[0:23] Hello everyone, I'm Jonathan. I'm Crystal. And this is Haunt Weekly, a weekly podcast for the haunted attraction and haunted entertainment community. Whether you're an actor, owner, or just plain a fish, you're not, it'll be aimed to be a podcast for you. And we return to you this week with the 2024 haunt season in the books. Yay! The last haunt locally that was open did their big blackout weekend last weekend um and so basically to my knowledge every haunt nearby is now closed for the season and we're going to take a minute and just sort of, revisit the season yeah at least until they get to their christmas yeah we got some christmas shit coming up and so i don't know if we're going to how much of it but i don't know we'll see we'll talk more about that as we come but yes we're going to spend some time recapping the season and seven takeaways that we have. And these are takeaways, by the way, that come from the news. Yes. The news.

[1:21] Our own haunt visits and our running the haunt. So it's a little bit of column A, a little column B, a little column C. I think it's going to be interesting. But definitely check out more Haunt Weekly at HauntWeekly.com, Haunt Weekly on X, Haunt Weekly on Facebook and YouTube.com slash Haunt Weekly. Find us wherever you get your podcasts from. please do follow the facebook page once we return from the haunt season coma we are planning to do some live streams possibly this winter so please stay tuned there that will be the place to watch.

[1:57] Um so work we did for the haunt you did it i didn't do shit yes the yard display is down functionally yeah other than the the tunnel but all the lights all the skellies all that stuff is down and in the new storage system that you hyped up last week and didn't tell people what it was yeah the hdx storage system from home depot exactly i think that is the exact name of it yeah, um it's you'll know it by the black bottoms and yellow tops yes and you get it looked like a bumblebee coming at you yeah and they're about ten dollars a piece for the 37 gallon containers yeah they're significantly more expensive for the larger containers but we didn't need a lot of those so we just bought like a shit ton of the 37 gallons and one thing i've learned is that the lids for the 37 gallon also fit like the 15 gallon the uh shallow ones um those were the ones used at Decomposed. Oh, okay. It's the same lid. Yeah, and they've got a little place that you can zip tie it or put a lock through. Yep. They're watertight. Yep. They're stackable. Very, very stackable.

[3:07] Watertight. Meant to be outdoor, indoor. And a lot of places construct special shelving just to hold it. Yeah, so that it can slide out and still open. Yeah. Very, very cool stuff. So, yeah. We're very happy with it. It seems to have worked. we have a few extra but not much no and once we start cleaning out the actual haunt because there's a few areas we haven't looked in in like i don't know 10 years maybe yeah we might be buying more buckets actually but it has worked out swimmingly and one thing i really love about it is made because most of the outdoor stuff gets stored in our queue line yeah it is a covered queue line um so it's some protection from the elements but it still has to be watertight, but with the previous hodgepodge we can never fit everything under there right now because it's so stackable because it's all the same size it all fits together it's taking up like half the space, it's really nice so we can fit so much more in there so yeah you took down the bulk of the yard display like you said other than the tunnel and we're kind of debating we want to keep the tunnel up since it stayed together so well yeah and may do something christmasy with it i don't know or Or just put some white lights on it so that people delivering at night can see the house.

[4:24] You know, we could look up those white net lightings or just the net lightings that are color change and some white. Yeah, I've already got the color change in our list. Okay, so yeah, we've got options here. We've taken everything down. We intend to immediately take it. I want you to get you took down everything. I barely did shit. I was feeling like crap that day. It was a rough weekend. Yeah. Not going to lie. Well, so yeah, that's basically it is trying to appease the neighbors. Oh, the other thing is having it so neatly stored, it looks so much better from the curb. It does. Our queue line doesn't look like a horse mess. It actually looks organized and well put together. Yeah. So, yeah, I know. Wild idea, right? So, yeah, that is what was achieved this past week for us. Hopefully, this means on Friday, the lawn guy will come over and actually mow the goddamn yard. Yeah, it has become a small ecosystem out there. You know, it's interesting. A couple of houses around our court have been growing butterfly gardens. Right. Which is where they're letting either patches of their yard or most of their yard grow fairly wild. And actually, I don't mind it at all. I think it looks pretty good.

[5:38] We have an unintentional butterfly garden. Yes. Well, it's not the plan, but we definitely have one now. So, yeah, hopefully that will go away come Friday because we had, and there was this whole big complicated thing because apparently our lawn guy quit the service we were using and no one told us. Yeah. So we didn't get the lawn mowed for several weeks before we put up the display.

