[Zombor]

Finally decided from several themes for this year and ended on Abandoned/Haunted Asylum. Plans for the theme so far go as follows:

1. Living Room Becomes-Waiting/Reception Area: Will have a desk in the corner on the room with a skeletal "receptionist" slumped over it complete with beehive hairdo and outdated dress. Working on a self writing pencil effect on the desk with a self-page turning book. Throw around some old magazines, cobwebs, and creepy music and voila.

2. Dining Room Becomes- Electro-Shock Treatment Room: Working on a "shock treatment" chair similar to an electric chair with strobe, smoke machine, and zapping sounds. Set out my nebula plasma ball and place a plasma plate behind the chair. Will also be heavily black-light lit with some black light paint and neon party favors.

3. Sun Room Becomes- Morgue: This room is off limits, so I will be hanging some semi-transparent painters tarp in the doorway with a sheet covered "dead body" with a prop arm hanging off the table barely poking out through the tarp.

4. Unused Basment Door Becomes- Crematory: Easy enough, back lit spot light coming through door cracks with some fog machine seeping through. (Got the idea from an earlier post, sorry, don't remember from who.)

5. Foyer/ Hallway Becomes- Crazies Room: Straight Jacket patients sitting in corners and peeping eyes look on as you walk by. Also will be building and using Mainelyelectrics idea for the flickering fluoescent bulb here.

6. Kitchen Becomes- Cafeteria: Trays, ice cream scoop served dishes, and (if money allows) a skeletal "luch lady" with a hairnet.

Top it all off with my wife and I dressed as a creepy and antiquated doctor and nurse combo and there you have it! Please, please, please fill me in on comments and suggestions for more. Also, I want to do a padded wall effect for the "crazies" area, but don't know how to pull it off inexpensively and with good effect. Thanks in advance for the comments!

 

[printersdevil]

Sounds like a good start. I was in Michael's today and they had a sign that said something about insane asylum. It was on one of those metal frames and looked like the real estate signs.

 

[MsMeeple]

Sounds like a great plan!

I would suggest a psychiatrist's office.
And a medicine tray/cart in the crazies room.

 

[Mordessa]

Oh wow, cool! I love your ideas so far! We're also doing an insane asylum this year, one that has been completely taken over by the patients.

Our entryway is downstairs and it goes past two bedrooms. So, the bedroom on one side will be a padded cell, complete with my husband in a straight jacket (*cough* which is fitting. hehehe). It's just the two of us, so at first, he'll be just sitting in his padded cell doing whatever. And then the door on the other side of the hall will be our brain washing room. It will have a bed that has a propped up mattress to look like a hospital bed, and a dummy on it that is staring at the TV across the room, which will have brain-washing type stuff, like pinwheel effects and "subliminal" messages and things like that. In that same room, there will be a dummy or skeleton, haven't figured out which yet, who will be standing over a basin washing a brain. (Somebody on here gave me that idea and it was just too good not to do, so whoever it was, THANK YOU! )

After the guests get past those two rooms, they will come to a guard station which will have a guard dummy slumped over in front of a monitor that shows a screen cut into four screens, each showing patient monitoring camera views, with patients in their rooms, in black and white. When they get to the guard table, which is at the bottom of the stairs, my hubby will come raging out of the room and startle everybody enough to get moving up the stairs, but not so bad that they'll fall on the stairs.

Then, the upstairs will have a morgue complete with hanging body bags, morgue drawers on the walls and an autopsy table, and this room will also have the fogger and bluish spooky lights. Outside that door will be little boxes with bars and a sign that says claustrophobia therapy, and sounds of people freaking out inside them.

The living room will be like a day room for the patients, and my rocking granny will be in there somewhere. The sun room will be our Death Therapy room with hanging nuses and knives and chainsaws and stuff like that all over the place.

The hardest part to figure out is the kitchen for me. It's always the place I forget to plan for, and this year, even though I've got the time to do it, I just don't know what to put in there to make it part of the haunt.

Oh, and usually I offer hot apple cider and cookies to those who come through the haunt, so they linger a bit in the kitchen. And while they are doing that, this year, the hubby is going to go take the place of the slumped guard dummy so that as they are leaving, he can jump up and chase them out.

I'm still trying to figure out where I can put some more jumps into the haunt, but we've at least got a good head start.

I'd love to hear anybody else's ideas on this theme as well though!! So, please keep 'em coming!

 

[Jaberchtold77]

You could have a security office, where the security gaurds were killed by the mentally insane who escaped. You could have tv's/computers with survailance or fuzzyness. It would look great with a dark room.

 

[kcharles12]

I'm doing the same thing. I'm building an asylum door and projecting two asylum patient videos on my front windows. My bathroom will be a treatment room with all sorts of surgical instuments and car batteries. My bartenders will be dressed as nurses and liquor will be dispensed from IV bottles and shots given from syringes.

Check out hi-rezdesigns.com for the asylum videos - they are great

 

[Zombor]

Thanks again for all the great advice. I'll try and post some pics after we get everything all set up this year.

 

[pins and needles]

Love your ideas.!!!!Thats a lot of area to decorate. You have your work cut out. How long have you been doing this? I was really impressed with all the attention to detail, I felt like I was there. lol

This is my first year doing a haunt, I usually just decorate my porch really good. This year we are using our 3 car garage and mud room calling it the "Maze of Terror". I have 4 themes I am doing, Clown House, Skeleton Bride, Friday the 13th and The city Morgue. I have ads on craigslist, Alaskaslist and am using the local newspaper's Halloween Safety tips page, which comes out the week before, for advertisement. Plus the "Grass Roots" approach, store bulletin boards, fliers on corners where kids catch the bus, etc etc. Home haunts aren't really practiced up here but would love for this year to be a success, in hopes of others following suite. Tell me more about your morgue, I am needing help in that area. Thanks in advance.