I made a couple of observations this year that I wanted to share with the group assembled here and hear your feedback.
This year was a high-water mark for my family. We had a dozen major props, we had seven actors, we had a maze for the first time, and we had a very organized, professional, event from start to finish. We had people start coming to our house at 4:30 because they were going to work and wanted to see everything they had watched being set up all month. We had officers from three different agencies come through after a deputy sheriff brought her kids through before she went on watch and she spread the word to everyone on patrol to sneak by and go through the maze. And we didn't get the last visitors through until almost midnight. By all accounts we scored big, but we scored big last year as well, and received loads of support, congratulations, and appreciation from our neighbors, but I didn't see all those good feelings translate into more families decorating or even being home Saturday night. Our neighbors across the street decorated, but only about half as much as last year.
So what I'm wondering is if some of us are pursuing a self-defeating proposition? It seems to me the more we improve our houses and haunts, the more we may be intimidating or deterring others from doing the same. How many of my neighbors are saying "I would love to decorate, but how can I possibly compete with that? My feeble efforts would look like crap compared to those, so why bother?", and what we've been hoping would encourage others is actually deterring them?
The other observation I made is we had about 25% of our visitors arrive by foot. The other 75% would pull up in vehicles, a bunch of kids and adults would get out, they would go through the maze and do their thing, then they all got back into their vehicle and left even though there were five houses within sight that had their porch lights lit. I had a couple of folks ask me how good our neighborhood was for trick or treating, and told them all our neighbors appear to be participating, but I did take a drive through about 7:45 and saw only about a third of houses were lit.
So I'm wondering if trick or treating is moving away from being a neighborhood event and becoming more of a destination thing? Who wants to walk a couple miles through a neighborhood to get 25-33% results when you can throw the kids in a car, drive around and look for house like ours that are all decked out and entertaining, and stop there, have a great time, get some candy, and then drive around to the next house? This reminds me of how my folks liked to go look at Christmas lights. They had no problem driving around for hours looking for the really nice houses, and I'm wondering if that same mindset is becoming more prevalent at Halloween?
Lastly, relating to both previous observations, we got contact information from a lot of people, including several neighbors, who asked to participate in our efforts next year, either helping with funding, setup, or serving as actors or guides. So this made me wonder if maybe there's a if you can't beat em join em mentality raising its head? Instead of setting up your own decorations, align with someone else and eventually create a community haunted house where everyone congregates instead of doing things on an individual basis.