[6:02] And then it was impossible to do it while it was up. Right. So it's probably been about six, seven weeks. Yeah. Legitimately. Yeah. So, yeah. Looking forward to that being done. Hopefully, like I said, Thursday or Friday of this week. And also, hopefully, Thursday or Friday of this week for us, a cold front. Mm-hmm. I know. It's, like, raining right now, which is usually a sign of a cold front coming through. But, yeah, we're supposed to get a cold front Thursday, Friday. It's supposed to actually feel like autumn, which is great considering it's fucking winter.

[6:33] Yes, and by a cold front, you mean lows in the 50s. Yeah, the 50s. It's not going to be... No, 50s and highs in the 60s, yeah. Yeah, I won't even have to bring in my carnivorous plants. No, and I'm not going to have to drip any faucets or anything like that. No, no, no. And the worst part of that is I'm going to kill the fucking mosquitoes. Exactly. Bastards. My plants will still gorge themselves. I'm surprised with the amount of mosquitoes in this area that your carnivorous plants are not just like taking over the whole area. Like Audrey 2 type thing. Just taking over. Anyway. Well, on that note, every week except for last week, we ask a question of the week. We forgot. I forgot to post it last week. That's on me. It's like I said. So ask it one more time. When do you start work, like the actual physical work, on your next year's haunt season? Do you give yourself a little break? Do you start in January? Or do you just get right out there November 1st and get back at it? Let us know at all the places we previously discussed. HauntWeekly.com, HauntWeekly on Twitter, slash X. HauntWeekly on Facebook and YouTube.com, slash HauntWeekly. All right. Well, to pick up this week's actual topic, this was, without a doubt, a really long haunt season for us.

[7:49] Yes. I think that you probably got that listening to the episodes over the past two months. Yeah, if you've been keeping up, yeah, a lot's been going on, both with the haunt, personally, professionally. I mean, in the middle of it, we became goddamn grandparents. Yeah. You know um a lot has happened in the past i would say six weeks and we tried to kind of go over it as it was happening but obviously now we have a little time we've digested some so like i have we have our themes of what we think are the biggest takeaways from the 2024 season no and like I said these are based on our haunt visits where we traveled and places we saw the experience of running our haunt and of course the news and reading the news articles about the season, so yeah we obviously go into details about what happened at these more in previous episodes but this is more of the general reflection thinking about it trying to pull some meaning out of the chaos.

[9:04] Yeah. Actually, pulling meaning out of the chaos may be the tagline for this episode. You should just change the title now. Nah, I'm going to go with the title we have. Yeah. Alright, number one. This one comes from the news stories and I think is probably the most likely and if not the most obvious.

[9:26] Safety at Hayride Events. Yeah, not only safety, but I... So there have been three major accidents at hayrides this year, two fatalities, and one with 25 people on a hayride that turned over. Yeah, all injured to some degree, but some serious, some minor. Why not?

[9:50] Yeah, I fully expect we're going to hear a lot in the offseason about hayride safety. I don't know where it's going to come from. No. Because it could come from authorities. It could. It really, really could. Or it could end up coming from insurers. Exactly. And I kind of think insurers are more likely. I think so, because they're going to say, oh, this is not as safe as we thought it was. That's just it. Hay rides have had a reputation for being incredibly safe attractions. Yeah. Like, way more safe than a walkthrough haunted house. I've never fully understood why, because I've always seen, like, the potential for harm with all the mechanical equipment around. But, yeah, every time we heard about someone getting hurt or killed at a haunt, it usually was a walk-through haunt. This is the first year I think I've heard about anyone being seriously hurt at a hayride event. And now we had three serious accidents, all of which have got to be making insurer's butts pucker. Right. I mean, and the thing about it is, this is a bit like the Haunted Castle fire in its own way. The Haunted Castle fire, for those who don't remember, was the Six Flags fire back in the early 70s. I think it was. I mean, late 70s, sorry.

[11:10] Basically, Six Flags did literally everything wrong to make that attraction as unsafe as possible, including falsely claiming it to be a temporary attraction because it had wheels. Remember, they never took it off the wheels. Therefore, it's temporary, right? Just been there for like all these years, right? Totally. But the fire marshal ended up getting blamed for it. And I think that was unfair, but that put fire marshals everywhere else on alert for haunted attractions. And we went from this weird side thing that fire marshals have to deal with once a year to being an active target. Right. And I do see something similar happening with hayrides. And the reason is that a lot of the hay rides are run on farms, which have different licensing and responsibilities and fire codes and things than haunted attractions. Now, one thing I have to say is I know with agribusiness, agrientertainment, there's a different liability standard. I don't know enough about that offering in common on it. I know it's different. Exactly. I've seen the posters. Exactly.

