I Survived Elitch Gardens' 24-Hour Coffin Challenge. Here's What it Was Like.

More than 200 people applied to be shut inside a coffin for 24 hours as part of Elitch Gardens' first Pine Box Challenge. Five people were selected to participate. But on the day of the event, one of them didn't show up.

That's when I got the text. While interviewing Elitch's marketing manager about the coffin challenge, I joked about my failed application and offered to be an alternate. So with less than thirty minutes' notice, I headed to the theme park on Saturday, October 5, to spend my weekend inside a wooden box.

The four other contestants and I successfully completed the challenge on Sunday. We were awarded nearly $900 worth of season passes, dining plans and Fright Fest tickets — but the once-in-a-lifetime experience far outweighed the prize.

Here's what it was like inside the coffin:

Frequently Asked Questions

Let's get this out of the way.

Could you use the bathroom? Yes, we had scheduled bathroom breaks around three times per day and unlimited bathroom access overnight.

Did you get to eat or drink? Water bottles were provided and allowed inside the coffins, and there were three meal breaks outside of the coffins (pizza for dinner, doughnuts for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch). Other much less appetizing food was also forced on us during challenges.

Did you have your phone? Cell phones were confiscated before we entered the coffins. We were allowed to use our phones twice for thirteen minutes to let our families know we were still alive: once before bed on Saturday night and then after we woke up on Sunday morning.

Could you bring anything inside the coffin? Just a pillow, a sleeping bag and whatever articles of clothing we were wearing.

In the Coffin

For an event billed as "24 hours inside a coffin," we spent surprisingly little time in the wooden boxes.

We were taken out of the coffins at least once every hour for challenges and breaks while the amusement park was open. The only undisturbed stretches of coffin time happened overnight on Saturday, from midnight to 8 a.m., and then two hours on Sunday morning.

Though we were left in our boxes overnight, we were not alone. A team of haunted-house actors spent the entire night tormenting us — banging on the coffins, crashing cymbals, sounding alarms and setting off prop chainsaws and tasers in our faces. They also blasted children's music over the loudspeakers, playing the likes of "Baby Shark," "Wheels on the Bus" and the Bill Nye the Science Guy theme song. That particular brand of torture kept two of my fellow participants awake all night.

I largely slept through the onslaught, but awoke once in the middle of the night, when a staffer drove a truck to the front of my coffin, turned on the brights and laid on the horn until I sat up.

The actors also periodically visited us throughout the days, at times jumping on top of our coffin lids or tossing fake rats inside. The worst visit came on Saturday evening, when a group of clowns shoveled dirt and mulch into our coffins and on top of our bodies. I curled at the bottom of the coffin and covered myself with my sleeping bag in an attempt to hide, but the moment I lowered my defense, I was met with a fistful of dirt thrown in my face.
With all the activity, being alone with my thoughts was much less of a concern than I anticipated. When the actors left, most of my time in the coffin was spent chatting with park visitors. The coffins were propped up at an angle with an opening cut in the lid from the chest up, so passersby could peer inside and ask us why we would subject ourselves to such public humiliation. Q&A sessions and rock-paper-scissors tournaments with kids provided ample entertainment.

Out-of-Box Challenges

We participated in numerous Fear Factor-esque mini-challenges throughout the 24 hours. If we failed to complete them, it would have resulted in our elimination.

The most universally hated trial was the two rounds of eating challenges, which forced us to consume various disgusting foods in a limited amount of time, including dried mealworms, cod liver, preserved duck eggs and sardines. While I finished my plate the quickest during the first round, I was nearly eliminated during the second round, choking down the last of my duck egg with only seconds left on the clock. One contestant threw up during the challenge but was able to advance in exchange for finishing the rest of his plate.

Other challenges had us reaching our hands into tanks of live Madagascar hissing cockroaches, crickets, mealworms and goldfish to search for keys or other objects.

There were some fun challenges, which included riding roller coasters. We went on the Brain Drain twice in a row to get nauseous before the first food challenge; rode the Boomerang blindfolded with haunted-house actors sitting beside us yelling in our ears; and took on the Twister III while holding cups of water, trying not to spill (whichever contestant kept the most water in the cup would have gotten extra phone time, but we all lost to a staff member, so we had our pillows confiscated instead).
We also got to ride the XLR8R late at night, which pulled us 150 feet into the air in a harness before dropping us in a free-fall over the ground. The attraction, which typically costs visitors extra to ride, is the largest free-fall swing in the state.

One of our final challenges had us walking alone through one of the theme park's haunted houses in pitch-black darkness, with only a faint glow stick to light our paths. The final room of the haunted house was a maze in which they hid the exit door, leaving us wandering through the halls confused for several minutes before they let us out. I traversed the haunted house the fastest, earning me a Dippin' Dots reward.

Post-Coffin Clarity

Apart from eating bugs and being covered in dirt, the coffin challenge was a surprisingly fun experience.

I grew up going to Elitch Gardens and spent many of my middle school summer days exploring the park. Getting to see the behind-the-scenes operations of the theme park and spending the night stargazing between the Half Pipe and Tower of Doom was well worth any back pain from lying in a wooden box for a day.

While chatting with park visitors, we fielded many questions about whether free passes were a fair trade for 24 hours of our time. But it became clear that none of us were doing the coffin challenge for the prize. My coffin neighbor, Adam, recently lost 200 pounds and took on the challenge because one of his weight loss goals was to be able to ride roller coasters again. Heather, a single mother nearing her fiftieth birthday, wanted to show her kids that she could still do fun and challenging things.

Our motto during the tough moments: "It's one rough day for a story we'll tell forever."