[0:19] Hello, everyone. I'm Jonathan. I'm Crystal. And this is Haunt Weekly,

[0:24] a weekly podcast for the On Attraction Entertainment community. Whether you're an actor, owner, or just plain aficionado, we aim to be podcasts for you. And we return to you this week with apologies for being late. I'll spare the details, but you have been put through the fucking wringer. Yeah, there's been a lot of hours put in at the office instead of working from home. Yeah, there's been a lot going on at her job that's pushed us behind. We're actually in talks right now about maybe moving the date of publication because we thought Tuesday would be a good day for us, but it looks like we may be moving it to Thursday or Friday just because those are evenings in which we more typically have free time. Yeah, my work is usually settled down by the end of the week like most jobs. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, and also Ellie has a store and she's not here those evenings. So this may work better for recording and publishing. We don't know when we're actually going to publish, but we may be moving our recording days to those days. So, yeah, I'm sorry about this. Job stuff, life got in the way. Sorry about that, but that's all there really is to say about it. So on that note, definitely, if you have not done so already, check out all the places we exist. We're at HauntWeekly.com or HauntWeekly on X slash Twitter. HauntWeekly on Facebook. I guess I should set up a blue sky for us. Yes. I guess I'll do that.

[1:44] But we are currently at youtube.com slash hauntweekly as I go off on tangents in the middle of the promo. You can also find us wherever you get your podcast front page. Special attention to the Facebook page. We have some announcements coming. Well, let's see. We don't have any housekeeping notes other than the one we just did. We're late. Right. I have been working on the story for the haunt. I've been saying that. I've not sent it to you yet. No. But there is work that's been done. I'm hoping to have the story done this weekend. Okay. Would that be good? That would be great. So, yes. That is my intent and my plan. I hope to have that to you. But other than that, we really haven't done much with the haunt. We had to use the haunt. We went in there. One of my very good friends, one of my longest friends, is turning 40 this week. Because he's a young pup who has no idea what's coming up for him. But, yes, he is turning 40, I think, today, as of the day we are recording and publishing. Yes. So, yeah, he will be – oh, that's right. I think we had him on an episode, didn't we? We did, and I'm trying to find it. Yes, we did. You're jumping ahead. Sorry. I saw while you were searching, like, oh, yeah, we had him on one of the early episodes.

[2:54] But, yes, indeed. So we got to go into when the rooms were hot, And our little triad recorded a cute little video for him. I hope, Patrick, if you can hear this by some chance, I hope you enjoyed it. And I hope you had a great 40th birthday. And I hope you enjoyed the car, too. Yes, it was episode 267, Building Better Haunt Communities. I love how I said it was one of the early episodes. Like it was episode 5 or something of shit. And it was like 267. Yeah.

[3:24] Oh, God damn. We should move on to something that makes me feel younger. Question of the week. Okay. Question of the week. Last week we asked the question, when do you start construction or work after your haunt season? Y'all had a lot of answers. Yeah. Daryl Plunky said Tuesday after the final open Sunday. You know, at least you give yourself one day off. Yeah. At least you give yourself that Monday. Sinister Cellar, new theme and promotion materials. We start working as soon as we close, and then we start building again in December. So, yeah, we'll call that a December beginning because I get how some things never stop, but we're going to focus on construction.

[4:02] Chuck Morrison said, year-round construction keeps me in the spirit. I do not have the energy for that. So I respect that, but I do not know if I can do it. Bernard McClellan, immediately after we closed, like literally that night, we're pulling things down, tear down, and then construction around Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving seems reasonable to me too, by the way. Yeah, I plan on doing some stuff with your story in the haunt next week. Yeah. For Thanksgiving. Reggie Wood said, March. Just the word, March. So I stomped around the room for a bit and then realized what he actually meant. And basically a bunch of people said that they never stop. Yeah. That they start work pretty much immediately. And you know what? Kudos on that. I respect that. But like I said, I am far, far too old to do that. But this week's question in the week is playing on this week's episode, which is what are you hoping to improve next year? Where are you hoping to reach for the stars? We're going to be talking about that in just a minute. But do let us know at all the places we exist. Once again, HauntWeekly.com, HauntWeekly on Twitter, HauntWeekly on Facebook, and YouTube.com slash HauntWeekly. Leave a comment, send us a DM, do whatever is relevant to the platform, and we will receive it. All right. Well, it is an even episode. And on even episodes,

[5:19] we do the comments and reminders. But before I jump into it, I want to say, give some sad news.

[5:26] We learned that over this past week that both haunt con and fear expo are no more, the organizers said that health issues were the cause they didn't go into a lot of details understandably but come to know that both of those haunted attraction conventions are no more, That is sad, but we do have other conferences coming up, so Crystal, kick us off. November 22nd and 23rd, it is Creep It Real Festive in Santa Ana, California, at the Heritage Museum of OC. Over 100 vendors and creepitrealoc.com for more info. All right, after that, December 13th through the 15th in Greenville, South Carolina, a place I am actually surprisingly familiar with. That's the Chris Massacre.