[12:19] But... Yeah, that is what we're saying, is that they fall under different things, so now they might be scrutinized a little bit harder than they ever had to in the past. And like I said, if I were an insurer insuring a haunted hayride event, or a hayride at a haunted attraction, because you also have hayrides like RISE, which is not covered in agribusiness at all. No. There is no agriculture thing going on. The one at Eckerd's Fun Farm we went to, or that other one we went on to the North Shore once upon a time. Right. Were actually agribusiness. So, you know, there are some that are both ways, but yeah. And like the first one, we only know about one of the fatalities, and it sounds like the hayride didn't do anything wrong. Right. Kid got away. I mean, yeah, kid did kid shit. I get it. But there's only so much you can do. Right. I'm not saying, you know, it's 100% the kid's fault either, but it's just, yeah, come on. But that being said, there was that injury at Fear Fair that wound up closing them down because they couldn't find insurance. Yeah, and that was just an injury. That was an injury, and it was totally on the person. It was not on Fear at all. They literally snuck past security, jumped some kind of barricade, and tried to climb a rock wall without harnesses or the safety equipment or being hooked into anything, and then fell and hurt themselves.

[13:46] And the fact that that idiot killed Fear Faire pisses me off to no end. Oh, yeah. But that's just going to prove how this shit isn't fair. Right. So, yeah, I do expect to see some really good, really close examination of safety at hayride events overseas, both by insurers and possibly authorities.

[14:08] I think the pushback is coming somewhat. There may be new regulations or requirements. Keep your ears to the ground on this one. This is an evolving space right now. All right number two yes uh the storytelling lessons from exiled a positive one yes we uh we visited there in early october um it was easily our favorite of the year not just because it was new but because it was a different kind of experience yeah yeah and and yeah we had a super cool experience there met darren boseman and he got us into the vip thing and we got to do that crazy ball of shit yeah um that was wild but here's the thing even if we had just stuck to the level we were at never met darren bozeman never uh went into the vip tent and just did the trail after doing the carnival we still would have had one of the most unique haunt experiences ever yeah i i agree with that and i think that the difference is is because you were asked to participate almost required to.

[15:18] Participate yeah because that's one thing i've noticed it's like when we go to rise and the asylum it is a very interactive haunt when they say to you please participate please play yeah please banter please you know respond and the fact is i do it because i'm an asshole that doesn't care but almost no one else does no very well and there There were a few years there where there was a victim there that was asking for help, and I wanted to untie them, but I didn't know if that was part of what I could do. And then we did it one year. Because they said, don't touch the actors. But then now it's in the speech that they give outside.

[15:59] They say you can release someone if they're being asked to be released. And you get a different ending if you do that. A slightly different ending, at least. So, yeah, no, it's so hard. It's incredibly difficult to get people who aren't expecting to interact. I think one of the challenges the asylum has there is the other two attractions at Rise are very much non-interactive. Right. They have a little bit of interactivity in places, in the big house, but the Hay Ride, really and truly, I mean, it's a Hay Ride. It's very limited opportunities for interaction. anyway but the point of the matter is this was an attraction built from the top down to be an interactive attraction a very even though you and i went through the trail together yes side by side same group did every step along the way i feel like we got very different experiences we did i had to reach in an outhouse yeah you had to confess what your regrets were We had very different experiences going through this.

[17:06] And yeah, that was incredible. So it's a very different kind of haunted attraction that's so heavily focused on it. And one of the things I love about it is there is a very rich story and lore there, but you don't get told it. You have to kind of piece it together as you're going through. You talk to the actors. You do the thing I did where I get put on my head and take off with that guy into the wilderness. and you know, you do these things.

[17:35] And you get the story and the lore piece by piece by piece. And even understand how the VIP tent with the elites fits into this crap. Right. It's crazy. They had it. I mean, and once again, a lot of this apparently is Darren Boseman's work. He was the lead on the carnival and the VIP tent, apparently. He did both of those things. So, yeah, some of this is his work. And obviously, he's going to come at it from a storytelling perspective. But yeah, this was a place that not only let you participate, it forced you to participate.

