Social media posts lead Dr. Oz to local haunted house
Oct. 23, 2020
A Sioux Falls-area haunted house is getting its 15 seconds of fame with Dr. Oz.
“The Dr. Oz Show” is doing a segment on why people get scared in haunted houses, and Terror 29 was asked to provide footage from its “scare cams,” said Zac Tenneboe, who started the attraction last year.
“We’re not sure if they’ll mention Terror 29, but just to be asked to use our footage is pretty cool,” he said. “Even if they don’t say our name, our logo is on there.”
The episode was taped Wednesday, and it’s expected to air Tuesday, Tenneboe said. “The Dr. Oz Show” airs at 8 a.m. on MyUTV, KELO’s sister station.
A producer for the show found Terror 29 because it shares its scare cam footage and other video on a variety of social media platforms as @terror29haunt.
“When the pandemic first started in March, we started going viral on TikTok,” Tenneboe said of the promotional videos he filmed. Terror 29 has grown to 230,000 followers on the platform, and some of its clips have more than 1 million views.
Dr. Oz’s producer reached out to Terror 29 through Instagram.
“They had seen our scare cam footage and had seen a bunch of others and thought ours was the best,” Tenneboe said. The producer asked for “point of view” footage to show what was terrorizing the haunted house visitors, and Tenneboe was able to provide that in less than a minute because of the weekly “virtual haunts” Terror 29 added this year because of the pandemic.
“Most business know the value of social media, and this is a perfect example of how social media can take you places,” Tenneboe said. “It will be name recognition and even worldwide. .. I have a buddy in Germany, and he’s like, ‘Dr. Oz is super popular here.’ ”
While Terror 29 has spent time crafting some of its TikTok postings, “the less polished it is, the better it’s done on TikTok. … The moral of the story is its OK to be goofy and weird on social media. You don’t have to be polished. We have fun doing it, and people watching it like to have fun.”
The haunted warehouse and circus freak show is open Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights through Halloween and will offer a final virtual tour Wednesday. It’s in an industrial area on the northwest corner of the Renner exit on Interstate 29.