[6:22] It's at the Nightmare Dungeon. They'll be touring the Nightmare Dungeon Haunted Trail. More details are coming. Hauntfest.net for more info. Early next year, January 13th through the 15th, That's the Halloween and Party Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada at the World Market Center. Hundreds of vendors must have qualified business in order to attend. It's not open to the public. HalloweenPartyExpo.com for more info. If you can go, it is a great way to get a jump on what the trends will be for next year. And finally for this week, it's the conference that everyone knows about and waits for. It's Trans World's Halloween and Attractive Show coming early next year. February 27th through March 2nd in St. Louis, Missouri, the America Center. Details are sparse right now, but you can follow along at the Ha Show, H-A-A-S-H-O-W dot com for more information. I will predict now there will be a party at City Museum. Yes. And an Empire Ball. And probably a tour of the darkness. Maybe a costume contest. Maybe a costume contest. Those are predictions. And if we are right, you get to call a psychic. or just moderately good at pattern recognition. Yeah. So, yeah, indeed, there's a lot of great events coming up. We're definitely getting already into the peak conference season for the haunted attraction industry.

[7:50] Well, last week we talked a great deal about our takeaways and our lessons from the haunt season. And I've got to admit, it was a great episode, but it got me thinking about, okay, where do we go from here? What do we do? And so with the 2024 haunt season in the books, we really wanted to put some focus on what can we nail down? What can we improve? How can we grow next year? Because if you ain't growing, you're dying, right? Yeah. So, yeah. Overall, I will say this season went incredibly well. I think the bigger disappointments like turnout and so forth had variables that were outside of our control. I don't think anything we could have done would have changed the fact Taylor Swift was in town. And traffic was fuckered. Traffic was fuckered or the rain on Halloween night. I don't think we can change those things because if we could, we would have a much bigger haunt because we'd be super wealthy.

[8:53] But that doesn't mean we don't have some stuff we want to improve.

[8:59] Some of it is fixing problems we had, whether they were minor or less in this year. But a lot of this, and there's something I'm very proud of when talking about this list, a lot of it is, hey, we improved this. Let's improve it more. Let's move the goalposts. Let's get it better. Right and i like that i like that better than well this shit was a disaster we got to do this better next year no a lot of this is we did good but we can do better yeah that's a fun type of improvement so we've come up with eight different areas we want to focus on in 2025 um and honestly i think we're going to have the freedom to focus on these areas because we don't have hopefully knock on wood you know do not have any major builds coming our way we have a few minor builds Yeah, a few minor builds, mainly focusing on the outside entrance. Yeah, which is going to be both easier and more difficult to work on at the same time. Yeah, it's going to be interesting for sure. Yeah, we've never really done much with it, admittedly. So we're entering some Uncharted territory, but we're going to get into that. But yeah, so since we do not have major builds, we should hopefully have the time to focus on these things. And the first item up for bid. Yeah, detail and lighting. Yeah. This is true every year. Yeah, this is the refrain. You know, chicken go claw, cow go moo, Crystal goes, I want more detail in lighting. Yeah.

[10:23] You could practically put it on the speak and say for us. Yeah, this year did turn out okay. Yeah. But...

[10:31] Did not match at all what i had envisioned in the beginning and basically we had to cut back on a lot of the detail i wanted and the things that i wanted to build and construct, because we ran out of time because we had poor time management last year maybe that's something we can put on this list some of it must be a poor time management some of it was you know we had a grandson we had we had a really hot long summer a really hot long and summer today's the first day it's dipped below 60 I think yeah like today's the first day I actually can say I felt cold yeah for even a minute yeah and it was just a minute of it yeah and and we're November 21st for those playing along yeah so we had an unusually hot summer and early fall and between that and the baby the grandbaby on the way some events at my job we kind of also got robbed of a lot of the time we did have too right um so yes that's what i'm viewing the baby now i'm viewing the grand baby as a thief of haunt time that is all no obviously not i don't want this point i'm not trying to frame it like that but no we did so a lot of the time we did have we got robbed from us we ended up leaning heavier on lighting to do detail and admittedly that worked out very well because we got very creative with the light. Right.

[12:00] And, you know, I realized that part of the problem is I always think too big and give myself too much that I want to do in a year and scale back. Well, yeah, I think a lot of it also is that we get, we both do this. We both get this vision for what we want it to look like and that vision is never realistic exactly and i and i've realized that over the years and so i'm a little gentler on myself now than i was 20 years ago when we started but that said this year we had to scale back much further than we wanted yes but like i said i think we like saved that with the creative lighting i do too i mean like the lighting in the first two rooms and here's the crazy thing the lighting in the first two rooms realistically were just three bulbs.