[18:11] Yeah, and I think that this is definitely something that haunts that are trying to be more interactive with the crowd can do. Yeah. You know, tell people what you want them to do, and they'll generally do it. I will never forget for the life of me how awkward it was when we were at the stage show at the very beginning. And i'm like dance and i'm like i have no idea how to dance at all period so we'll start there and second how do you dance to this music you know it was pretty simple it was the twist yeah but it was so but you know what i mean it was very very well the okay that was the second song was it was the first song was not i i don't remember what it was but i remember thinking that song doesn't have a rhythm to lend itself it was a country song yeah yeah i'm not the best person for figuring out how to figure out how to dance to country music um now i think the reason why we don't see more of this is because it is a killer for throughput yeah you need a lot more actors and you're going to get a lot fewer customers so our tickets the tickets the level All two tickets we had, not the VIP ones, were 60 bucks a piece. We paid $120 to do this, and that just included the carnival and the trail. Now like I said, met Darren Boseman, he very graciously upgraded us. If we had paid for those, it would have been $200 a ticket.

[19:40] Insane amounts of money and i can definitely see that a lot of people are not going to pay that but that's what it costs that i mean we spent an hour in that tent with seven or eight professional actors doing some weird shit that actors deserve to get paid well for doing yeah well and there was the whole um as you're wandering around the carnival you go up to the tent and they say no You can't come in here. You're not good enough to be in here. Because they tagged us. Yeah, they tagged us with necklaces. But that would create FOMO, and some people would go and upgrade. Yeah, I don't doubt it. So it's just, it's an interesting structure from a price standpoint, too, because most of the people that we saw were getting in at the lowest level. Yeah, I agree. They just wanted to go through, and that's going to pump your numbers, because that's going to be the largest base. But then you're going to have those few elites that are going to pay that extra, that are going to do the full thing. No, we were the Looney Tunes who already drove there. Yeah. So, of course, we're going to pay at least for the level where we get to see what Darren Boseman does. Yeah.

[20:54] But, you know, we made the conscious decision not to get the higher package at the time, just because we weren't fully sure what it was. Right. And I think that may be the one thing I would encourage Excel to work on is sort of pitching these and explaining what they are on the website. The marketing a little bit better. Yeah, the marketing message down a little bit. Because while I pretty clearly understood the first two tiers, the VIP tier was very confusing. If I had known it was that, I probably would have tried to talk into doing it. Yeah. If I had known it was that. Yeah. But, no, I really enjoyed this interactivity. I enjoyed this form of rich storytelling. Honestly, this was my favorite experience from the year in a haunt, no doubt about it. And I would like to see more haunts off of this. And I think their idea is not a bad one. It's like you said, 90-ish percent of people were just going through the Danfro. Yeah. They just wanted to do the trail, and that's it.

[21:56] We looney tunes we're the ones that paid more it's it does really limit your throughput but i do think as you just said one attraction with different levels of interactivity you can kind of get the best of both worlds exactly what i think we're trying to get at yeah all right number three a lesson from our haunt education can actually be fun and kids like it too i still can't believe this shit oh my god okay to recap in early october before we left on the kansas city and st louis trip we only had two days to put up the yard display that is not enough time no we usually take two weekends so four days typically so we're like okay what can we set up that's quick and will still be somewhat popular well we came up with the idea of just making our skeletons look like famous scientists of history the only rule we had really was that they had to be cosmology or quantum physics related in some way right and because they had to be dead yeah they had to be dead and related to those because there are a lot of different fields of science if you didn't know yeah and we might come back to scientists in the future but from a different field, Maybe we'll do biology. Maybe. I mean, so yeah. And we just dressed all the skeletons up as a different scientist. We had our Richard Feynman. We had our Max Planck. He was so cute. Tiny with a skeleton.

[23:25] We had, let's see, a Schwarzschild, a Heisenberg. Yeah, we had all the greats. But it was really funny because we did it, and then we put QR codes on them so that you could scan them and find out who they were. Right. And then, lo and behold, kids loved this. Yeah. All the QR code did was link to the Wikipedia entry. Yeah. That's it. It was a URL to take you to a Wikipedia entry. Yeah. Well, and I explained this to one of my coworkers, and she's like, so you created a Wikipedia page for each scientist? Are these real scientists? And so I had to explain it to her. Yeah, these are actual scientists. These are actual scientists who already had their own Wikipedia pages. We just did a QR code with a link. Yeah, it's literally just a URL. The time spent on that project was literally the time it took to print the 20-odd pages of QR codes. Yeah, and laminate. And laminate them, yeah. And then figure out how the fuck to keep them on the damn poles. Yeah, okay, that was the bigger struggle, was trying to keep them attached. And wind. And wind. Because that was the one thing we had that caught wind consistently this year. But people loved this. This was our most popular VR display ever. I always thought people were going to be disappointed because we didn't have a big spectacle thing. Like last year, we had the wrestling ring. Yeah.

