[0:23] Hello, everyone. I'm Jonathan. I'm Crystal. And this is Haunt Weekly, a weekly podcast without an attraction on the entertainment community. Whether you're an actor, owner, or just plain aficionado, we aim to be a podcast for you. And now we're living up to the name Haunt Weekly again. Hopefully. Hopefully. It's nice to get another episode. Well, knock on wood. I mean, we're recording it on time. But it's nice to have another episode up on the new schedule and getting things done. That does feel great. So, but if you want to check out other things that we have done. Please, go back to the past. To the shitty games that suck ass. And also previous episodes of Haunt Weekly. You can find them at HauntWeekly.com or HauntWeekly on Facebook. YouTube.com slash HauntWeekly is an easy place for you YouTube-a-files to get all the episodes. Those exist. Don't look at me like that. Also, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts from. We are there. Please, please, please check us out. And follow us at all the places we exist.

[1:29] So... Except in real life. Except in real life. Yeah, that'd be creepy. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we're not difficult to find. No. But please don't, like, you know, use that. Yeah, basically we're at three places.

[1:43] And we're probably going to one of those three places after. Yeah. Anywho.

[1:48] Um work we did for the haunt this week we actually had a fairly busy week for haunt work even though it wasn't work inside of the haunt right but we did do a fair amount cleaning up the actor area and the backyard in general yeah one of the things that we've had for a while we refer to it as the boneyard yes which is a little too literal of a term in this case well and i think everybody probably has had a boneyard at some point if you work with these plastic skeleton, it's mostly for the plastic skeletons in the yard display when skeletons break or something falls off of them or whatever and these are going to do it from time to time we've been doing this for 20 years.

[2:29] We would take the remnants and put them in a pile in the yard yeah because it's, it's just bones never have enough we are switching homeowners insurance, yeah not by choice Not by choice, and they requested photos of the yard, and one of the things we had to do was clean up the boneyard pile. Now, the good news is, we actually had a great way to do it, because we went through everything where the plastic was still good, we kept. Where the plastic was brittle and falling apart, we threw away, and everything we kept, we moved into the queue line. So it's now out of the way, out of the yard, should be fine. Right, with the other skeleton pieces. Yeah, so it's actually, this is something we'd actually been meaning to do for some time.

[3:14] Didn't do it and it's amazing how big a job feels looking at it but it only took us like a couple of hours yeah like we could have done this years ago yeah we could have done this a long time ago and it really you know you're you're right we looked at the mess in the backyard and been like this is going to take at least a full weekend yeah we need like both days and you know we're getting older we don't have the energy we used to have that always just seemed too daunting yeah but a little fire got lit underneath us and admittedly a very small fire yeah i mean let's be honest we were being kind of silly here but that small fire was enough to actually jump on it and we've got most of the backyard cleaned out and like you said a couple of hours and yeah it was pretty intense work and we needed to break afterward and we need to relax but yeah it didn't take nearly as long as we thought it would we're going to finish it next weekend um we got more we got to remove um now we're hoping to pick up a a couple of yard tools to help get the uh the vine.

[4:17] Oh my god this vine yeah it's ellie asked if it's kudzu and it's not kudzu it is not kudzu i grew up in south carolina i know kudzu i'm familiar with it it's got huge leaves on it yeah they're like the size of your hand almost yeah kudzu kudzu does not this this one has very tiny leaves we're not exactly sure what the fuck it is but we know it does not fucking die yeah we've tried everything and the part of the problem is the actual roots for this vine are on the other side of the fence yeah so even if we completely nuke everything in our which we have done once or twice it will come back super quick.

[4:57] So, you know, that's a thing. Yeah, and whenever we changed from taking care of the yard to ourself to paying somebody to do it for us. They just refused to touch it. Honestly, I don't blame them. Yeah, and actually Ellie took over that process because I think she was tired of hearing us bitch about how much we hated doing the yard. Yeah, we're not landscapers, but any stretch of the imagination. Some people find mowing real-life grass very soothing. I do not. You would rather do it in a video game. Exactly. Rather do it in a video game. That said, I have been spying those robot Roomba lawnmowers. Yeah. A little lustfully. Yeah, those look fun. I mean, and it would work definitely great on the front yard. Yes. The front yard is as straightforward as it gets. It is almost exactly a square. It's got a little strip down the driveway and a few other things, but it's very basic. Robotic vacuum, hunky-dory. I think if we let a robotic lawnmower on that, it would get lost. Oh, yeah. We would find it. Years later. Yeah. It's like this weekend. I stepped on top of the vines to grab something that was further back and stepped on a paint tray. Yeah. That doesn't shock me.