[12:54] Looked amazing. One of the things you did that I really loved this year with the lighting was you took a lot of the LED Edison-style bulbs. Right. And you put just a whiff of copper spray paint on it. It became a little patina. Yeah. Which is something that I've seen in other haunts do to dim down their bulbs. And then we've even seen some how-tos online that have done it. But we've never actually really tried it ourselves.

[13:22] Yeah. And it worked great. it gave a lot of depth of lighting and that's great because the painting didn't have a lot of depth but the lighting projecting on the paint that we had gave it that depth we wanted and so it ended up looking amazing like i said three bulbs yeah and one of the bulbs i thought was really clever was the one you put in the second room it was the it was a cheap cheap blood bulb yeah yeah i don't know where the fuck we picked that up from um actually one of our actors said hey do you need a bulb in this room and i said maybe and tried it and it worked well one of the things i loved about it was the way you suspended it hey you put it right over the quote-unquote workbench yeah but it made it so that when that wall hits the uh bulb would shake and the bulb shaking because of the the goop and the fake blood and the guilt on the bulb would cause the lighting in the room to jump around a lot and once again adding a lot of fake depth to the room yeah because that room did not have a lot of depth in terms of the painting. Right.

[14:26] You know, I think one of the lessons we learned, though, is that the projection probably isn't worth the effort. Yeah. Like, it looked really cool, but it actually hid the scare too well. I'm thinking we might move the projector front of house. Yeah. Project the story, project other things there. Yeah. Do something like that. because it's a great projector. We got an excellent projector, and it's super bright because that's one of the lessons we learned very hard this year was the cheapo projectors do not work well in anything other than absolute perfect lighting.

[15:07] I do not know how they ever anticipate these to be reverse projections for houses. For the window dressings. I don't understand how that's supposed to fucking work. These things are not bright enough. So we got a real honest-to-God home projector,

[15:21] which is still not that much money, oddly enough. No. But it was about ten times as bright. Yeah.

[15:28] And it shows yeah so if you're looking at using projectors in your haunt um one of the other places i thought about using it was pointing it at the floor to give the floor some down oh i could see doing that that makes a lot of sense too yeah just point it straight down yeah exactly um i like that but with you know black friday sales coming up and cyber monday that's something to be on the lookout for if you're interested in that sort of yeah a good and also make make sure the projector is good and bright and i'm not even going to like discuss what that is because if it gets so complicated so quickly make sure it's good and bright and make sure it has the inputs you want and need yeah we use usb sticks because we're lazy and usb sticks are super easy but yep pit find you know whatever input you need whether it's hdmi usb sd card whatever, but yeah all in all i think this is an area we really do want to work on and i think part of that is now that we have no major builds and i know we've harped on it but we had a lot of major builds this year yeah well and it was the scope creep kind of build yeah because it was like we only thought we had this many walls to move and then we moved those walls and we're like but these really should be moved too yeah so then we did it all and then we had to disassemble that slamming door frame that we had yeah basically the entire back half of the haunt was redone.

[16:53] At the end of September, I don't think we, I think we had two walls where they were supposed to be, maybe. Do you count the bookshelf that stayed where it was? If you can, don't count that.

[17:08] I think we might have had three i think we might have had three um because i i think that's a run of three going down the spine of the haunt because all the whole not all of those were up yet god damn it because the thing is like all the walls on the left and the right hand side of the haunt had to be moved yeah and the back half of the spine had to be moved and the problem was a lot of this was so structural that it really required careful planning on how to move it but anyways Enough of that.

[17:37] Now that we don't have to do that. Yeah. Once again, knock on all fucking things wood. We get to start on painting, decorating functionally now. Yeah. And that's kind of what we're hoping to do. So I'm really excited about that. You mentioned Thanksgiving break is a good time to begin it. I agree. We also probably have some time Christmas and New Year's too. Possibly, but we're also going to be using vacation time to go up and see the baby. Yeah, I mean, and that's the obstacle right now. Well, it is great to have a grandbaby. The grandbaby's 10 hours away. Yeah. And so these are like weekend trips. We can't just pop on over for an afternoon and jolly see the kid and then naff off. No, we're planning on like four days up near St. Louis. Yeah, sometime in December. So, yeah, just keep that in mind. A lot going on there. Okay, item number two. This is my bailiwick. Or one of my bailiwicks at least audio design um audio design is one of those things year after year much like a lot of the detail and lighting that we just run out of time on, um because it's usually left to you it's usually left to me and unfortunately.

[18:53] It's one of the things that we just don't prioritize and it's partly my fault for not prioritizing but i also because like one of the one of the divisions is typically when we get later in the haunt season so we've done the construction now we're doing the design the lighting and all that um after we've done all the stuff that requires two people because construction usually does yeah um once we've done that i go inside i start doing the more digital stuff press releases um did creating digital art for publications getting on calendars, There's the website, Facebook, social media in general, all that stuff. I do all that stuff. And, you know, that kind of becomes what I'm doing, flyers and other promotional material, too.