[24:49] The actual 12 foot by 12 foot wrestling ring with turnbuckles and people jumping off the ropes and shit. And it was wild. And I'm like, oh, yeah, it wasn't going to be anything like that. Right. And no, I think people spent more time in the display this year than ever. I'd agree with that. It was so wild. I mean, I don't get to see people going through the display a lot, but I did notice that leading up to Halloween, there were a lot more people coming around and going through the display before the nights we were open, even. Yeah.

[25:22] And one thing I saw that was really great, especially on Halloween night, was families, the older kids would come through the haunt, and the younger kids would be sent to roam the display and look at the scientists. Yeah. And so we've decided that this QR code skeleton thing is going to kind of be our jam for a bit. Yeah. We're leaning into it. To go ahead and give away the ghost here, next year we're doing famous New Orleanians. Yep. It'll be our 20th year. And so Bernie Baxter is getting his story told. So we figured the way to tie that in best was do famous New Orleanians. These would be real New Orleanians, unlike Bernie Baxter, who was a fake one. Yeah. But the point is, I'm excited about it. I mean, we're going to have a wide variety of musicians, scientists, political figures. Mm-hmm. You know we've got such a rich history here i don't think we're going to be want in fact interestingly enough they just opened the new new orleans uh hall of fame, the first year of inductees was this year and so we have a laundry list of people we can pull from just there yeah but i kind of want to get some more obscure ones too oh god yeah no no we're gonna get some we're gonna get some obscure people help people learn some yeah i i agree completely I think it's going to be fun, and it might be educational for us, too. We might learn something.

[26:40] Yeah. So, yeah, I really did love the skeleton display in the way it was, and I love the fact that it's something that's so much easier for us to do. Yeah, and I think that if you're, you know, last time when we were talking about the QR codes, I mentioned putting the QR codes to your rules. Yeah. But you could also do it to your video for the haunt. Yeah. And you could do it so that if you, like, so I'm thinking, like, for us, we don't always have a video. Yeah. But we could probably do one that was short enough that you could just watch in line as you're getting ready to go in. Yeah. No, I was thinking about that, too. Or even if we just link to the text version of the story. Mm-hmm.

[27:29] Yeah. I think the video would be better for this purpose. Yeah, because people are going to want to watch instead of read. Well, and the other thing is we can offer both. Yeah. Because there's, I mean, there's some millennials like us who grew up reading newspapers and can get through a 500-word article faster than we can get through a three-minute video. Mm-hmm. So there may be some of that, too. But, no, I think we're going to do both next year, partly because we'll have more time because we're not going to be spending two weekends on the yard display, it looks like. Right. I mean, we've already got other plans to make it significantly easier on us, too. Mm-hmm. Though we may be adopting one large plan that'll make it way harder. But we will see. We will see how that one goes. So, yeah, honestly, skeletons, amazing. Yeah. Number four. This one is also from the news. This isn't a sad one. The loss of long-running haunts. Yeah. There were a lot that closed this year, some without warning. Yeah, some closed like a week before they were supposed to open. It was weird. Yeah, it really was. Some had, you know, the reasons for doing it. Some didn't. It was all over the shop.

[28:39] It was really just sad to see all the stories. The number of haunts that had been around longer than 25 years and were closing was very high. Now, some were understandable. Some was like one dude retired. Yeah. I'm like, you know what? Good on him. One company we know, one haunt owner decided to pivot completely into a different business model. And it was incompatible with haunting. They wanted to sell all of their space for football tailgating. Yeah. So you had stuff like that. But you also had these long-running charity haunts with like 40, 45 years of history just disappearing. And this happened over and over and over again. Some closed before season, like you said, without warning. One haunt, I remember, announced the weekend before they closed. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's just sad and it's frustrating to see all these long-term haunts, many of which were in areas that are probably the only haunted attraction around. So a lot of these were in fairly rural places. Closed. Yeah. And yeah, it's just heartbreaking.

[29:47] I guess that one's a brief one. Yeah. Because I don't really have much to add to it, do you? No. All right. Well, five, I've got a lot to add to. And that is, we've talked a lot on this podcast about the need for content warnings and haunts, especially for things that may be trigger warnings for some people or may activate PTSD. Um i've decided unilaterally but i think crystal agrees there's also a need for physical intensity warnings yes and not just whether or not you're ada compliant that's not what we're talking about here because this was something else we learned on the kansas city trip right when we went to the beast and the edge of hell both haunts were extremely physically demanding and, and the thing is like i would feel like oh i'm just an old man saying that but no the teens we went with were bitching about it too so yeah yeah not just me who saw that stairwell and go, yeah well and the bad thing is is once you get up if you're afraid of slides or think that you're going to hurt yourself like i explained to my brother going to about going to this he's like I couldn't do the slide because I would think that I would hurt myself on the landing.

