San Diego’s infamous terror attraction McKamey Manor has resumed operations at a private home in Rancho Peñasquitos after a failed attempt to relocate to a small town in Illinois.

Proprietor Russ McKamey, 56, has scared patrons for years by simulating abductions, assaults and other horrors at his home, named the most extreme haunted house in the world by Tech Times and The New York Daily News.

McKamey says his manor makes no money and raises funds for animal welfare. When he lost his job as a veteran’s advocate this year, he said, he attempted to move his financially strapped venture to a more affordable region. He ran into public opposition in Illinois.

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“I have to find some place that’s supportive,” McKamey said. “It’s tricky. I’ve learned people will go to great extent to shut us down.”

As of July, McKamey was planning to move to McLeansboro, Ill., a town of about 3,000 people in the southeastern part of the state. McKamey said he arranged to rent space and dropped off about $35,000 worth of equipment, when problems started to arise.

What appeared to be a promising future in July had become, by October, a tangle of accusations and ill will against McKamey by his would-be landlady and some locals.

Before McKamey had even met with the city’s zoning administrator, controversy exploded on Facebook, and someone threw a rock at the building McKamey planned to lease, cracking a window, said Fred Vallowe, McLeansboro’s city clerk.

“They saw my movies, and it scared these people in this little Bible Belt town to death,” McKamey said.

McKamey said he thinks a lot of the problems McKamey Manor has faced recently stem from his effort to take it from a private hobby to a money-making business.

For years, McKamey Manor was able to avoid becoming a business. Participants were carefully selected, but once admitted, the only cost of admission was a donation of dog food for Operation Greyhound, a nonprofit greyhound rescue organization.

Is McKamey Manor too extreme? Yes 70% (5530) No 30% (2426) 7956 total votes.

An official with the El Cajon-based organization confirmed that McKamey collected donations of dog food for the nonprofit and also helped it raise money.

Because McKamey Manor did not charge for admission and entertained only a small number of participants, the city didn’t automatically scrutinize it for conformity to codes and regulations as it would a business, McKamey said. He recently applied for a business license for the first time.

A review of city code enforcement and police records show there have been few complaints about McKamey’s home on Almazon Street in San Diego, where he takes his patrons.

City code enforcement went to McKamey’s house in December 2014 and found a violation related to room additions and structures. McKamey brought everything up to code by March, and a citation was never issued.

Police said they have records of three calls for service related to the address within the last two years, two of which were calls from McKamey and one of which was a report of a kidnapping that did not turn out to be a crime.

McKamey said the “kidnapping” was him bringing an electrician to his own home. He said he doesn’t like people to know where he lives, so he picked up the electrician from another location and hooded him for the ride. Suddenly, the police were on his doorstep.

“We had eight of them at the door with guns drawn and they go, ‘Oh, it’s you,’” McKamey said.

Police said one person who toured McKamey Manor called to ask if the manor’s operations were legal, but she did not report a crime or indicate she wanted to press charges.

To visit McKamey Manor, patrons must be over 21 and come alone or with one companion. They sign a waiver allowing a certain amount of physical harm, although McKamey does not give participants a copy of the form and declined to release a copy to U-T Watchdog.

Visitors meet the haunted house staff at a remote location, where they are blindfolded, bound and gagged and taken to the manor in a location unknown to them in a large blood-red van.

At the house, they are subjected to simulated drowning and suffocating, force-feeding, unwelcome haircuts and physically rough treatment. Participants agree that they will not be released until McKamey gives his permission.

McKamey says much of what appears on the Internet YouTube videos — vomiting, participants weeping and bruised, a young man crying out to be released as his head is shoved under water — is “smoke and mirrors,” and that visitors are not held against their will.

Critics such as Amy Milligan of East County say they were held captive after they begged to be let go, and that what happened to them left physical bruises and emotional scars.

“I cry over every little thing,” Milligan said. “If I hear about McKamey Manor, I freak out. I’m so stressed. It gets so stressful. ... You give so much trust to them and they just break it by waterboarding you and slapping you.”

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Milligan said she knew McKamey Manor was an extreme experience, and she expected to an unpleasant, terrifying “tour” when she signed up, but she thought it was, ultimately, a haunted house.

Milligan said it occurred to her, as she lay closed in a coffin with cockroaches on her face, listening to hissing from little tubes, which appeared to be emitting some kind of gas, that she had unwittingly placed herself in actual danger.

“It clicked in my head, ‘I don’t know these people. It could be any kind of gas; I have no idea,’” Milligan said. “So I was plugging my nose because I was scared, like, ‘I don’t know where I am; I don’t understand this. I thought this was going to be a haunted house.’”

Milligan said she was placed in a shallow pool enclosed with a cage and held under water. She said she actually thought the manor’s actors were going to kill her, by accident if not intentionally.

“I’m going to die here,” Milligan recalled thinking. “‘I’m going to drown.’ My hair is wrapping around my neck and I start freaking out. I’m telling them I can’t breathe and they’re just laughing and doing it more.”

Milligan’s statements in an interview with the Watchdog contrast with video McKamey recorded after she took the tour, in which she said she was never assaulted, tortured or held against her will.

“It was my own free will,” she said. “I never felt that I was being tortured.”

Milligan told the Watchdog that she said those things during her “exit interview” video at McKamey Manor in the hopes she could obtain footage of her tour to use as evidence of what had happened to herself and her partner on the tour. She said she went to police with her concerns but never filed a report.

McKamey counts Milligan as one of the “haters,” a minority of participants who relentlessly pursue an invitation to the manor, repeatedly ignore his warnings about what might happen to them once inside, voluntarily sign a waiver to participate and then regret the decision later, falsely accusing the haunt of torture, assault and other crimes.

Ben Armstrong, president of America Haunts, a professional group for large, professional traditional haunted houses, said McKamey Manor caters to a very small audience of hardcore thrill-seekers and provides a very, very different product.

While McKamey Manor is often called an “extreme haunted house,” Armstrong says he and most of the other professional attraction owners America Haunts represents consider it a “simulated abduction.”

“In my mind there’s nothing haunted about it,” Armstrong said. “A good haunted house rides the razor’s edge between Halloween and horror, supernatural versus gore. Too far into horror and you become sadistic.”

McKamey said he has identified a new place to move McKamey Manor, and hopes to move out of his home in San Diego and into a temporary location within the next few months. He declined to say where.