[19:44] And once again, because of the extra construction this year, we didn't get to that design slash digital phase until late. Yeah. We didn't reach that point until late. And so one of the things that's on that digital list is audio. Now, we have done a lot of different things with audio. one of the things I do like is the poo boxes that we have because they can use motion sensors to activate a sound at a specific time. And like one of the things we did one year that I really enjoyed was we had to activate a fake, very disturbing sound door chime as people walked into the haunt. Oh yeah. Yeah. You loved it. The actors fucking hated it because anytime any of us moved in that first room that door chime would go off yeah that's one of the problems is those are not very good motion sensors which is one of the things i would like to address this year yeah um but actually what i would like and the truth is i'd like to get away from it almost entirely because i've over the years i've read several pieces and watched a couple videos on organic sound design. We already do a pretty good job of organic lighting. The lights are either where you can't see where the light is coming from or they're from places that make sense. Right.

[21:06] Like we use chandeliers for lighting. We use, like you had the weird sculpture thing in the first room. They had a light bulb for the head. Yeah. That was really cool. The light that was over the workbench made total sense replacement. Things like that.

[21:20] I want to do something similar with the sound. I want to have, you know, like old-timey radios that play the music, rather than it just come mysteriously from the ether of the haunt. We have an old-timey radio. We have several, actually. We have, like, a three-and-a-half-foot-tall one that was your grandfather's. Yeah. We'd have to get it out of the room, the room of death, but we have one. And we can also, I'm sure, go on Facebook Marketplace, pick up. Oh, yeah. Some old-timey ones. Or just, you know, build like a record player looking thing. Exactly. Out of boxes. We can make this happen in a lot of different ways, basically. But places where it makes sense for sound to come from. And that way the sound sounds natural. It feels natural. Even if, you know, it's not, even if it's a very modern thing making the sound. Yeah. It looks like something appropriate. I would like to get in to do that. And I would like to have it so that there is some degree of sound design for every room. Yeah. That would be nice. Especially since we've got enough of the small speakers. Yeah. Well, once again, if we can improve on how those work, because I've never been happy with the motion sensing on, they work, it works well enough so that if all the actors are still and someone's going through the haunt, the timings are fine.

[22:50] But, like you said, in a real-world situation where actors are moving around, things are happening, they will trigger seemingly at random.

[22:59] So, yeah. Basically, I would like to get that going. And I would like to have it not be an afterthought. I'm not, like, a great audio editor. But I'm good enough at splicing things together and mixing things and making things sound fucked up. Basically, I'm the perfect amount of audio editor to make things sound creepy and messed up. Because i because i just do random stupid stuff it's actually really easy the secret i have found for most of the time is you drop it an octave you make it you drop the pitch an octave and slow it by about 25 that's usually a very good starting point for making a song or a sound effect sound creepy so if you want to do like the door chime we talked about earlier that's what i did with that drop the pitch yeah i was thinking more like the music that you did for the diner yeah the 50s music yeah yeah it messed with everybody that was my favorite year for sound design just because i got to play with music that i love yeah and i think you gave yourself a couple of days to actually do it too and i created a 30 minute loop of some of my favorite music from that era but like you said like we talked about dropped it down an octave slowed it down 20 25 percent and so songs get like the chanterelles the temptations um dion and the belmonts all that stuff gets real fucking creepy no and of course i had to use butcher pete too just well yeah because you had to.

[24:25] Especially for that year yeah i had to it was a legal obligation yeah so yeah i want to move past what we've been doing where sound design's been an afterthought that we just stick in the ceiling and call today and i want to make real good sound design for each room.

[24:39] All right number three three walkie-talkies and communication oh we made such a big improvement yes we did yes we did yes so last year on black friday sales i researched and found a pack of all of the same ones it's like six of them um that are chargeable and have set headsets so they came with both um the stands and the headsets which was really nice got them like 50 or 70 off something.

[25:10] Um we had one it was wild because we got them on amazon i think yeah because previously we had little ones and we only had three of them yeah we had a little more we had a little more than three but the problem was we had such a horrible mismatch that even though walkie-talkies are cross-compatible we can never keep track of them because they require different chargers yeah like theoretically all walkie-talkies should be able to talk to each other but a you probably know that's never going to work in functionality and b since they all had different chargers they got scattered to the four fucking winds so yeah we might have six already but we can't find six right and some of them took double-a batteries which that's not gonna last a whole season and even if it does I mean it's not gonna last two and who's gonna remember to change them after the season's done yeah exactly so anyway we bought a whole bunch last year higher-end rechargeable headset included walkie-talkies, Yes, and so I had one, you had one, our queue line actor had one, and then we gave one to the back room of the haunt, and next year, what we're going to do to improve is we're going to add one to the actor area. That we're just going to, like, zip tie to a pole or something. Yes, and just say, if anybody's in this area, get back to your spots. We've got people.

