For thousands here locally, the month of October is synonymous with a visit to downtown Pontiac’s Erebus Haunted Attraction. 2025 will be its first year without Ed Terebus, who opened the popular haunt 25 years ago with his brother, Jim. Ed died suddenly on June 7 at the age of 62.
Steve Shipp first met Ed in 1999. Shipp was inquiring about buying The Haunted Gallery, a pop-up trailer haunt founded by Jim in 1980. For two decades, the Terebus brothers operated the attraction each fall out of different Macomb County parking lots. While Shipp didn’t end up buying, it was the beginning of a long friendship.
“He just had a way of bringing out the best in people,” Shipp remembers.
The following year, with Ed’s encouragement, Shipp would illustrate his first cover for Fear Finder, a seasonal guide to Michigan’s haunted attractions that Ed founded in 1993. In its heyday, it had a circulation of over 600,000 copies. Today, a gallery of the distinctive front-page prints (all designed by Shipp) is on display year-round at Pontiac’s Mythos Museum of Oddities & Curiosities, which Shipp partnered with Ed to open in 2023.
“We would sit down and brainstorm and dream about things,” Shipp says. “But Ed wasn’t just a dreamer: He found a way to pull those dreams off.”
For the Terebus brothers, pulling off the dream of a permanent haunted house was anything but glamorous. To purchase the space in downtown Pontiac, Jim remortgaged his house, and Ed sold his condo and liquidated many of his belongings.
“Our shared passion for bringing the impossible to life was the challenge we accepted together, as brothers and business partners,” Jim recalls in a statement to Hour Detroit.
The 104,000-square-foot former junkyard — which initially had no running water or electricity — became Ed’s place of residence while he fixed it up. “He spent probably five years sleeping here on a cot,” Jim’s son Zac says.
The haunt opened in 2000, and Ed is credited with naming it — the idea first came from the House of Erebus in the Blade series. By 2005, Erebus was a nationally known and well-respected destination for scares, earning the Guinness World Record for largest walk-through haunted attraction, a title it maintained through 2009.
In addition to his business savvy, Ed’s creative side was apparent from a young age, solidified in art class at Cousino High School, during which he sculpted some of his first monster heads. After graduating in 1981, he continued to study sculpture at the College for Creative Studies for two years, while working for his brother at The Haunted Gallery.
At Erebus, Ed created many of the monster designs, while Jim, a former Ford Motor Co. engineer, designed and built the mechanical components. Examples over the years of the brothers’ collaborative ingenuity include Uncle Freddy, who catapulted out of his casket onto unsuspecting guests; a giant T. rex that “eats” visitors; and mutant gorillas that grab onto visitors’ legs.
The business has remained largely a family affair. Today, Zac, who was 10 when his uncle bought the building, is now operations manager for the haunted house and the Erebus escape room. Of his Uncle Ed, Zac recalls many fond memories — the magic tricks he would pull out at family gatherings, giant snow forts and snowmen they built together.
“He would do things that were larger than life and make you believe that absolutely anything was possible,” Zac says. “And he made every person he came in contact with feel like they had all the time in the world [with him].”
Ed is survived by his wife, Kanjana, and two children, Zigmund and Victoria; his older brother, Jim; and his five sisters, Susette, Denice, Renee, Jacqueline, and Rosette.
A donation page for Ed’s children’s college fund can be found at gofundme.com/f/support-eds-legacy-ziggy-and-toris-future.
This story originally appeared in the October 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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