Haunted House

For years now, we had enjoyed visiting a haunted house up the road from home, but the neighbors moved last year. So we decided to put on a scaled-down version for the kiddies. We had a bunch of fun and were quite surprised to see that traffic was backed up & down the road in both directions as people were parking their cars in the road and walking their kids over for a 'run' through the spook-tacular. We had several adult visitors (some already under the full-sail guidance of Captain Morgan and a few martinis) come by to look things over and give us their votes of approval. We had so many kids come by that we ran out of candy 3 times, so Luann had to run out and get more. We even had the neighbors across the street drop off a couple of bags of candy to 'support the cause'.

Well, time to explain the pictures...

Here is the first picture of the entrance to the haunted house, a fan-blown feature we picked up at Walmart. Inside the seemingly small interior, is a park bench entirely covered with a huge, green irridescent cloth. Under the park bench is an ice-cooled carpet-fog machine (blows a slow, lazy smoke that hugs the ground) and a portable boombox with detachable speakers that plays spooky sounds from a CD. On the park bench is a globe with a witch's head inside it that lights up with fiberoptics and says all kinds of 'witchy' things. Sitting on the bench next to the witch globe will be me, decked out as the Grim Reaper. The mask I got this year is a special one that has a red fluid pumping through it so the face looks like it has blood dripping down the front. I also installed green LED lights for eyes in the mask. When I put this outfit on, I have the blood pump concealed in my right hand and the light switch for the green eyes in my left hand. Typically, I simply sit there on the bench and let people go through, not responding to them. But if I hear somebody claim that the haunted house isn't all that scary, I will quietly follow them out the back, wait for them to concentrate on the candy bowl, then flick on the eyes, pump some blood on the face and give them a rendition of a snapping, growling dog . That usually get's them going!

The open-air haunted house is really taking shape in this picture. We decided on an open-air format so parents won't be nervous about sending there kids off into the 'ever-after'.

It's still under construction, but when an adventurer makes it through the haunted house, the backside will be loaded with all kinds of beasties and creepy-crawlies that are sound and motion activated. We got quite a few jumps and shouts of surprise when something activated and started walking, crawling, shaking and making all kinds of noises as they came near, or even if they simply pointed at it.

Unfortunately, the new fog machine required surgery after we had let it sit with the heater on for a while. I had to clean out the injector system to get it functioning again. You can see the bench with the green cloth and the witch-globe to the right.

As dusk settled in, Katrina took up her station, guiding kids to the candy bowl and directing them to first push the button on the ghost doorbell. When they touched the button, a tongue would shoot out and hit their finger, and the ghost bell would shout something like; "Tag! You're it!", or "Hey! What're You Doing?" Even some of the older teenagers fell victim to that one...

We had to make up what we called a 'chicken run' for the little ones that didn't want to go through the haunted house. It soon migrated into also being used as an exit path.

So, night has fallen, the lights are lit, the strobes are flashing and a cacophany of sound can be heard from several sources throughout the site. It's time for our first victims...er, ah, visitors.

So, there's the witch-globe, all lit up and doing her thing, while I wait on the park bench next to her for some brave soul to venture within my grasp.

This was the most fun we had, doing something like this for Halloween. Even though we had some spoil-sport issues, such as the blue lightning disk in the top right of picture 5 being ripped down by a rapscalian teen-aged boy who jumped up and pulled it down and could only then exclaim when the glass shattered into thousands of bits; "That was real!" before running away at top speed.

And then there was the knot of about 9 teens (boys and girls) that huddled in front of the entrance and almost knocked it over, then decided that 3 boys should try to judo kick me in the face as I sat on the bench. When I stood up, they crowded up close and asked me what I was going to do in an aggressive manner... So I pulled the plug on the inflatable haunted house and they beat-feet back out of it as it was collapsing. At that point, it was nine o'clock and I was tired, so I pulled my costume off and told Katrina that it was time to shut down the haunted house. Humpf! Just some dumb boys trying to impress some dumb girls...

In spite of these mishaps, it was still a good time and the neighborhood really had some fun. I have to admit, for the 16 years we have been in this house, I don't think we had as many people stop to Trick or Treat over the whole time, as we did this evening. It had to be well over a hundred visitors and they kept coming by, even as we were working on packing up the equipment...