Thread: Do you advertise your garage haunt?

Tweet

Hi everybody! Michael here and I'm new to the forum.
For the past few years me and a couple of buddy's have been doing a haunt in my two car garage.
It seems to get better every year.
Luckily I work in the Haz Waste dept. of my county recycling center and can get all kinds of stuff from the residential drop off such as paints, foam, pallets, carboards, etc.
This year we're extending the haunt outside the garage to make it a little bigger and we are also putting more turns in it to make it take longer.
I recently built a coffin, paper mache lifesize corpse, I'll post some pics asap. and a few other props, I just got through working on my flying crank ghost via oscillating fan.
I'll post a few pics asap.

My question is:
Do you guys and gals advertise for your garage haunts?
We get plenty of people but I would love to have more. My buddy thinks advertising for just a small garage haunt is silly and that people may be disappointed by the size. My theory is "Who cares what they think? They're here aren't they?".
We do cram a lot of detail into our haunts and the one year we did not do the haunt everyone was asking "what happened?".
I'm thinking of putting a few flyers up at the local Winn Dixie, on telephone poles, and the big bulletin board sign at the entrance of my subdivision.
I'm also gonna build a sign at the entrance of the subdivision.
Anyone do this for their garage haunts and how did it work out?

What could it hurt? Especially, if you are thinking of taking it to a higher level. We contacted a local charity for kids and contacted our local paper about our haunt. Shared with them a brief history about the haunt, that we wanted to pull more haunters and we wanted them to bring old costumes or new ones for kids. Set it up for the charity to come pick them up on that night. The newspaper came out and did a whole article on us and then ran a rerun the weekend of Halloween. Of course we did the haunt for two full weekends Thur-Sun. Overall, not huge numbers, but we had a little under 3100 go thru over the two weekends. Oh, and we also did a family/kids hour just before dusk. I say about 1/3 of the haunters that went thru came at that time. I noticed that the parents came back during our full haunt.

You might try tag teaming up with anyone else in your local area who is doing a house haunt. You give directions to theirs and visa-versa. Good Luck!!!