Funhouse
A funhouse or fun house is an amusement facility found on amusement park and funfair midways where patrons encounter and interact with various devices designed to surprise, challenge, and amuse them. Unlike thrill rides or dark rides, funhouses are participatory attractions, where visitors enter and move around under their own power. Incorporating aspects of a playful obstacle course, they seek to distort conventional perceptions and startle people with unstable and unpredictable physical circumstances within an atmosphere of wacky whimsicality. Common features. Appearing originally in the early 1900s at Coney Island, the funhouse is so called because in its initial  form it was just that: a house or larger building containing a number of amusement devices. At first these were mainly mechanical devices. Some could be described as enlarged, motorized versions of what might be found on a children's playground. The most common were: Notwithstanding the images in movies and comic books, fun houses did not drop patrons through trapdoors, which would be far too dangerous. One type of floor trick plays on this image: it consists of a section of floor that suddenly drops just a few inches, making victims think they are falling into a trapdoor. Some  fun houses brought new arrivals through a short series of dark corridors or a mirror maze or door maze (many identical doors forming squares, only one of which opened in each square), often leading onto a small stage where they had to negotiate a series of rocking floors, air jets and other obstacles, while people already inside the funhouse could watch and laugh at them. A few places even provided benches for the watchers. Once patrons were inside, they could stay as long as they wished, repeating each feature as many times as they chose. This type of fun house  resembled a miniature version of Steeplechase Park at Coney Island, whose 'Pavilion of Fun'—a building resembling a huge airplane hangar—included, in addition to rides, a gigantic slide, a spinning disk probably across, and a lighted stage called the "Insanitarium" where patrons emerging from the Steeplechase ride were harassed by a clown carrying an electric wand, while women in skirts were at the mercy of air-jet bursts. Through the first half of the 20th century most amusement parks had this type of fun house, but its free-form design was its undoing. It was labor-intensive, needing an attendant  at almost every device, and when people spent two hours in the fun house they weren't out on the midway buying tickets to other rides and attractions. Traditional fun houses gave way to walk-throughs, where patrons followed a set path all the way through and emerged back on the midway a few minutes later. These preserved some of the traditional fun house features, including various kinds of moving floors, sometimes a revolving barrel and a small slide. They added such things as crooked rooms, where a combination of tilt and optical illusion made it hard to know which  way was up, and dark corridors with various popup and jumpout surprises, optical illusions and sound effects. Although some walkthroughs were given unique names, like Aladdin's Castle (Riverview Park in Chicago), Magic Carpet (Crystal Beach, Ontario) or Riverboat (Palisades Park, New Jersey), many were still labelled Fun House, and regardless of the official name the public generally referred to them that way. Many traditional fun houses were removed after parks created walk-throughs. Some became dilapidated and were torn down. A few burned down; they were nearly all wood-frame buildings with extensive electrical wiring. Those that remained were  all at traditional local amusement parks and died when those parks closed due to competition from new theme parks. No theme park ever created a traditional free-form stay-all-day fun house, but theme parks sometimes developed the walk-through attraction to new, high-tech heights. A few traditional fun houses are still operating in Europe and Australia. Related, but with somewhat different history, are walk-through haunted houses and mirror mazes, although the latter are sometimes labelled fun houses. In popular culture. Books. John Barth's experimental short story collection "Lost in the Funhouse", and the short story  of same title. Robert Heinlein has Lazarus Long and his mother Maureen Long visit a funhouse with his younger self in the novel "Time Enough for Love". Movies. Hollywood sometimes built elaborate funhouse sets with devices never seen in a real funhouse, as in the 1937 Fred Astaire musical, "A Damsel in Distress", and the 1939 Joe E. Brown film, "Beware Spooks!". Other funhouses depicted onscreen include: Carnival fun houses. Traveling carnivals have long included small walk-through fun houses in addition to their thrill rides. The typical carnival fun house is built entirely in a semi-trailer, usually about  long by wide, allowing limited space for elaborate scenes or effects. Common features are dark corridors, light-up skulls, gravity-powered tipping floors, and airjets at the exit. A few include motorized devices like moving floors and stairways or downscaled revolving barrels. A few attractions traveling on two or more trailers are more elaborate. Beginning in the late 1980s a few American operators acquired European-built attractions that unfold into multi-storied walkthroughs with dozens of tricks. Such funhouses are ubiquitous in Europe, but the falling value of the U.S. dollar and the high cost of fuel to transport multiple  trailers over the long distances carnivals travel in the United States has made them expensive to buy and operate, so they are seen only at the largest American fairs.