Our Haunt

[movieman64]

As many of you know I've talked about doing a local haunt on here several times. We just had our opening weekend the 8th &9th...duh. We had approximately 320 visitors...wow! we were really excited. We collected $473 in donations and cleared $212 on concessions. We opened 1 weekend earlier then last year to try and raise some extra money and we think it worked. The theme this year is House of the Dead, and so far we have had some really good comments. We are thinking about adding a pair of debating zombies to mock Busch and Kerry, but that's still up in the air. As I said before, we split the monies between the PTO/Youth league, H/S drama club and the haunt for props and operating costs. One of the local volunteer F/D is having some money problems and we are thinking of making a donation to them as a group too. It's a lot of work, but it's great fun, I've had a bunch of calls from friends of the students wanting to volunteer on the upcoming weekends so there's no shortage of help, it seems everybody likes haunted houses. We didn't have very many College students yet, but we are hoping as it draws closer to Halloween they will show up.

I'm not trying to blow my own horn, I'm just really proud of what we are doing, and doing something I really love. I know it's been done before, but a movie about on of the actors at a haunt, really being a serial killer escaped from the local asylum and hacking up actors as well as guests....now that's a horror flik.

[movieman64]

Well even though, there were no replies to this I'm gonna update this post do to this project being so near and dear to my heart. We had our second weekend and it was great, the numbers were roughly the same, up some, closer to 400 visitors this time. We had several of the College students go through too. Met a DJ from the College radio Station and he's going to see about broadcasting from the haunt on the Saturday before Halloween, he's at least going to give us a few plugs too. We had more students/actors show up then there were stations, so we made them up like Zombies and let them mingle with the guests, very effective I might say. We lit the waiting and concession area with red, green, blue and backlights, and had lots of fog going, the effect was really awesome. We have bought a mountain of candy, and hope to have a lot of TOT's for Halloween, we are going to tone down the tour for an hour or so for the younger crowd and are hoping for a big turn-out. As I said before it's a lot of work but it's great, we have had nothing but positive comments.

So if nothing else I will post again next week just to boost my own ego...lol.

[Vodstok]

Sounds cool. i wish we had had something like that when i lived in indiana. nothing like that around here either. Good luck with the dj, i hiope he is able to pull through for ya :)

[movieman64]

Well now that Halloween is over, and we have started to tear down the Haunt I hope things will start to get back to some degree of normal. We did great this year, despite a couple rainy/cold nights. Overall the crowds were good, the wait wasn't too long, and everybody had a lot of fun, (us and the patrons). We had a lot of TOT's Sunday evening, and the younger one's were not to enthused about going through the haunt, even with the lights turned up! We had a lot of repeat customers and that hurt us a little on the donations, but overall we did good. We had a small fight Friday night, and we asked both parties to leave. Saturday night I asked a local city police officer who was going to be off duty if he could help us out? I told him we couldn't really afford to pay him, but his food, would be free, and any of his family/friends could come out too. He was great, and guess what...no problems. Too bad it had to come to that but hay.

I got a chance to meet one of the guys who was putting on a Haunted Hay ride in a town about 20 min from us. He came out to our haunt, went through and then introduced himself. He wanted to come back during the day and see how we did some of our stuff! I told him fair is fair, so when could I visit his haunt. He gave me their times for the weekend and said to ask for him at the ticket booth. I showed up on a Friday night and the place was packed. They told me there was about a 1 1/2 to 2 hour wait...WOW!!! They charged $5.00 per and had what they called "fast track" tickets too for $10.00, you got to go right in not much waiting. He and I went through the ride on a golf cart like thing, we followed one of the wagons, (each wagon held 20-25 people), so we could see the effect. I had a good time and got some good ideas...we talked about setting up a haunt of our own next year, so well see what happens.

Next weekend we are having our after-party...and we do it up just like Halloween it's always been great fun