[6:19] Well, it wasn't a tray. It was one of the cups, the paint cups that you sit on and stuff. Anyway, I should have been able to see it. I could not see it at all. Yeah, it's been...

[6:33] So this has been a very challenging process dealing with this vine. And part of it is, like, you don't have to set stuff out there long for it to get consumed. No. Literally, sometimes a matter of days or weeks. Yeah. Because this thing loves to cover stuff. But, yeah, we're going to do what we can to knock it back. But I know even if we succeed, the victory will be temporary. And it will be a costly temporary victory. Well, hopefully we can get it knocked back enough that somebody else can take care of it. Yeah, we'll figure something else out. So anyways, that's what we've been working on this week is yard cleanup and getting both the actor area and improved access to our storage. Because our shed is back there too. That has been a big deal. And it's been, like I said, I've been happy with the progress. Looking forward to finishing it up next weekend.

[7:23] All right. Every week we ask a question of the week. last week we asked what are you i mean what was your trans world highlight, um and we did not get any responses yeah and i checked y'all were just tired and ready to be home well i think that's part of it but i also checked the insights on facebook because that's where we get most of our responses on facebook we get a few from the youtube page we get a few direct emails but the vast majority comes from the facebook page and a i know i posted it later because we were off kilter with the timings. But B.

[8:03] Facebook only showed it to about a quarter of the audience that it normally shows these posts to. Oh, weird. I went through and looked at the insights on other questions of the week, and it was legitimately about a quarter, maybe a third less than all the others. Yeah. And that is frustrating as fuck. So basically, this week, We'll get into this week's question in a second, but please, if you see the question of the week and you think it's a good one, share it out. Leave a comment. Participate. Let Facebook know you give a shit about these. We greatly appreciate you guys answering them, and it means a lot to us as a smaller, lesser-known podcast with a smaller audience to be able to get feedback and information from you guys. And so on that note, this week's question of the week is... what's the creepiest place you've accidentally wandered into? Yeah, and it's going to fit very well with this week's episode. Yes, it is. What would yours be? Okay, so at the college that I was working at, there was an area. So I was trying to find a place that I'd never been before and wound up in this hallway of lockers and dust and spider webs and like bad lighting and no completed ceiling. It was... I've got photos of it that I shared with you. Yeah. Yeah, and I think...

[9:28] It doesn't quite qualify as accidental because I was going the correct way. Yeah. But I have extreme creepy memories of the elevator in the McCormick Library in the University of South Carolina. This is one of the oldest buildings in the University of South Carolina. The University of South Carolina actually celebrated its bicentennial while I was there. It was founded in the early 1800s.

[9:56] And this was the original library building now the library is since long since been moved out yeah i've been to that life that library and that elevator and i think that might have been the original elevator you know it's you know not exaggerating that much have you ever seen in the movies the elevators that have like the scissor door the scissor grating on the door yeah yeah this this is that yeah because it didn't have a solid door that closed it just had the scissor rates yeah yeah and it the noises it made were unnatural and unholy um yeah and i it felt so weird and what's so surreal about it is if you go in and you you've been in the elevator too so you know we can share this memory together was you go past the museum portion yeah and the museum portion is very modern it's been recently renovated it's very bright very museum like got the nice flat walls and artwork and other shit hanging on it it's a museum you walk past it and the next thing you know you're swearing this 1800s elevator yeah and you feel like you just fucked up in a horrible way but no it is where you have to go at least it was when we were there 20 years ago now it was where you had to go to get to the design team the graphic design people the marketing and graphic design uh when i went to it it was um like the.

[11:24] People who would call and beg for money yeah the alumni not the alumni it was the, it was a different kind of i really get the feeling if you were in that building and not in the museum that's where they stuck the unwanted people yeah basically because i remember the graphic design people were in the very attic like literally you could see like it looked very batman-esque yeah yeah that's the room i was in okay so it may be shared by multiple departments but yeah steers so that elevator and that whole back area was incredibly creepy and i don't think there's anything they can do to fix it no so on that note what was the creepiest place you've been to let us know homeweek.com homeweek on facebook and youtube.com slash haunt, Okay, now we get into the main topic. Now, there's two types of people out there listening to this. Some of y'all are going, what are you doing talking about this outdated meme all these years later? And the other half are asking, what the fuck are you talking about the back rooms? There's no one in between.