[31:05] So that would mean that he would have to take the stairs all the way back down.

[31:13] Yeah basically both of those haunts had a lot of staircases and slides i lost count of how many flights we went up it was in the dozens yeah i don't know beyond that but here's the thing exiled once again going back to them had very clear warnings on their site that they were physically demanding yeah they're like you're going to be walking on a trail in the woods It will be hills. There are, you know. You'll be climbing a ship. There'll be. Exactly. And I was actually worried before we left for the trip whether or not I'd even be able to do it. Yeah. Their morning. Okay. Because we did the Beast and Edge of Hell the day before we were supposed to go to exile. Right. And we woke up that next morning terribly sore. We were in a lot of pain that next morning. And honestly, if we had not already bought our exile tickets, and if it had not been for, you know, Darren Bozeman and all that, I don't think we would have gone. I don't know. I mean, I'm pretty sure we would. Well, I don't know. If it weren't for Darren Bozeman, we wouldn't have been in Kansas City. So, you know. Fair point. Fair point. I can't say what I would have done. Fair point. But no, I mean. But yeah, I was really worried about it, and then we got there, and it was way easier for us. Yeah, and the true story is when we got there.

[32:38] You know, we kind of resigned ourselves to each other that we're just going to do what we can and not push ourselves physically. Yeah. Because you were like, I want you to do the things. And I'm like, Crystal, I don't think I'm in a better position right now. My hip was really hurting after those two haunts. I was genuinely worried. But no, we were able to do it fine, even with the injuries. Right. So their warning may have been too strong. And the Beast in the Edge of hell's warning had no warnings yeah and so that we need some kind of standardized way to communicate how physically demanding it is and i think it should come in two parts first is the incline and the physical demand that's required because you know how many stairs are we going up how much incline is there you know basically everything from completely flat like our garage yeah to uh Basically, rock climbing, I guess, would be the other end of that stream, right? Yeah. And how long is it approximately? I think telling people those two things lets them make a decision if the haunt is right for them. Yeah. Like, I would love to know how many stories there were at the Beast. And I'm reminded, and I remember thinking when we were in that stairwell in the bell tower type thing, thinking this cannot be the same set of legs that climb that son of a bitch in Durham, England.

[34:04] Yeah. You know what I mean? Well, that was the second half. We had already gone up and down one slide, one stair slide set. That was the second half. That's true. I don't even, like I said, I don't know how many stairs it was. I don't know how many flights of stairs it was, but it was incredibly intense. And we walked into that with no warning. Literally no warning about it so yeah i there's got to be some way to communicate this and like you said it goes beyond being ada compliant you can technically be ada compliant, if you have workarounds that people you know and with wheelchairs in particular can access right but those workarounds as we know from other haunts can be kludgy and still let you see quote unquote most of the haunt but not all of it yeah so sometimes you just can't see all of it and then if you you know you're just not getting the experience that everybody else in your group might yeah so i want to know about the physical intensity put it on a scale put those two factors on a separate scale because if it's a really intense haunt but it's super short i'm probably fine yeah like if just a little bit of climbing and a little bit of crawling probably fine if If it's really long and really intense, I'm going to be a lot less okay. Now, if it's not very intense but really long, like Waterloo was up until the very fucking end... Oh my god, that climb...

[35:33] Speaking of other reasons for the intensity scale, I think this is a good idea. I think this should be implemented at Haas. Maybe when we redo our rules poster, because it's one of the things we're going to redo, I'll include something about this. Make sense? All right. Number six. Go big, go dumb, go easy. God, yes.

[35:57] We've learned this lesson so many times, it needs to finally catch on, though. Well, you've written it down, so maybe it'll stick. Maybe, maybe. Anyways. Because every year we try to do something subtle or overbuilt or complicated, and it never works. Nope. This year it was the falling wall. It started out as a very simple idea. Yeah, it was. We would just recreate what we had done in the past, but then I realized that there were some problems with the way that we had done it in the past and the positioning for this year. So then it got bigger.