[26:31] Yeah. Because being a home haunt, we do have a lot of downtime. Time well especially on the friday and saturday yes and actors tend to wonder um they wander around i'm the wanderer yes home around around sorry yes exactly um and then on halloween night we actually also gave one to ellie who was inside and to the trick-or-treat crew and you will not.

[26:58] Believe how happy that made them literally i i i did not foresee that no i i always thought that they knew that they were part of it and that we like tried to think of them and not just keep them as an afterthought but now i'm thinking maybe we need to find more ways to make them feel included because they always think that they're just doing the the job that we don't want even though they've been offered um the option to work inside the haunt they just they don't want to

[27:28] they want to hand out the candy yeah one of them did work one year.

[27:31] But that was a that was an emergency desperate situation yes it was and she wasn't very happy no she was not and it was not on halloween night no it was not all those things are true yes yeah basically we need to work we've got the technology now basically we've got the tools we've got the tech and we got a good enough set for our purposes so now what we need to do is sort out how we use them these walkie-talkies are a little bit um touchy yeah um so we're still working on that we also need to make sure that actors are using the headset yeah i use the headset religiously under my mask in fact it's kind of weird i have to remember now when i put on my costume the first thing is not the mask is not the shirt it's not the gloves it's not anything it's the fucking earpiece yes not the walkie-talkie the earpiece yeah you leave that little bit dangling down there on the side so you can plug it in when you're ready to go yeah that way it's under your shirt it's under the mask under the shirt it's under everything so basically there's at some point halloween night where i'm going to be in nothing but my pants and an earpiece you're welcome for that image yeah at least i have pants on in the image think about that way so yeah i i really do think we lot of progress here i agree with you completely.

[28:49] Um i i just wish we've got to get more people on the earpieces and i think the one in the actor area is a brilliant idea just one that's never going to be used to talk exactly be used as a broadcast exactly so yeah i think that's a that's a great idea i think that'll be uh what we're doing next year this is a very simple thing to improve the only other the only other element is you and I do need to do some practice with them. A, to test the range, exactly to extend the range. When we have reasons for that, we can go into another time. But more about getting the timings for talking down so we don't talk over each other. Right. And there were some times when you would ask if we were ready for the next group and I would click to say ready or I would say ready, But you wouldn't hear me, but you would hear it come on. Yeah, I would hear the boop or whatever it was. And I knew you were ready. But, which honestly, that worked pretty well. You're just not saying anything. I mean, not hearing you say anything. You're just hearing the on and off of the button. Yeah. So, honestly, that may just be what we do.

[29:58] All right. Item number four, marketing PR. This is another one of those things that, even though we did pretty well, we got two newspapers that published us, two local publications.

[30:11] Yeah we can do better um once again i didn't get started with the digital stuff until way too late i would love to be starting with this in mid-september i mean after all this is our 20th year yeah 2025 will mark 20 years of this yeah so what we want to do is we want to get the word out early that it is the big 20 and we want to have the haunt in a condition where if news uh say hey can we come and shoot video or take photos photos do that kind of thing we can do it, And, once again, since we are not going to be turning our haul into a major construction zone, knock on wood, that should be much more possible this year. God, I'm realizing between the heavy construction and the hot summer slash early autumn, we got screwed.

[31:06] But, anyways, yeah, we really want to get on this, get the press releases out, hopefully by mid-September. Yeah. I think that'd be about right. Basically, as other haunts are starting to open, get ours out. We did not do a promo video this year. No. We're going to do a new promo video this year. This is going to be one of the things we do. And one of the reasons we didn't do a promo video is because we didn't have a space to shoot a promo video. Right. And what we may do is we may do several little videos and push them out on social media. Yeah. You know, just chapters of the story, so to speak. One thing I would like to do in addition to that, since we're talking about marketing PR, is we have the security camera footage. I need to get it fully off the cards and into the cloud. I need to get that done. Chop those up and make those video posts, some of the highlights. Yeah.

[32:03] Put those out on the Bernie Baxter Facebook page as the year goes on. Uh just like every two weeks or so publish another one um so get like 10 or 15 of them or something like that and that way over the course of 2025 that can be published pushing them out yeah um i don't want to do one weekly i don't want to do it too often but i'd like to do it often enough that people kind of anticipate them and maybe share among their friends and once again it's never going to go viral it's never going to be huge, but it hopefully is something that can get people talking a little bit during the off season yeah.

[32:44] Number five, actor training. This one's on me. So I want to start it sooner. And there are a couple of people who have been with us for a while. And just they're very good at what they do. What they do is similar every year, though. And I would like to kind of work with them more closely to get them to where they can be scarier and feel good about what they're doing. Yeah.

[33:13] And the other thing is that I found that in the past couple of years, even though we give the actors the story and we give them, you know, lines to work with, they aren't really using that to develop the characters. So we want to try to incorporate the story, especially this year, because this year is the 20 and it is the story of Bernie. And one thing that's going to be great about the story this year, just a spoiler a little bit here, is that since Bernie is the ringmaster slash Carnie Barker type, basically all the other actors get to be various people at a carnival. You would expect it in an old-timey carnival. No. You want to be the strongman? Okay. We've got an actor that could be the strongman. You want to be, you know, think about all the various quote-unquote freaks or performers that might be at an old-timey carnival. Or just you could have people who are running the games or people, you know what I mean? Oh, okay.

