Thread: Please describe your haunt this year

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I would be curious to hear details about location, size, theme, music, props and lighting. Pictures would be great.

Mine:

We live in a second floor condo. Downstairs near the gate we are setting up a cemetery with red and green lights, spiderwebs, blinking eyes in the bushes, bats hanging overhead and a tombstone that creates a lightning/ghoulish noices when activated. Im going to put speakers down there to play cemetery/storm sounds FX.

Upstairs on the "porch" area we are goin to tarp it off to make it enclosed. Havent decided on lighting but there will be both ground and regular fog. Lots of skulls and a bubbling caldren (dry ice). The one prop there will be a skelletal ghost that moves up and down when activated by movement. In that room I plan to play generic haunted house sounds from a CD.

Hanging from the balcony will be three floating reaper/ghosts with blue lights aimed at them.

In general the theme is one of undead. My wife has a costume that looks like sorecerous and I will either be a vampire or a reaper.

The first thing you see is a 57' long, 18' tall pirate ship, complete with masts, sails, rigging, cannons, and a "skeleton" crew (straight outa Fortume). You step through through a gaping hole in the side (cannonball damage from a recent skirmish) and enter the belly of the ship. The first room you encounter is the Master-at-Arm's office, where the diligent MAA is asleep at his desk, snoring, rum bottle still clutched in his fist. A lighted podium next to his desk has a guest book and a sign which reads "All visitors must sign in". There are 6 more "rooms", then you exit the haunted house and enter a huge, black, lantern-lit cave, complete with bats & crickets, live grass growing in the corners & crevices, and a 6' high pile of booty. Beyond the cave is the Red Room, where a long table is covered with food & drink fit for a pirate king. You exit out the front door, get your candy from my wife, & go your way.

Originally Posted by LV Scott T

The first thing you see is a 57' long, 18' tall pirate ship, complete with masts, sails, rigging, cannons, and a "skeleton" crew (straight outa Fortume). You step through through a gaping hole in the side (cannonball damage from a recent skirmish) and enter the belly of the ship. The first room you encounter is the Master-at-Arm's office, where the diligent MAA is asleep at his desk, snoring, rum bottle still clutched in his fist. A lighted podium next to his desk has a guest book and a sign which reads "All visitors must sign in". There are 6 more "rooms", then you exit the haunted house and enter a huge, black, lantern-lit cave, complete with bats & crickets, live grass growing in the corners & crevices, and a 6' high pile of booty. Beyond the cave is the Red Room, where a long table is covered with food & drink fit for a pirate king. You exit out the front door, get your candy from my wife, & go your way.

I want to see some photos of that. A 57 foot long ship? Holy creeping crap!1

Originally Posted by LV Scott T

The first thing you see is a 57' long, 18' tall pirate ship, complete with masts, sails, rigging, cannons, and a "skeleton" crew (straight outa Fortume). You step through through a gaping hole in the side (cannonball damage from a recent skirmish) and enter the belly of the ship. The first room you encounter is the Master-at-Arm's office, where the diligent MAA is asleep at his desk, snoring, rum bottle still clutched in his fist. A lighted podium next to his desk has a guest book and a sign which reads "All visitors must sign in". There are 6 more "rooms", then you exit the haunted house and enter a huge, black, lantern-lit cave, complete with bats & crickets, live grass growing in the corners & crevices, and a 6' high pile of booty. Beyond the cave is the Red Room, where a long table is covered with food & drink fit for a pirate king. You exit out the front door, get your candy from my wife, & go your way.

Sounds like you hardly went to any effort at all...

Kidding!

Sounds great.

Do you have any points in the haunted ship where you startle people?

Oh, yeah! And one major "wet-kill" zone!

It will depend largely on the weather. I will decide the week before Halloween.

Originally Posted by ICKYVICKI

It will depend largely on the weather. I will decide the week before Halloween.

... for next year's haunt, right?

I haven't laid out a floorplan yet, so don't know the order of things.


Lots of torches. Lots of skulls impaled on poles. Some creepy scarecrows, the 10' scarecrow entrance/exit, 2 10' 'totems' the kids built for the other entrance/exit, and one big scary witchdoctor (me).