[12:34] And needless to say, you both are completely right. So yes we're behind the times on this one and to be clear that doesn't hurt our feelings we were never the cool kids no and so people like haha you're in your 40s why does it feel like you lose your call i'm like haha i never had it yeah thank you can't hurt my feelings so yes this episode we will be talking about a meme that is six to seven years old but still shockingly relevant, all things considered and it's generally apropos too because, I mean we'll get into, how I found out about it recently and why I've become a little bit obsessed with it but it has tons of potential for haunts and we've never seen anything like it used and we'll go into some of the reasons why I don't think it's been used but yeah it's about to become the subject supposedly it's still in production, A24, that's the Amazon movie studio. They are doing a feature film based on this concept, the back rooms. And it's an idea that is incredibly simple to do.

[13:51] Um, so yeah, honestly, I'm, I'm really excited about this and looking forward to, uh, getting into it. And we're going to start by telling a story. And it's a story that takes place as of this recording about, we'll say, uh, seven and a half years ago. Okay. I think that's about right. Because it was December, 2017.

[14:18] Now, we were making one of our many trips to St. Louis to visit family. Hong Weekly at this point was still fairly new. Yes. But we were in St. Louis visiting family. And Ellie, being Ellie, decided to book a hotel at like the last possible millisecond. This is, and anyone who knows Ellie, this is like the least surprising thing you will ever hear in your life. Yes, but that has changed over the years. It's gotten better. At least for the bigger trips, yeah. But she still will sometimes attempt to book hotels while driving or riding in the car and trying to decide where to stop for the night. Well, yes. But no. So she booked it at the last minute. But she got a great rate at a random hotel that none of us had heard about and was close to where Shawnee and the other members of the family were. Mm-hmm. So we got there, I think, like the 20th or 19th or something like that. And it was eerily empty of a hotel like we knew it the minute we walked in oh yeah the field was all off yeah like it was so it had a really tall lobby and it was dimly lit and the people that you saw walking around were not normal no not even longer stay because this was a longer stay Yeah, we only saw a couple of guests there ever. I'd say 80 to 90% of the people we saw there were staffed.

[15:47] Um, and, and no one was acting normal when I'm doing the air quotes thing that y'all can't hear, but, but you can probably sense what I mean there. So it was bizarre, right? And so we go there and we stayed there. Like you said, it was a longer stay. We actually booked like two weeks, something like that. Um, so we stayed into the new year. Um, but basically it was completely empty. other than an occasional glimpse of another guest, we almost never saw anyone. Right. And then about halfway through the stay, we got a note underneath our door. And we have it somewhere. But basically, we were evicted from the hotel. Yeah, the day before or... I think it was like three days after. Yeah, they notified us basically. We couldn't stay longer than we had booked. Yeah. It wasn't like, you know, we had to leave now or anything like that. In fact, we got to complete our stay. In fact, we may have actually been the last regular hotel customers to leave that hotel. Right. And I say that because they were turning it into a retirement community. And that's what the eviction note said. Hi, we appreciate your stay. By the way, get the fuck out. Never come back. We never want to see you again until you're really old. Bye. Yeah. That's how you think.

[17:13] Um so yeah the whole thing was weird but anyways during some of the downtime of our visit we decided we wanted to record some haunt weekly episodes and specifically wanted to record two because, we had travel going back to new orleans planned right at the end of it and you were having your wisdom teeth pulled this was at the same time right and so we wanted to have both episodes 107 and 108 you can go listen to them we don't mention where we are really should have we don't mention it but you can hear how echoey it is like i know we don't have great audio quality believe me we don't strive for it editing what's that but these were really echoey episodes compared to others and the reason was because we went down to the front desk and hey do you all have an empty room that what we can use to record Haunt Weekly." And that, in hindsight, is like the stupidest question. The second stupidest question I've ever asked in my life. Because, of course, they have nothing but empty rooms. Right, because they've been trying to clear it out forever. But we didn't know that when we asked the question. And like I said, in hindsight, and they said, oh, sure, use any of the rooms in the conference center, and motion to, like, around the corner of the lobby.

