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This is the stuff nightmares are made of.

Chain saw-wielding maniacs chasing the drunken visitors through the corn. Burned-out Gothic cathedrals, baroque tombstones, Egyptian mummies, voodoo bayous, grotesque zombie nurses in charge of the asylum.

And perhaps the creepiest thing of all: an eerily lit playground where the swings, carousel and see-saw are moving, but there are no children. There’s just a woman in a little girl’s clothes, beckoning, trancelike:

“Come play with me.”

Here at Spookywoods, on the 55-acre Archdale farm where Tony Wohlgemuth grew up, a high-tech haunted Halloween trail defies all sense of proportion, the product of a fertile imagination run amok.

And like a “Friday the 13th” plot, it all began with a dare the summer Wohlgemuth turned 13, and he and his friends were camping out in the woods next to the abandoned farmhouse.

They egged one teen on to climb the rickety staircase inside. When he reached the top, he was attacked by a family of angry bats.

“That really freaked us out, and we decided the place was haunted,” says Wohlgemuth, 38, who then set up a five-room haunted attraction in the farmhouse, charging $2 a head.

That was 25 years ago. Today the haunted trail has grown into an elaborate operation that brings in 3,000 visitors on a good night, employs 140 people — including a former Universal Studios designer — and houses a year-round special effects lab supplying mummies and zombie suits to the stars.

This year, Spookywoods opened a graveyard inspired by a tour of New Orleans cemeteries, an archeological dig that is Indiana Jones of the damned, a voodoo priestess hut, a cabin where a hunter practices gruesome taxidermy, and a ghost town.

In the ghost town, Wohlgemuth built “The Last Ride.” The visitor lies in a coffin, which creaks shut, leaving total darkness. Then come the sounds and smells. As a pair of cockney undertakers take the coffin on a bumpy, lurching trip to the graveyard, a succession of smells is piped in: funeral home flowers, the smell of exhaust, moist earth, rotting flesh.

May we ask how?

“It’s from a company in Chicago called Sinister Scents,” Wohlgemuth says. “You can get cotton candy. And you can get rotting flesh.”

The phenomenal, apparently recession-proof business of fear has been good to Wohlgemuth, whose Swiss father bought the farm off Kersey Valley Road, later returning to Switzerland, leaving the son his land.

In terms of crops, Wohlgemuth diversified: He has a computer business along with special effects, does a Christmas tree farm event after Thanksgiving, runs a daytime cornfield maze and magic show for kids.

But after dark in October, when he turns on the fog machines and the actors crank the chainless chain saws, Halloween is his bread-and-butter.

Every year, he adds detail, trucking in sand for the Egyptian tombs, or hanging the bayou with tiny microchip fireflies so lifelike that the real McCoys try to mate with them.

But however high-tech the trail becomes, the scariest parts always derive from the sudden starts: the nurse with the zombie baby who invades visitors’ personal space, the skinned victim who suddenly leaps to his feet in the hunter’s cabin.

“He scares them so bad, they bust out the windows,” Wohlgemuth says, inspecting a broken pane. “It’s not the $20,000 animatron that scares you the worst. It’s the person. It’s sudden things.”

Things like bats screeching out of the dark at the top of a rickety staircase, in a farmhouse with a macabre past, Wohlgemuth would later learn. A woman who grew up as a little girl in the farmhouse told Wohlgemuth that the family once took in a boarder who would entertain them at night by playing a fiddle.

One night, he died in his sleep, and he was so portly, they couldn’t get him down the narrow staircase, but had to lower him from the window. For three days, he lay in state, the woman told Wohlgemuth, and kept sitting up spontaneously in his casket because of rigor mortis.

The strangest part?

When the Winston-Salem Paranormal Society visited the farmhouse to take readings a couple of years back, the finding surprised Wohlgemuth.

“They said it was definitely haunted — not by a mean ghost but a benevolent one,” he says. “They said they picked up fiddle music. And I hadn’t even told them that story.”

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com