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Viewing 1 - 7 out of 7 Blogs.
I remember SOMEBODY posting photos of a cauldron they made with a layer of board or cardboard on top of the cauldron. It had holes cut into it and styrofoam balls and Christmas lights inserted to make it look hot and bubbly.
There was a pretty girl in the cauldron with her arms and legs hanging out, looking like she was being cooked. I would like to use this idea for my haunt but, DARN it, can't remember who made it. Can't find the tutorial either. Any help?
Tags: Cauldron
Whew! I FINALLY got my husband to join me in cleaning out the garage so I can have my haunt in it this year! He gave me the green light!
But I am having problems with another sort of lighting. I want to make a "dot" room, with black walls decorated with random spiders and spiderwebs. And my daughter will dress in a black costume to match the walls and scare folks when the "walls" come alive! I thought that we would light the area with blacklight and fluorescent painted spiders, but my daughter thinks that a strobe light would be more effective. Any thoughts on how to light this area of my haunt?
Tags: Dot Lighting Room Garage Strobe Blacklight
I'm getting kind of nervous. Last year, my first year setting up a haunt, I set up a big tent in the front yard and had a 2-room haunt in that.
Since we had such a good response, I wanted to expand to our 2 car garage this year. Problem is, it's fairly full of my husband's woodworking (and other) garbage. Lots of wood, his Shopsmith, the lawn mower, bikes we never ride, etc. I am pretty sure that I could clean it out and reorganize stuff so that the haunt could be in the garage (without the cars of course, haven't been able to get my car in the garage since May!), but I need my husband's help and input as to where to put his junk so he will be able to find it again.
However, he is showing no inclination to clean the garage. I would have to revamp may plans rather drastically if I have to use the tent again. I don't want to antagonize him, especially since I have prevailed upon him to help me with various projects and will need his help with the haunt, whether it is in the tent or the garage. How can I motivate him to let me use the garage? It will be a bit of work.
Tags: Garage Haunt Tent
I don't know if anyone else has already reviewed the new dark ride at Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh, but here is mine.
Ghostwood Mansion is in the same space as the old Gold Miner ride at Kennywood. It is a dark ride in a electrically moved car which holds 4 riders.
There is an orientation room at the beginning which the riders enter before getting in the cars. In the orientation room, which is decorated to look like a Victorian parlor, with red brocade and family portraits on the walls, a large portrait of "Sir Kenneth Ghostwood" comes alive (by animated projection) to explain that he built the mansion as a refuge, but it has become populated by squatter ghosts. Your mission is to shoot them with the laser guns in your car to get them out of the mansion. He says the highest scorer will get to stay in the mansion overnight.
Then the patrons walk up to the second floor to get into the cars. These move very smoothly and silently into the mansion proper. There are multiple rooms, decorated variously as living rooms, library, dining room, etc with animatronic, projected, static, and pneumatic props.
Unfortunately, just about every surface is covered with small "bullseye" targets for you to aim at. I say "unfortunately" because you spend so much time shooting the targets, you miss the actual props. The first time I went through, I didn't really see much of the actual mansion, I was concentrating on those stupid targets so hard. By the way, the points are talied on a scoreboard in front of each rider, but they don't matter at all. You don't get to compare your scores to other players, and you don't get anything (even a night in the mansion) for having a high score. However, when you hit the target, the props are triggered to move, often with a little flash of light, so you don't really want to NOT shoot, or you will miss the props being activated. As the car goes through the mansion, there is a constant chatter and noise from the props, with so much overlap between the props and the target "pops" that it is difficult to determine which prop is saying what. I went through the ride a second time and purposely did not shoot at anything so I could pay better attention. The props move very slowly and are far away from the cars (I guess to prvent folks from grabbing them), to that they are not surprising or scary in any way. As a matter of fact, when you aren't shooting, it's kind of dull. You got your basic run-of-th-mill mummies, corpses, skulls, ghostly figures in winding sheets. etc, none especially innovative. There were a few nice items, such as the graveyard stature that rises toward the car, or the lifesize hearse and skeleton horse (it neighs when you hit it's target). There is a nice scissors-type action on a prop in the library that moves a ghost forward toward the car. There are a couple of slow giant spider drops. I thought I could duplicate some of the family pictures on the wall that spun around when you hit their targets. Altogether, it is a good concept to make the ride interactive, but it detracts from the actual enjoyment of the view. The view was not very exciting, slow and predictable. I guess they don't want to scare the little kids, but this ride was so "already been done" that it wouldn't scre anyone at all. For the 30-45 minute wait to get in, I'd rather go see the Noah's Ark attraction, an old fashioned walk-through "fun house" that packs some real surprises after probably 50 years. I even saw a kid crying at the end of Noah's Ark because he was scared. That would never happen at Ghostwood Mansion. My final grade for this ride? I give it a C-. It could have been so much more...
