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Viewing 1 - 6 out of 6 Blogs.
So we are going into the third weekend of Into the Dark. We have a complete, working haunted house and life is good. I'm sitting in my office on Wednesday and the building inspector comes in. I went to the city before I built the haunted house and asked the old building inspecter if I needed a permit. He said no. The new building inspector asked if he could see my haunted house. Of course I said yes.
We went downstairs and I gave him a tour. He had two or three very small things that he wanted corrected. There were one or two things that I thought were borderline, but he didn't even flinch at those. He said goodbye and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Then twenty minutes later he walked back in with the fire chief. My heart dropped into my shoes, I knew this was going to be bad. So, I gave the two of them a tour. This one did not go well at all.
Now I know we had some issues, I was working on them when I could in between weekends. The major things the fire chief had problems with was styrofoam walls in our alter room and too many extension cords. He was very negative from the moment he walked in the door. I truly knew there would be problems when he was asking why I had not consulted them about the haunted house. I told him I had asked the former building inspecter and he said I didn't need any permits. The fire chief then asked if I got that in writing.
Thursday afternoon the building inspector came in with a notice from the city that we were to suspend business. The major problem at this point was that the fire chief had left for Wisconsin and would not be back until Monday, after the weekend. I could not even find out what to fix until after losing a weekend of business. I talked, chewed out, the building inspector and a few hours later I received a fax from the fire chief, in Wisconsin, listing what was wrong with the haunted house.
I consulted an attorney, my sister, and wrote a letter to the city administrator. I also went to his office to talk to him. We had a meeting and he called the fire chief. I proposed a list of things I could do to open for the weekend and a list of changes and fixes I could do the following week in an effort to comply with all of their concerns. They were both nice and understanding and we came to a compromise. I then went back to my haunted house and removed all stryrofoam and stayed up until 3am hard wiring everything in the building. We spent the next day wiring and changing things and had an inspection by the building inspector 5 minutes before we opened on Friday night.
Once again we worked up until opening, but we opened and had a good weekend. On Sunday night I sat down and read our local forum online. Someone posted that we were shut down and went on to say that the city was crooked and we probably had to pay off the fire chief. There are some citizens who hate our fire chief. Now I know that every employee of the city reads the local forum. I immediately posted a reply defending the city and the fire chief most of all. I was torqued that someone would mess up the delicate balance I had struck with the powers that be.
Monday morning the building inspecter, the fire chief and three fire fighters showed up at my door for a further inspection. The first thing out of their mouth was that it was good to have someone say something nice about the city on the web and they appreciated it. That inspection was a 180 from the first. The liked my improvements, had fun, scared each other and left with a keep up the good job. And that was the last I saw of them that season. So the meddlesome internet poster ended up being my biggest blessing that season.
Next week:
We finish our first season
We had a crew building, we were quickly getting the haunt done. One day we thought, we are gonna need actors. Really actors were no problem, we didn't have the best but we had them. The problem is that we are not actors, and we are not really into acting. We were under the assumption that anyone who wanted to act in the haunted house would have the same level of enthusiasm and devotion that we did. That is not always the case. For our second year we have focused on acting, things will be differant for year 2, I hope.
We had a couple of acting meetings and run thrus. The problem was that the haunted house was being built, so there was a lot of pretending about props, scenery, walls and such during the practices. Opening night flew up on us at the speed of light. There were several nights leading to the opening when I stayed late. I have a rule of thumb that I live by, I stop working when I slice my hand open. That is usually the point when I become a danger to myself and others.
Opening night, I can sum it up by saying that we opened two hours late and the spinning tunnel wasn't working. But, we opened. We worked out a lot of kinks in the first night. Our theme and story went right out the window. A few things that were not working got axed. The actors came up with some things that worked really well, and some things that we just had to shake our heads and walk away.
I highly reccommend that anyone going to open a haunt go download J.B. Corn's books on building and running a haunted house. They are free so go do it now. I read them and there are a lot of things I did not understand until I was done with year one. Now I read them and go, yea he's right we should have done that. One thing J.B. Corn wrote that I did not get was that the build crew and the acting crew should be seperate. I thought that was odd, surely the build crew would have more invested when it came time to run the thing.
Leading up to the opening night I noticed that the build crew was not taking the acting meetings very seriously. When opening night came Chuck, Dan and I were still building. The actors arrived and I did not have time to get them into makeup and get them assigned there spots. We had one actor we had put in charge of costumes and getting everyone organized. I was hoping she would step up and handle that area for us, she did not. However, Amanda, a girl on the build crew, did step up and got everyone going in the right direction. She got them all into makeup, into costume and assigned everyone a spot. I was very impressed.
I realized that Dan could not be an actor, we needed him too much on the technical side of things. We were still constructing and we needed him to keep things running. I also knew that Chuck, Nathan and I would not step into the role of actor wrangler willingly. So I promoted Dan and Amanda to management. The actors had no problem with it, but many of the build crew all felt that it should have been them. This caused a few problems down the road.
During construction we worked every night. But, we didn't care who showed up and when they came and went. When people could they came, when they couldn't we didn't worry about it. When October came and the show started the new actors showed up, some of the build crew kept up the relaxed schedule. Thus, your build crew and acting crew should be seperate. Really good talented people can be on both, but mediocre and marginal people should be one or the other.
