
LIFELESSONS
Broadnax’s own experiences as a teenager and later as a mother to two mixed-race children gave her a strong sense of social justice and racial equality.
“I’m literally haunted by my own past,” Broadnax said. “America needs to make up for its past. I don’t want it to be that hard for my children.”
She was one of 12 teenage girls who brought a lawsuit against a juvenile correction facility run by a now-defunct private prison company. The allegations of mistreatment, including sexual misconduct by the guards, resulted in a large civil settlement.
The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit took her own life the day the settlement was completed.
Broadnax said her friend’s death and the emotional scars from the abuse combined with being a 19-year-old with few life skills but lots of money led to many bad decisions. When the money was gone in a spending spree, she found a way to pull herself out of the predicament and entered the home-mortgage loan field.
After many highs and lows in Texas and on both coasts over the years, she ended up in Atlanta where she was laid off with no notice and given only a fraction of the $28,000 in commissions she said she was owed.
That $3,000 went quickly, and she found herself back in Texas, living in temporary housing first in Hutto and then in Austin.
“That was the day (of the layoff) that I decided I would never work for anyone again. I needed to have the next billiondollar idea,” she said in an interview at a northwest Austin coffee shop.
BUILDINGONADREAM
Haunted houses have grown in popularity, going from temporary fright fests around Halloween and Oct. 31 to permanently maintained facilities that bring the scares for several months.
Major theme parks also have gotten in on the action with haunted themes in the fall.
A year-round haunted house experience with restaurants, shops and a bent toward historical themes was the big idea Broadnax was looking for.
Although the goals for the theme park include tackling a lot of heavy issues, Broadnax said, “We’re going to have fun, too.”
A part of the park called Haunted Hollywood will include both physical and virtual spaces to experience a chilling look at the land of stars and starlets of yesteryear. Robotics, some salvaged and remade from parks that went out of business, also will be a part of the action.
The first part of the project is to acquire land in the area and then build out the theme park in stages, adding features as they go. The bigger dream is to expand to other states as part of a Haunted Unites States chain of parks, each with state-specific themes alongside concepts that will be in each park.
“The idea is to make it scalable,” Broadnax said.
The concept for Haunted Texas done in this way “is kind of untested,” said Luke Ortega Luper, a business consultant working with Broadnax through the Small Business Development Center at Texas State University’s McCoy School of Business. “But it is a growing area” with parks such as Six Flags bringing people in seasonally with haunted-house features, he said, “and she has a pretty impressive team.”
One of the biggest names in the haunted-house business is Leonard Pickel of Orlando, Florida-based consulting firm Hauntrepreneurs. The former Dallas architect has made a living for decades creating haunted houses, including for major theme parks around the country. He is now busy designing multiple features for Haunted Texas.
“There’s no real reason for a haunted house to be tied to Halloween,” Pickel said. With Haunted Texas “the scale we’re talking about here is much beyond what has been done.”
Starting from the ground up allows for energy, water and waste sustainability to be built into the park, something other established theme parks are now trying to catch up with, such as Disney adding solar farms, Pickel said.
That ground-up process also includes incorporating the latest advances in virtual reality and computer processing power into the experience.
Pickel said there will be physical spaces to explore to give the true sense of being in a special location, but the virtual images seen through a VR headset can transport park patrons to fanciful places. The experiences can also be switched out to keep people coming back but without the need for major infrastructure changes.
“We will take some actual occurrences that happened in Texas because some of them are horrific,” Pickel said of inspiration for some of the haunting features.
While East Williamson County isn’t a major population center, it could be a tourism draw for the area, Pickel said.
“I think you can build it and they will come,” he added.
BUILDINGTHETEAM
Broadnax’s drive has impressed other people she has recruited to the team.
“Over the years, I would hear from Amy and see how well she was doing in each endeavor she undertook,” said Penny Raney, a Dallas lawyer who represented Broadnax and several other teenage girls in their lawsuit against private-corrections firm Wackenhut. “When Amy first got in touch with me about Haunted Texas, I knew if she is behind it, its chance of success is high.”
Raney, who is serving as general counsel for the startup, said in a written statement to East Wilco Insider that Broadnax’s “enthusiasm is contagious, her plans are well thought out and poised for success.”
Also on the team is Teyon Johnson, who serves as vice president of personnel for Haunted Texas.
“It’s been an exhilarating journey as we bring together all the elements needed to make this park a landmark destination,” said Johnson, who has worked for more than two decades in sales, marketing, human resources and staffing and recruitment roles. “The idea of being able to touch a multitude of lives and have a positive impact on the environment sold me.”
Broadnax is drawing on the fortitude of overcoming the challenges of her youth and her experience in the business world to keep the project going.
“I am walking and living in my purpose,” Broadnax said. “I wish I’d had the courage to live my purpose when I was younger.”
She has told her story of a childhood fraught with family trials, social injustices, abuse and overcoming those challenges as a guest on various niche podcasts and in essays on the online platform Medium. com.
That story and determination that grew from it is part of her pitch to investors as she tries to get them in on the ground floor.
For Haunted Texas to become a reality, the project needs millions of dollars in seed money and requires even more funding as the clock ticks down on a 90day hold on 246 acres in the Taylor area.
Pickel said even if the Taylor location doesn’t work out, he thinks there are other suitable sites nearby. He said once the land is secured and financing in place, it will take about two years to complete the major first phase of the park. In the interim, he said, there could be some popup haunted-house events to give people a taste.
The money for infrastructure such as roads and purchasing industrial-scale equipment to harvest water from the air and produce backup power for the park off the grid will be another major expense.
Broadnax said she wants a few big investors that understand the vision and won’t flip their interest in the company after only a few years as many venture capital firms do.
She wants to get the business plan in front of Texas-based automotive and space billionaire Elon Musk and other wealthy investors she believes share her beliefs in making money but doing good at the same time.
Despite the many challenges to getting investors and local officials to buy into the project, Broadnax is unfazed.
“People call me every day and say, ‘Amy, you keep moving forward.’ Everybody here on my team, I feel like, was handpicked by God,” she said. “I actually feel like we’ve already won.”
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