[34:15] Obviously, we have not talked about the story, because the story is always in Jonathan's hands. Yep. I didn't realize it was going to focus so heavily only on his adult life in the carnival. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what Bernie's best known for. Yeah. But the idea I had was we could bring in some of those characters, people that would be around him organically. So, and like I said, we're going to talk more about it, but definitely this story has opportunities for characters not named Bernie Baxter. Yes. And that is the main thing. Because that's kind of been one of the problems we've had, is while we've had some, I think, great stories, they focused on one iconic villain. And though that villain may have had helpers, they're kind of generic henchmen types, this one gives us the opportunity to build real characters. And I'm excited about that. But yeah we we do need to start with that earlier um and we've learned that three of our long-term actors may not be here in october so we also have to start recruiting earlier yeah i it looks like they'll probably be here but we can't bank on it we can't like get money on it so yeah i i can't i can't take the chance yeah because i can't run the whole thing by myself Well, not with that attitude. Yeah, I know. I should talk to Leonard Pickle, right?

[35:44] How to do a one-person haunt. You know, we've got... We damn near have the layout to do it, too. I know. I know. You know? So, hey. Yeah. Honestly. But this is an area where we need to put in some work during the offseason. And I think it's going to start in the new year that we really need to begin this. So once again, I'm going to work on the story this weekend. That'll help with this. That'll also help with the decoration and design. So this is going to be interesting.

[36:15] All right. Well, number six is the ever-present problem, reducing running. Now, here's another example of an area where we made good progress, and now we're wanting to make great progress. Yeah.

[36:34] Because this year, from my position outside, and you can back me up or contradict me, where I sat outside, it used to be in previous years, there were times, I swear these motherfuckers teleported. Yeah. I'd be standing at the entrance, they'd peer at the exit before I could spin on my heels and address the group behind me. You know, it felt like some of these motherfuckers were breaking the laws of quantum physics. Or maybe they were obeying the laws of quantum physics and they quantum tunneled through the wall. Into the other door i don't know but anyways that seemed to have happened less i won't say it happened zero times but it happened less as a percentage it was much less likely and groups who did bolt through still had more time in the haunt than they did in previous years and that's owed a lot to the layout when you break up the sight lines which is what we focused on people struggle to run you leave sight lines open people tend to bolt from safe place to safe place and in the case of our haunt that was from the front entrance to the back of the haunt and from the back of the haunt to the exit um that's not the sidelines anymore no um you can't just do that And I love it. And that has helped things so, so much.

[37:56] But we need to do more. Yeah. The transition areas, as small as they are, still need to have something to slow people down between them. So that if they're... And I honestly don't know that if people just decide they're going to run, I don't think there's a way to stop them from doing that.

[38:17] Yeah. Not safely. No, not safely. And the reason I say that is because even the big haunts, like 13th Gate was talking to us about it and how they have this issue of people running through their haunt. And so does like every haunt owner we've talked to has this issue of either people running through or not going fast enough and not being able to implement the uh play through rule so that the people going faster just pass the people going you know some people never play mini golf in the shows yeah, I'm not even going to pretend like they played real golf. They never played mini golf at any shows. Yeah. Because it's the same rule on both a mini golf course and a golf course. Exactly. If you have a group that's playing faster, you step aside, let them play through, and move on.

[39:13] That's just courtesy, and we kind of follow that rule in Haunted. Actually, like I said, when we were at 13th Gate, they had a sign that said, please do this. Yeah. The problem is people don't read signs. Yeah. Like, they just don't. Yeah.

[39:29] It's incredibly frustrating and i agree that well here's the thing i look at this like a lot of other social ills and that if like you said if someone's determined to do it you can't prevent it but what you can do and what you should do is work to prevent or reduce every case you can't you should work to minimize it um and and so yeah i think part of that's going to be putting better obstacles in those transition areas part of that is going to be um focusing more on layout and lighting again um going back to that um honestly beyond just um you know focusing maybe maybe there's tweaks we can make to the layout maybe there's things we can change yeah i've got a few ideas so we got but the problem is because of the space limitations we have we can't do anything drastic i think in terms of physical layout we probably have the best we're going to get in terms of reducing running yeah but we can make tweaks and changes to improve it we can add more obstacles we can do more things and also actor positioning can play a role too so we're going to work on it we got some ideas but we know we can never eliminate this but reducing it I think we can. Yeah.