The first night really was great, don't get me wrong. Customers showed up. They got scared. It really worked. All that planning and work paid off in a very satisfying way. There were a couple of groups that came thru scared out of their gourds, screaming all the way. After they were gone and we went to break all the actors came out laughing and having a good time. A good group can energize actors and bring them together as a team like nothing else.
Next week:
The Fire Chief Shuts Us Down
August quickly arrived and we had 2/3rds of our haunt roughed in. Not nearly enough. We began working, a lot. We did decide that we needed to do two things, a parade and try to hire some builders and actors.
The largest parade in the area is the last one before Halloween. I felt like an idiot advertising our haunted house in August, but it was our only chance. We made a float, a cage with a zombie in it. And a large box that looked like it was chained down and it jumped and moved. We had my daughter and all of her friends hand out flyers. It went well, we had a couple of write ups in the paper. Handed out about 800 flyers.
Next up, hiring some more warm bodies. We advertised, once. We had a half dozen people show up for the first meeting. The first guy was Dan. If I could hire all Dan's I would. Our haunt is Into the Dark, our company is actually named Shadow People Inc. After the first season we invited Dan to become a part of our company. That's how good Dan is. I decided I wanted a drop door. Dan had never seen a drop door before. I showed him a video where they showed a guy jump out of a drop door, you could see the drop door work for all of three seconds. Two hours later Dan calls me over and has a working drop door built into the scene where I wanted it.
Anyway, enough about Dan. So we hired about 10-15 people to build our haunt. Some were great, some were not allowed to use tools, for safety reasons. I can say that if we had not gotten our crew when we did we would not have opened, period. As it was we opened three hours late our first night.
Building with a crew is totally different that building. We ran around telling people what to do, getting supplies and directing people. I am used doing a project and concentrating on one thing. With a crew I couldn't get anything done while trying to keep them all busy. We worked every night from 5 to 9 and eight hours on Saturdays and Sundays. It was brutal, but worth it.
Next Week:
Opening Night
Our haunting career was sidetracked for quite a while. I went thru several careers and businesses. My wife and I had a marketing and promotional business out of our home. We decided to go full time and move our business into a storefront. We were looking around town and stumbled into a good deal. The local Masonic Lodge combined with another town and sold their building. We went to look at it and bought it for a great price. The kicker was the 5500 square foot basement. It has 11 foot ceilings and a dirt floor.
We bought the building and I knew it was the right time to start haunting for real. I called the team, after 8 years and told them we had a new home. Our first order of business was to attend Transworld in 2007. We took the classes, went on the Frozen Tundra Tour and took in the convention. We also spent every night and the trip home coming up with our theme, our script and the rooms we wanted. If we hadn't spent the time together putting everything on paper we would never have gotten going that year.
We went to Terror on the Fox as part of the Frozen Tundra Tour, so we had to have a cave. Chuck was bound and determined to make one, and he had ideas in his head to make it work. Look at the pictures in my gallery and you'll see he was successful.
We came home full of ideas. I started designing the maze, and bought my first skid of OSB and 2x4s. We didn't work on nearly as much as we should have that summer. We did build 1/3 of the maze and the basic cave. Chuck also wanted to build his own spinning tunnel, so we tried a lot of things to get that to work. We did a lot, but not enough to get us open in October.
Next week:
We hire a build crew
I arrived home from Dallas with a lot of ideas and no direction. I did know who would be with me on this particular journey. Thanksgiving was shortly after I returned so I saw everyone I needed at dinner. My Uncle Chuck and my Cousin Nathan.
Uncle Chuck is that crazy uncle everyone has, and everyone loves. He is a carpenter, a professional wrestler and perfect for building a haunted house.
My Cousin Nathan is an artist. I don't mean that guy who you know who can draw real good. He sees things in 3D, he can sculpt, make models, airbrush. He can make a scene, not just paint a brick on a wall.
They looked at everything I had and they were into it instantly. We discussed it all day. We worked on theme ideas, we sketched mazes. Best Thanksgiving ever.
Then for the next two months I dived right in. Researched everything I could find. Prices on building, props, tents, anything we thought we would use. I now understood that it was not a get rich quick scheme, but I was also hooked and knew this was something I wanted to do.
And then nothing happened for 8 years.
Next week:
I buy a building
Tags: First Haunt
I did not grow up loving Halloween, never decorated the house, never went all out on a costume. And yet, I now have my own haunted house. This is how it all happened, and every mistake I made on the way.
My wife wanted to open a kids play place, you know an indoor jungle gym. So we went to a IAAPA (International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions) convention in Dallas, Texas. Some of the companies she was looking at buying from gave her a free ticket into the convetion.
So we are walking the trade show floor and in a small corner I walk thru a small haunted house. I remember a clown jumping out at me, not much else. I thought then what a great business. I remembered all of the haunted houses I went to in high school that were always packed, there must be loads of money in this.
Later that day I ran across one of the two biggest influences in my becoming a haunted house owner, Philip Morris' booth. They had all of the great animations of the time, and Elvira. I then spent $20.00 I've gotten back many times over and bought Mr. Morris book How to Operate a Finacially Sucessful Haunted House. I read it once on the way home, and probably a dozen times since.
Next week:
I get home and start recruiting
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