Haunted House - Year 3

We put on our haunted house for Halloween for the 3rd year in a year and we had a huge turn out. Not only that, it was a bunch of fun for us too.

But first, Luann took this picture at work of a lady whom characterized herself as the original 'Hooters Girl'. Love the glasses...

Remember, if you want to see a larger version of any of these pictures, just click on it and it will expand to a larger size.

Here is the begining of our 'haunted house'. We tend to make it something of an open-air design because we don't want the parents to get too nervous when they send their kids into the 'unknown'. We saw more than a couple of parents walking down the side of the setup to make sure 'junior' made it through intact.

This is one of the new elements we put in for this year. Good 'ole inflatable Dracula here actually lays down every so often and the coffin lid closes over him. Then after about a 20 second pause, the coffin lid opens and he sits up. What is really neat is that it has lights inside the coffin and inside the body so you can see it real well at night.

And, here is part of our crew, helping out with the setup. It took us 4-5 hours to get everything into place.

And, here is yet another new element for this year... I like this inflatable spider because every so often, he would move his head to one side or the other. I can't remember how many times I saw a kid jump because this thing moved... Just like Dracula, the spider has lights in it so you can see it jerking around when it was dark out.

So, the sun is going down and the teenagers are starting to get into their costumes. They had a good time escorting the little kids through the haunted house area, giving out candy and scaring the older kids who thought that there wasn't anything worth screaming about. Until they were stalked by one of our concealed 'beasties', that is...

As a reward for helping us out and to feed our non trick-or-treater guests, Luann put together this little table full of goodies. We decided to use the catering services of one of our favorite Cuban restaurants up the road to make up the sandwiches for us.

Yeah, things are beginning to take shape as the sun sinks in the west.

The kids are poised for the fun as I'm kind hidden behind them as I'm busily setting up the projector for the slide show I used last year and the "Nightmare Before Christmas" movie we will show tonight.

Elena stopped by with her daughter Natasha, whom helped out with giving out candy to the kiddies.

Eventually, Karen showed up with her boys, Brendan and Kyler, so they could do some Trick-Or-Treating in our neighborhood. And did I mention her new boyfriend, Tony? He came along for some fun and we talked for a while about all kinds of things, like football and stock car racing.

Yeah, this picture was taken during a slow moment, which didn't happen very often.

Well, here comes some more visitors for some fun and (more importantly) the candy at the end of the driveway.

Here is a picture showing the crowds that lined up to have a go at the haunted house. They even pushed strollers through the door and kept right on heading towards the candy bowl at the back...

And then, there was the projection show with chairs lined up so parents could take a load off while their kids practically ran through the haunted house.

And when Melissa's parents stopped by, they decided to watch the show for a while.

Whereupon, Melissa finally showed up and watched the movie with them for a while.

If you click on this picture, you can see that there were people all over the place, and it was tough for cars to make it down the street with so many people coming to the haunted house and/or watching the show on the screen.

We even had a stilt-walker come down the road and he started messing around with the kids waiting in line to go through the haunted house. Nice getup.

And, this would be the last picture we took as it's now 10:00 PM.

This is about the time that the kids pretty much stopped coming by, so we decided to break down the haunted house. The whole setup has been designed so that it only took 1 hour to take everything down and pack it all away. By 11:00 PM we were done and everybody started heading home. Whew! It was hot and steamy tonight (but it wasn't snowing) and not everything went off perfectly, but we had so many people thank us for our hard work that we're planning on doing it again next year.