Tags: Ghostwood MansionKennywood Pittsburgh Dark Ridereview Amusement Attr
I was just thinking (always dangerous).
When we bury people, they are usually dressed up to look nice in the coffin. Probably very few people are buried in a T- shirts and jeans. Therefore, any dug up dead folks (zombies, skeletons, half-rotted corpses, etc) should for the most part look like they are going somewhere.
They probably did go somewhere, but the point is that a naked skeleton is probably not what we are going to see. Clothes tend to rot, but I'm thinking that the newer synthetic materials will last, easy, 200 years, since they are mostly plastic. Maybe if you are thinking green, you might insist on 100% natural fibers for your funeral. Just imagine all those poor folks buried in the 1970's, in their Qiana blouses,nylon stockings, and polyester leisure suits. That stuff'll be around 'til the next millennium!
Older corpses would probably have less clothes on them after exhumation since the clothes would have been wool, cotton, silk, or linen, but even these fibers can last a surprisingly long time. Look at how well the Egyptian mummies' linen wraps lasted, still recognizable even after they were soaked in pitch and whatnot, buried for several thousand years, shipped out to musems, and displayed for a hundred years or so. Probably you would still be able to tell, if you opened a tomb, whether the person was male or female, their social status, and the time period of their burial.
So, dress up your corpses! Let's see those funeral clothes!
Stamp out nude skeletons and corpses in the buff! I'm just saying...
Tags: Corpse Skeleton Clothes Zombie
I have a confession to make.
When I first joined HS, I was afraid that it might be a "hookup" place, as one of my co-workers warned me that all the chat rooms she had visited were full of people after "one thing" only. I didn't want anybody to hit on me, so in my profile I made myself seem older that I was. Like, 19 years older.
Also, I figured if I told everyone I was a little old lady, nobody would expect me to know anything about computers, and would cut me some slack when I did dumb things.
But I have come to see that HauntSpace is a safe place full of really nice haunters, who ARE out for "one thing" - the promotion of haunting and Halloween. So I have updated my profile to reflect my real age.
I am truly sorry if I have misled anyone. It was not done with the intention of "tricking" anybody, but with an eye to my own protection. Most importantly I want to apologize to Pete, who does so much to make the site a place where we can really be ourselves. And I hope he doesn't ban me because I lied.
I actually learned a lot doing my first haunt this year. Mind you , I had never even been to a professional haunted house until earlier in October, but I have wanted to make a hsunted house attraction for most of my adult life. Thanks, Hauntspace, for giving me the courage to go for it!
I spent what I considered a horrendous amount, but probably amounted to about $250 dollars. Many of the items I bought were motion activated props, as I didn't have any actors in my Haunted Tent. I learned that the lighting needs to be pretty good for motion activation to trip on: my string of Christmas lights and glowsticks were fine to see by, but the motion sensors were spotty.
I manually operated a fog machine, and found that a little fog goes a LONG way in enclosed area like a 15' x 18' tent.
However, the whole thing was a real success, considering I am starting pretty small. The neighbors were thrilled. More comments on what I did and how I did them , and how I plan to improve for next Halloween to follow. As my kids ssay, peace out!
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