[40:50] All right extending the tunnel yeah this is this is your big thing so you get to explain to the nice people yeah oh and improving the lighting this is about the yard display yes sorry okay sorry i i thought we were talking about the l oh i mean we can talk about both actually okay we can this is all uh front of house shit so yeah i'm gonna gather all right so yard display was a hit. Easy setup, easy teardown for the most part. So how can we improve it? The first thing we're doing is we're going to try different lighting for it because what we've had in the past are three strands of light on our PVC tunnel, like three on each side and three in the top. And it looks really, really good. Yeah, it does. But what we want to do is we want to see if net lighting would actually be better and give us a more closed-in feeling you know make it more tunnel like a b easier setup easier teardown yeah because one of the great challenges we have is these led strands because they not only do the tunnel but the yard also is these are like 200 feet of led lights yeah it's an absolutely god fucking insane amount of lighting and we have to run it three times.

[42:12] Zip tying at every point, we can literally spend an entire day doing nothing but these strands. Yeah. So we're hoping that by using net lighting on the tunnel part, because part of the function of the lighting is to keep people out of the parts of the display they're not supposed to be in. Right. So we're hoping by using the net lighting on the tunnel, we can shave off a lot of that time. That is the hope. We're also looking at possibly changing the way the tunnel is built to give us more points of contact to hang pumpkins from because we have an ungodly amount of pumpkins. We did not use all of them this year. No, we used about two-thirds of them. You know when we talked about the new storage solution? Yeah. Yeah. About a third to almost a half of it went to fucking pumpkins. Yeah. That's not an exaggeration. No, it is not. Somewhere in like a 40-ish percent range went to pumpkins alone. Yeah.

[43:16] There's a lot of pumpkins there's a lot of fucking pumpkins and and and when we and since we spray painted so many of them this year they are officially fucking pumpkins because they're goddamn motherfucking pumpkins yeah yeah but so we're we're hoping that that works we're also looking at ways to improve the actual walkway um we've been using these stakes and we probably will again but we um we have bought more of them for the outside edge because that side did not have the same height that the rest of the walkway and those stakes suck nuts i mean the ones that were there the green ones yeah yeah the short short ones that we bought oh my god who how the fuck are those fencing stakes they're labeled as fencing stakes yeah i know what fucking universe of those fencing stakes i don't know but the other thing is is that we're going to put up um some.

[44:18] Privacy fencing or fabric on that side probably so that whenever we turn our lights on it doesn't blind into our neighbor's house yeah because we bought those really bright spotlights which are right now at in the christmas section at home depot yeah not that much money actually so if you're wanting some flood lights for your house that are programmed on led check it out it may black friday sales too i don't know yeah there's but they're really bright they are dimmable and you can change the color they're they're great these are standard rgb remote things yeah and they're outdoor so that's i think that's gonna like take care of the front yard yeah and then for the l which is the little outdoor section for those who don't know what we're talking about the We've built a small wooden structure that goes in front of the garage that basically is meant to block sight lines from the queue line into the haunt. Yeah, it's just a little entrance into the haunt so that you aren't able to see into it from outside. And we don't have to put up a curtain on it. Yeah, and what I'd like to do with that is I would...

[45:27] Times past, we have had structures where I could hide inside of and come out, which I want to build something like that again. Yeah. Because that way it's easier for me to get behind people before they're actually in the haunt. I'd also like to extend the structure over to the fence that's up against our neighbor. Yeah. So that on rainy nights, Bernie has a little place to sit. Aw. Yeah. That might not be sweet of you. Yeah. Okay. Um, so yeah, I guess while we're lumping all the out front of house stuff together, we also need to put the roof back on that one section of the queue line. Yeah, and we might look at new ways to light the queue line because. You know, I actually kind of liked the flame light setup. We probably need to get them out of the rain though. Yeah. Before. That's a valid point. We probably need to take them down and still even them up all year. Yeah, just take the bulbs out of the day at least. the housings can stay no they're not going to get super wet but yeah you're probably right about that but no the flame lights i think actually worked really well it looked really good and it helped me because in that mask even though it's a very good mask for visibility uh you still do have some limitations and having brighter lighting that was more um that more directional made it easier to see people and interact with people so actually i was very happy with the tonal lighting.

[46:55] Other than, like you said, we might need more of it. Yeah. So, honestly, I mean, those flame bulbs are cheesy and cheap and whatever, but, god damn, they work, especially when you put a bunch of them in tandem. Yeah. And the outside, you know, the front of house stuff is not meant to be scary. No. It's not meant to be too intimidating for people to come in. No, no, the front of house stuff, as far as I'm concerned, is meant to be fun and approachable and ideally structured well to flow traffic, human traffic. Yeah. So that people know where to go and what to do. That's the function of the outdoor stuff. And the lighting definitely did that.

[47:33] All right. And number eight, this is for us. This is for just the two of us. Nobody else need to be involved. We demand. Yes, I'm changing it to demand a real haunt trip in 2025. Yeah. We have not been able to take one for a few years now. Now, some of that was pandemic.

