What’s Up kicks off a series on Kitsap’s haunts for the Haunted Holiday Season.

A piercing scream shatters the calm of the mid-October’s eve at a wrecking yard just outside of Belfair.

Inside the gates, there is certain to be untold amounts of blood and guts and gore, twisted metal and haunted wreckage. But for now, waiting to enter, all you can hear are the shrieks from inside the Scrapyard Massacre.

“Are you sure you want to go in there?” a freaky-looking, pale-faced, white-haired evil ice cream man welcomes you. “Well good … then welcome to hell.”

Also known as Washington state’s best haunt according to hauntworld.com, the Scrapyard Massacre is a haunted house like no other. It brings together the creepiness of a mid-October’s eve with the wicked reputation of the outlaw, outlying Belfair area and the sheer bone-chilling setting of a wrecking yard under a harvest moon.

The stench of evil is so thick you can smell it.

“We didn’t realize when we first started doing this, but the wrecking yard, by itself, is scary,” Belfair Auto Wrecking owner and Scrapyard Massacre entrepreneur Parris Shepard said. “Not for me, but for a lot of people … people die in their cars that end up there, and a lot of horror movies end up there as well.”

As did What’s Up this past weekend, on the first stop of a jaunt through Kitsap’s haunts for this haunted holiday season.

In its third year of operation, the Scrapyard Massacre has become one of the most talked about haunts in Kitsap, hailed as the best in the state and rumored to be best in the Northwest. It’s an all-volunteer endeavor that had more than 4,000 visitors last year.

Who could resist at haunted house at a wrecking yard?

Once inside the gates, you wander along a trail through the eerie grounds, marked with dead animal carcasses, severed pig heads and raging garbage can fires. And yes, they’re real.

“Smelling rotting flesh kind of gets you in that mood,” Shepard said.

As you follow the trail making your way to the haunt, there seems to be an abundance of escaped convicts also wandering around amongst the wreckage with disfigured faces and huge machetes, also quite possibly real.

And then you head into the haunt.

“Freddy Krueger and stuff, that was great back in the 80s, but it’s not real,” Shepard said of the Scrapyard’s inspiration. “People don’t come out of your dreams and kill you, but hillbillies that come get you when your car breaks down and take you back to the farm … that’s scary.”

THE SCRAPYARD MASSACRE is haunting from 7 p.m. to midnight every Friday and Saturday in October at the Belfair Auto Wrecking Yard, two miles south of the Bremerton International Airport on Highway 3. Admission is $12, $2 off with a donation of food. Ages 12 and up. Info: www.myspace.com/scrapyardmassacre, www.hauntworld.com

NEXT WEEK What’s Up goes to the Haunted Fairgrounds.