[36:32] Well, and then we tried to put people in front of it, and then we tried to do a lot of other stuff. And, like, the Saturday night when we had a completely full house of actors, we had two actors in that room, and the falling wall failed. Basically, it did not work. And the reason was, it wasn't the actor's fault. It was just there was too much going on in that space. Right. The scare was barely noticeable over the two actors working in the room. They were doing a great job, but it was just too much for people to make that quick, you know, what should I be frightened of in this room decision? Yeah. And so, yeah, when they were not there the next night and were like, oh, God, that room is going to be empty. Turned out an empty room was not a bad thing there. No, it worked much better. People could see the movement of the wall easier without somebody in front of it because, of course, they could. And that set him up right to where Davison was, and he could open the barn slide door and get him again. It was a beautiful setup then. And we just realized, you know, you need that big visual pop.

[37:36] You can't go for subtle or understated. Yeah. And I think that was a huge mistake we made when staffing, setting that room up. Because like you said, originally it was going to be one way, but we also identified some safety issues and some potential problems. And so we remedied them, but in remedying them, we kept people further away from it, which is, you know, kind of important here. Right. And I think that if we had had one actor in there on the table that we had built as a backup backup stopper, because it already had safeties in place. Yeah. Overhead safety and a chain safety. Yeah. So if we had the actor on the table... Activating it from there it probably would have worked better or at least as well as it did tonight yeah because they could have held it up and then it would have been easier in time yeah and then let go with a scream up and hands up yeah anyway it wound up working without anybody in it the simplest way possible which is what we had originally talked about and then we changed Yeah, we pivoted. I changed.

[38:50] Honestly, and when we were reviewing the security camera footage, what I noticed in that room was the first night, or the night we had the two actors in there, the movement of all the stuff that was hanging, that was supposed to generate that movement, was very subdued. Exactly. Because the people were blocking it. Yeah. The people were blocking it because we told them to stand. Exactly. And when there was nobody there, all that shit just slung way over everyone's head. But it was like that perfect height where you would swear that fake buzzsaw is coming right for you. Yeah.

[39:29] And that was just so great because you would see people instinctively duck and hold their hands up. Yeah. And then slide away from it. And, yeah, you didn't get those strong reactions when there was an actor there. And I think it's also because the actor was like a barrier and a safety thing. They felt safer with it oddly enough like oh well she's not dead therefore i'm not dead yeah which that makes sense which you don't know she could be dead it's a hot house yeah we don't make any promises of whether our ghouls are dead or alive all right number seven this year i think we finally nailed the layout yeah this is a big one for me i've been wanting to redo the layout for some time and i think we finally have a layout that is not perfect we have a lot of issues we have to we have some issues we have to address still we're going to iterate but i think we're on the right track because the problem with our previous layouts was we prioritized maximizing space and specifically maximizing the number of zones we could do scares and we had four rooms and a hallway at the back. And that gave us a lot of great scare opportunities, but it also meant line of sight was fucked. Yeah. Because you could very trivially see from one room to the next, and the biggest issue was when you rounded the corner or the back side of the hallway, you could see straight out the exit.

[40:57] You could just see straight out. And if you were someone that was scared and running, those last two rooms were just a blur. Yeah. And we still haven't found the secret formula of stopping the people who really want to run. Yeah. And I don't think anybody has. No. We have stopped the people who... I think we've stopped the people who don't... You know what I mean? They're unsure of themselves. Right. If they can't see where the exit is, they're not going to run. Right. We've stopped the people that I think are more of the subconscious runners. Yeah. They see exit, they start moving runners. People that are just like, I'm going to run through that shit as fast as I don't think there's anything we can do to stop them. We've got a few ideas to slow them down a little bit next year. Yeah. But the layout, I think, is going to stay the same. Because now your line of sight never leaves the room you're in. Yes, we had to sacrifice the back hallway. We had to sacrifice that last zone. You know what? That sucks, but we only have 625 square feet. So we have to, you know what I mean? Yeah. We have to make a choice. Do we want the fifth zone or do we want to have better sight lines? We wanted better sight lines. And I think it was the correct choice. Now, the good news is next year that means no major construction.

[42:21] We should not be doing all the stuff we did this year because even though a lot of it was subtle work it was surprising like moving those damn walls that were near the light switch yeah was a mammoth project it was we're not going to we don't need to do that again next year we may need to figure out a way to tape that light switch up when we're up oh duct taped worked fine i just have to remember to do it but we don't have to move those walls again we can take down the The site break lulls, if we want to, during the off-season. They'll help us get through the haunt more quickly. Yeah. We may do that. Don't know yet. But they're easy to put back. Mm-hmm. Because now that all of that has been done, honestly, what we need to focus on for next year is decoration and new scares. Yeah. Yeah.

