This Halloween, instead of the usual trick-or-treating, my brothers and I decided to make a little haunted house. We did something similar the year before, but it was crude and not exactly scary. This one wasn’t much of a ‘haunted house’ either, just a little room with a small scare pulled off by my brothers Hank and Jack, as well as a church friend, Andrew.
The house, which we didn’t bother to give a name, was pretty much two tarps strung up between the posts of our front porch, held aloft by little eye-rings and stuck to the walls and pillars with some tape and wood clamps. Inside, we strung up some fake cobwebs around the roof and walls, and my brother cut out a silhouette of Oogie Boogie from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas to put in an exposed window. I 3D printed purple and orange light covers to be used on the lights inside and outside the haunted house, respectively. The only major focal point of the haunted house was a small table with the candy bowl, flanked by Hank and Andrew, both in costume.
Outside the haunted house, a spiderweb was draped from the roof of the porch across the lawn, with a large UV light shining at it. On the back end of the haunted house itself, we had a little fog machine setup, consisting of the fog machine, a cooling chamber (cold fog stays on the ground) made out of a storage bin, and some dryer vent tubes to funnel the fog into the house.
When the trick-or-treaters came around on Halloween night, my brother, Jack, dressed in stilts and a pumpkin mask with a black cloak draped around him, would give the kids an initial scare. Expecting that to be the first and the last scare, they would continue into the fort where Hank and Andrew, both also swathed in black, would pretend to be statues. And when the kids reached for candy, they got spooked.
I didn’t take part in the haunted house because part of my costume was missing, and I decided to let Andrew and Hank take the rest of its parts so they could be inside the house, since I’d had the chance to do the scaring last year.
The Wooshing King 