How to Haunt an Apartment Tennis Court

An easy and affordable way to make a maze on a paved surface would be to use 5 gal. buckets filled with concrete, holding up 8' tall posts (2x4's). You can then tie the 2x4 posts together with furring strips for stability and stapling surfaces. For the walls, you can staple heavy black plastic to the uprights and cross members. As long as you have cross members sufficiently spaced across the tops of the halls and between the uprights, the whole structure should be quite stable, even in light to moderate winds. Since the top is open, you should not have any fire marshal concerns. It is a bit of work to get the buckets and uprights put together, but they will be reusable year after year. The furring strips used to stabilize the walls can also provide mounting surfaces for lighting and sound.

Just be sure that the major scares are not in confined halls, as the plastic will not hold back a stampede. We have successfully used this system with the haunted barn portion of our hayride for 16 years.

Eric

OpenTrackRacer said:

How did you end up securing the plastic to the conduit?

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We just ducttapped it. We used gorilla glue tape (cause it's black)to tape the loops I taled about to the top and bottom of the roll and then just rolled out the length we needed for each stretch of corridor. Anywhere there was a corner join, we tried to roll it around the corner if possible. If not, we carefully taped them together and then cut the tape we we took it down to prevent tearing the tarp. But, we spent money on the fireproof stuff and wanted to get as many years out of it as possible. You may not need to.

We also didn't bother covering all the upright pipes. Some we painted so we didn't have to do two side worth of tarp. Some, we just left bare. Most didn't notice.

Phil1979 said:

hey shadowopal nice idea with the conduit system i just don't understand how to secure them so if someone bumps into one they don't just fall over , doing it inside on the tennis court how would i secure them i am trying to make a pretty large area into alot of small hallways and rooms and i don't want on scared person toppling the whole thing over but i have priced it and it seems very reasonable

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Thanks. I wish I could take crdit for it. But, I stole it from someone else Will Shock is the name I think. But, he spent more money than I did and probably has a quicker to assemble system than mine even. He used the tent joiners spoken of above. I founde the junction boxes to be cheaper and I could make any kind of join I needed for $1-$2

Making the walls stable is easy really. You'll notice in the instruction video that I have 3' pieces spanning the corridor at the top and bottom. This helps a lot after you tighten the screws on the pipes. Plus just having corridor pieces back to back helps. And if you tie the perimiter sections to the fence, I doubt it will move much at all. The key is to not have any free-floating walls. I'll try to explain this as best I can.

When you have a corridor heading west that turns 90 degrees and then immediately turns 90 degrees to make them head back east, you will have a wall that is on their left side that will be a free-floating wall. This is unavoidable as the person has to walk through the wall at some point in order to continue the corridor. Basically, you need to have the junction box at the top connect to the three walls around it. So, the junction box at the top will look like a cross when you look down on it and you plug 3' spanner pieces into each socket and then have a junctino box on the wall where it meets. I hope that helps. I'll draw it up later to show you when I get some time.

But, the free-floater walls are the weak points. So, if you use the above method (assuming I explained it to where you can figure it out), all your walls will use each other for strength. There will be a little bit of give if someone pushes on it. But, the main threat will be to your covering anyway.

Phil1979 said:

and btw nice sound effects where did you get them

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Thanks again. I made them. Some I recorded myself. Others I took bits of soundeffects I found on the web and remixed them together. I have a big collection of sound effects that I really need to organize. Once I do that, I'll be offer services for sound effects. Right now, I'm too scattered to do it for a bunch of people. But, if you need something specific, let me know and I'll see what I can dig up.