[47:54] Some of that was time constraints. And some of that was just other problems that came up. But we have not been able to take a real haunt trip. And to be clear, this year we did have the trip to Kansas City. But that was a trip that was piggybacked on the baby shower, the grandbaby shower. Right. It was not a standalone haunt trip. Yes, we had an amazing time at XL. Yes, that may be one of my all-time favorite haunted attraction moments that has ever happened in the whole of human history. Yeah. And trying to explain that to my friend Patrick the other day proved fucking impossible.

[48:33] Yeah. You guys get it. You're my peeps. But anyways, there's someone who's like sane and normal. Yeah. And respected member of the community. It's kind of difficult. But anyways, yes, it was an amazing trip. But we want a real one. I want to have a trip like the Atlanta trip or the Chicago trip where we got to go to a place we've never been before and see a bunch of haunts. That we'll never probably get to go to again, but they're very different from anything we have locally. Yeah. We love seeing what the local haunt culture and community does. And dear God, I want to do that again this year. Where? I don't fucking know. Okay? Columbus has come up a bunch of times. Yeah, we would love to get up there because we have a lot of friends there. Yeah, we have a lot of friends there, and that one does seem like a natural. We've got to go there. There's so many great haunts there that we do want to go to and see. Yeah, we were actually supposed to go in 2020 and then weren't able to. Go to that. Yeah. Yeah. There was a thing in the way of that. The ongoing global bastard. I get to say that one more time. Yeah. Got in the way of it. New England area, though, maybe near Headless Horseman and all that toward Vermont. That state area might be really good. Las Vegas.

[49:58] Fear Factory and all that. And Vegas is really tempting. I've never been to Vegas. No. And that's absolutely batshit insane, considering the number of conferences I've been to and have done in my life. Yeah. Never been to Vegas. Philadelphia could be interesting, too. Eastern State Penn is still doing something. They're not doing the same thing, but they are doing something. There's a bunch of other great haunts in the Philly area. I don't know. I legit don't know. But we need to do one of them. Yeah. And honestly, you know, it needs to be a proper road trip and or it needs to be a flight. Like with a, you know what I mean? It needs to be something. It needs to feel like a real haunt trip. And if there's something like Lost Souls is in Chicago, I would love to do that instead because fuck all that planning. Jesus Christ. I mean, I'll do it. I won't be happy about it, but I'll do it. And I'm actually quite good at it, it seems.

[50:53] But, yeah, but fuck all that if I don't have to do it.

[50:57] So, yeah, I would love an opportunity to do one of these towns. We need to do in 2025 this is for us this is because we have not had the chance to do it and i have been itching for it i mean did i enjoy the trip to kansas city yes i enjoyed x out um very much in fact um did i enjoy the trip then the gulf coast yeah i enjoyed some of the haunts we went there but they didn't feel like real haunt trips well and part of it is that we didn't get to spend any time in the actual city no no because we were just in and out we wasn't like let's explore the city in the day and the haunted night yeah we like with kansas city i felt we were robbing the joint yeah yeah we got the money let's go good yeah because um well next year i should have more vacation time available to me yeah which is nice and since you know once again knock on fucking wood no major construction yeah and we're hopefully getting an earlier jump on things we should be able to spare that long weekend in early October to do this. Yeah. Because the Indigenous Persons Day is early October, and we take the Friday off before. That gives us a four-day weekend. Leave Thursday afternoon slash evening. You can be somewhere Friday. Go to Friday haunts, go to Saturday haunts, go to a few Sunday haunts, come back that Monday. You can do a lot, and that's how we did the Atlanta trip. Yeah. Pretty much exactly how.

[52:24] So, yeah. Yeah, although I think we got to Atlanta Wednesday, So that we could do the Thursday night, too. No, no. Thursday night, we did that one in Birmingham. Okay. We stopped half on the way. Yeah. We stopped along the way and did a haunt on Thursday. Gotcha. Yeah. That was a nightmare at 3008 we did, I believe.

[52:42] Yeah. So, yeah. But that felt like a real haunt trip. Yeah. And as you said, we found a Thursday haunt. Yeah. What the? The photovert? We found one. That was before that was common. Yeah. Now it's more common. I agree. Yeah. And now even Sundays are becoming fairly common. Yeah. So, on that note, where should we go? Where in the world is Haunt Weekly going?

[53:06] Never do that again. Got it. Yeah. But yeah, seriously, where should we go for this haunt trip this year that we are absolutely going to insist on taking in 2025? Let us know. All the places we exist. Hauntweekly.com. Hauntweekly on Twitter. Hauntweekly on Facebook and YouTube.com slash Hauntweekly. Please let us know where the fuck we should go. We need your suggestions and your ideas. Well, that's it for this week. I think I already did the outro, so we're just going to not do that again. Because repetition is not our friend. But on that note, everyone, thank you very much for joining us for the past hour or so. We greatly appreciate having you here. Sorry again about being late. Hopefully, Crystal's job will learn to control itself a little better. But until next time, I'm Jonathan. I'm Crystal. And we'll see you all next week.