With Halloween just about six months away, Jesse Tyler Ferguson is revealing memories of a long-ago trauma he experienced with the cast of Glee that haunted the Modern Family star back in the day. Fortunately, he did find a way to laugh about it in a recent podcast conversation.
The scene was the legendary Los Angeles Haunted Hayride, an annual outdoor event that features spooky attractions, including the deadly slow trip in the back of a flatbed hay truck, sometime around 2009.
Ferguson, who over 26 years has managed to avoid roles in horror films — other than possibly 2023's Cocaine Bear — admitted to being "really traumatized" by the Halloween attraction on Jeff Hiller's Dinner's On Me podcast, recalling he "started to cry."
The hayride takes Halloween travelers through a series of recreated classic horror scenes, including a carnival, an asylum and a graveyard. Along the way, riders encounter actors in gruesome costumes, wielding toy weapons and doing other scary things, all in good fun... unless you're Ferguson. Then, it's a living nightmare, as he told the Somebody Somewhere star, who was honored last year as one of the Out100.
"One year when Modern Family had just started, [for] some reason, I got invited with the whole cast of Glee, we were on a haunted hayride," said Ferguson. "I was really traumatized, and they all wanted to do the corn maze after that," he said. "The haunted hayride was enough, but you're in a vessel that moves. So, I felt protected and I stayed in the center of the hayride. People come out from the field with chains. I was really traumatized."
Ferguson was accompanied by his boyfriend at the time, Justin Mikita, who Ferguson married in 2012.
"You're not protected. They give you a lantern, and they're like, 'go,'" Ferguson explained. "I was like, 'I can't do it. I can't do it.'"
Mikita, he said, urged him to join the Glee gang in the corn maze. "'Just come on, it's fine,'" Mikita told him. "Literally, the cast of Glee is all like, 'Let's go.' And I started to cry."
Ferguson added that he then split off from the group to walk back to his car with "tears in my eyes," but in recalling the story with Hiller, he said he's able to laugh about it now.
"Amber Riley was like, 'Jesus Christ,'" said Ferguson. Then Hiller said he could just picture Glee alumna Lea Michele shouting for Ferguson to "grow a pair," and Ferguson chimed-in with a taunt that Michele did not utter but they agreed she could well have:
"'Grab a lantern, grow a pair!'"
"I refused," he said. "I refused."