[43:13] Yeah, and we may be extending the entrance L. Yeah. But we're not sure yet. We've got to figure out what our space is like. I'd really like to do it, but we'll just have to figure it out. That is something we need to plan the exact details on. You told me what you want, and I like the idea. Yeah. I really do like it. I think it's a good move.

[43:39] Yeah, because the issue that I'm having that I'm trying to solve with Extra L is that I come out from a very tiny space that's right near the entrance of the first room. And I have to wait for everybody to get into the room before I can come out behind them. And if groups get frozen, especially a large group, you might not have that ability. So we're trying to get a way to get you to get behind them in the outside L part. And I think there are ways we can do that. without too much expending. Yeah, I do have a couple of ideas. So, we've got ideas. I don't think that's that complicated of a build compared to all the panel slinging we had to do this year. This is fairly minor stuff. Yeah, that is true. I'm honestly really happy with the layout, really happy with the construction. I think, you know, that enables us to shift our focus, and I'm actually really looking forward to next season because now that we have found a relatively simple way to do the yard display that is as popular as it is enjoyable for us to set up and only takes a couple of days. Now that we have that, now that we don't have to do any heavy-duty construction that's going to require multiple days' worth of slinging panels and putting everything back up and undoing and redoing things.

[44:59] And that we get to focus on just the things we really and truly enjoy about home building, next season's gonna be pretty fun yeah i'm actually looking forward to it and you know that's the thing is like this time last year i don't remember what we said go back and listen to some of those episodes but i seem to remember being way more unsure than i am this year yeah, yeah no i think next year's gonna be a good year next year's gonna be a good year i'm actually you very excited about it and you know it it's gonna be the big one it's gonna be 2-0 it's gonna be a very interesting year I'm looking forward to seeing how the community responds, Um, yeah, I've got to start where it's one of the things I've got to do sometimes

[45:47] soon is go ahead and redo the website and all that stuff up. Because we already know the days are going to be open next year. Yeah. But, oh, and I just realized something. The yard display is down, right? Yes. I didn't get shocked this year. You did not. No shocks. No electric shocks in the year 2024. It's coming on Milhouse, baby. Well, that also means that it was never Halloween. No.

[46:14] Yeah it used to be well i don't know that one year that we were closed because of the road work and i got shocked putting that one light in well at least i won't get shocked this year plugging yeah i think the real secret is we never did any electrical work in the rain.

[46:34] True we had a very dry start to the season yeah and the only um in fact oddly enough the only injury i took plugging and unplugging things was when i cracked my knuckles on the wooden pallet trying to unplug the spotlight that was broken yep wasn't a shock i just whacked my hand hard oh well but you know so yeah all in all this was a good season i really did enjoy this i it was chaotic i felt like we didn't do as much right as we usually do i mean it proved the fact that we went to the 13th gate on literally the last night they were open yeah well we definitely, didn't do as many haunt visits as we normally would because we were so far behind on the build. And we were so far behind on the build because of the heat and everything else. Well not only that but the build kept growing. Yeah yeah especially as we get because this was a treadmill year. Yeah exactly. It felt like we were taking two steps forward but losing traction with every move you know because you'd realize something else has to be done. Yeah. It's one of the reasons why we've been very reluctant to move those walls is we knew that was going to be that type of thing. Yeah. Because of how it was built into, I don't know, every goddamn inch of that haunt.

[47:49] Yeah. So, yeah. All in all, it was a great year. I really do regret not getting to do much. My hope for next year, we'll do a few minutes of hopes since we have a split second. My hope for next year, one, I would like to do a further, a feel, a bigger haunt trip. Yeah, I think that we could probably swing that. I would like to do it, maybe go to Columbus like we've been talking about for a while. I don't know. We got ideas for places we want to go. Kansas City was a real last-minute pivot for us and granted it worked out amazing I'm really happy we did it but yeah it was not a full haunt trip we only realistically saw three haunts in the city yeah we saw we revisited Waterloo and near St. Louis but you know as far as Kansas City only saw three haunts and two of them were functionally the same attraction yeah so yeah I want to do that, and I want to really, really nail down the decoration. I want this year's haunt to be decorated to your standard.

[48:52] Well, give me the story. I will do that. On that note, everyone, thank you very much for joining us for the past 50 minutes or so. Hope this was interesting and entertaining. Please do check out all the other places we exist. We're at HauntWeekly.com, HauntWeekly on X slash Twitter, HauntWeekly on Facebook, and YouTube.com slash HauntWeekly. Until next time i'm jonathan i'm crystal and we'll see you all next week with i have no idea what we haven't really talked about the next episode but i'm sure it'll be something both as entertaining and rambling as this one was see you all then.