Well, I have two this year...

The first will be at my home. It will be a cemetery with assorted tombstones within a crooked fence. I am building a large scarecrow (like the one from Sleepy Hollow) with outstretched arms. In the center will be a large wooden coffin with lid slightly ajar and skeleton hands barely seen. Two skeletons will be holding wooden signs, one will read 'vacancy', the other will be reading 'we're waiting for you'. The house's front porch will be covered with cobwebs and the trees full of little ghosts.

The second will be at the PTO fall festival. We are doing a haunted high school theme. What I have to work with are two small hallways, a boy's locker room and shower area. for music, I am using Nox Arcana's Darklore Manor, Bram Stoker's Dracula and The House on Haunted Hill soundtrack on three separate cd players in different locations. Guests are welcomed into a small hallway, decked out like a yard, my groundskeeper, in pieces, unfortunately, will warn them of the horrors within. The guide (me) will welcome them, tell them how the school was built on the grave of Ligeia, a powerful witch and how she cursed it and everyone inside. The first stop is biology class, where we find the teacher amid bubbling jars, bottles and failed experiments. He is currently operating on a student, who screams as handfuls of guts are pulled out of his abdomen. The teacher says he is looking for more "volunteers" while others scream from a nearby wooden cage and we move on. Next, is the library, a small room of bookcases and stacks of books. The librarian is picky, though. There are body parts scattered hither and yon and two corpses stamped OVERDUE. She them jumps out at the guests and screams 'Time to pay the fine!'. The guests are quickly ushered away, past the detention hall, where the living and dead await chained to the wall. Guests are then encouraged to sample the cafeteria, where human bar-b-que is a always on the grill. If there are no takers, they are taken to the principle's office, where he so dead tired, he brings his coffin to work with him. He wants the guests to stay for a bite, but we are late for the dance. In the 'gym', the guide sits down and performs a spell to release the spirits from their torment, she does not succeed and is taken by the spirits, who come forward, happy to have company. The dead chase the visitors into the last room, the graveyard, a small room filled with graves, lit with green light and covered in fog, where the Truant Officer, weapon in hand, plans to cut them down to size.

Walking up the driveway you come to the graveyard, where a witch stirs a cauldron bubbling over a fire (fogger and lights) several graves have zombies rising from the freshly turned earth, and (if I can get my butt in gear) a New Orleans style crypt has a wailing ghost that has burst out of it (Donna the Dead, with strobes contained inside the crypt). Creepy music can be heard throughout the area.

A casper-type ghost is passing through the creepy tree in the middle of the graveyard. (we have a fantastic tree that looks like it was meant for a haunted house) The ghost is in two pieces, so his back end goes on one side, and his front on the other, and he has lights inside of him and he looks lovely!

A 12 foot skelly guy with red glowing eyes and black wings will hang above our garage.

Following the sidewalk up to the front door will be an 8 foot spiderweb, complete with 4 foot spider (Webigail - she's been with us since the beginning) and a life-sized victim that motion activates, calling out to the TOTs and shifting his eyes (mummy guy but he's being repurposed as a spider victim this year). The sidewalk to our door is a longish passageway between the garage and a wing of the house, so we string up webbing as a ceiling over it and usually put it up really early to get rained on and it's gross and strings trail down and feels slightly claustrophobic.

There are several motion-activated store bought tombstones up the front walk, and a half-buried skelly that fades in and out hidden in the flowerbed next to the beginning of the walk.

Jack o' lanterns will line the walkway to the door, (we usually carve around 10) where a flaming cauldron lights the porch. Another spider hangs near the porchlight, dropping on unsuspecting TOT when they knock on the door. We have the entry hall shrouded in black fabric so you can't see into the house, and the hall has a creepy table that holds a huge cauldron of candy and a flickering candlabra.

Inside is classic haunted house. Torn decaying curtains, white sheets over the furniture, skulls and flickering candles and scary whispering...

There's more, but I can't think of where it's going yet. I feel like the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland; I'm late, I'm late...not enough time!