[18:28] Now, interestingly, our key cards did work all these doors. Yeah. So we weren't allowed to be in there. But when we stepped into the conference center, and that conference center, now I'm really doing the air quotes thing violently. Yeah, it was a big stretch. Yeah. All of that. It was clear that no one had really set foot in it in decades.

[18:52] Like, if they had had a conference in there since the 2000s, I would have been shocked. Yeah, I think there were two tables, because all the rest were not there.

[19:05] They had some folded chairs up against the walls. Right. Which we took and used. They had the yellow walls, like, in the meme. Yeah. And it was, like, a dirty brown and yellow carpeting kind of thing. Yeah, and the harsh fluorescent lighting everywhere. And it's hard to explain, but when I say the air tasted and smelled like dust, yeah it was very musty it tasted wrong it smelled wrong it looked wrong yeah everything about it was wrong because yeah it did have the harsh fluorescent lighting but the things covering them covering them were yellowed with age yeah it was very very bizarre and it wasn't like we had a hard time seeing no there's plenty of light but it was incredibly disconcerting and i remember feeling, so incredibly uncomfortable in that space.

[20:02] That it was like, I just couldn't wait to get out. Well, yeah. And it was also like super duper quiet. Like we didn't want to do the podcast in there because it was so quiet. We thought we were disturbing the dust. Yeah. And we also could hear the echoing because there was no background noise or anything else to dim it. Yeah. So, yeah, it was both problems at once. So, but we did it. We got them done. And then we got the fuck out of there. But it turns out we were trailblazers.

[20:32] Because we had experienced the meme known as the backrooms a full year before it became a meme yeah see how cool we are yeah now who's the cool kid huh huh i thought it was america huh no wait oh i'm doing randy marsh now i don't know i don't know either but anyways so that brings us to the actual topic. What is slash are the backrooms? The memes began, meme really began in April 2018. So once again, we were first. By about six months or so. Yeah, exactly. It started with a user who posted an image in the cursed images form of 4chan. Now, to be clear here, 4chan has a terrible reputation deservedly so but it does have a lot of different forms some of which are, not horrible it's only you know certain it's kind of like reddit in that regard this was a different subreddit from what most people think of and take a fortune basically right, and all it was was a still photo that featured uh pastel wallpapered rooms, harsh fluorescent lighting again that felt strangely empty and off and it was very disconcerting. Yes, and the weird wallpaper.

[21:58] 70s diamond pattern wallpaper is tough to describe. You really should actually just look up, or actually I'm probably going to use that photo as the backdrop to the Hunt Weekly icon. But basically it was very disconcerting. And kind of got ignored. And then in May 2019, on the paranormal board of 4chan, a user called for individuals to post, others to post, images of rooms that feel, quote unquote, off. And inevitably, someone reposted the original backroom's photo. Right. As you do. As you can know, it was completely apropos. That's exactly what you do. You want to see a creepy place of a photo of it? Here you go. This is it. And since then, this meme has exploded. And it's really hard to overstate exactly how big it's gotten. Mm-hmm.

[23:03] Because once it appeared, once the original image was appeared, and those two things were married, the meme spread to Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok, apparently becoming really, really popular on TikTok, which will explain why we hadn't heard about it. Because I still think TikTok is that round bastard from Return to Oz. Yes. If you haven't seen Return to Oz, go watch it. Pause the podcast while you wait and go watch it. You'll thank us later or curse us later. Either way, you will have a response. Yes. And I'll take either. But yeah. But then people started making, then it started transferring to YouTube into video sites with found footage videos that were based upon the concept. And then came the fucking video games.

[23:50] Holy shit, then came the fucking video games. Currently, right now, if you go on Steam and search the backrooms, or just backrooms, I think it is, there are 400 plus titles. Now, there's some overlap here. Some are demos of full games. Some are DLCs. But there's 400 fucking titles centered around the backrooms.

[24:12] And as we mentioned, there is now a feature film being worked on. It was announced in February 2023, and there's still not many updates of it. Some people are wondering if the film is still being made. But IMDb has it listed as in production, as of when I checked. So the meme is still going. The movie is still moving forward.

[24:34] Yeah, needless to say, that's pretty fucking crazy, all right, that it went this far. You know what this reminds me of? uh slender man and all that how that exploded yeah and we got into slender man in the time not like the the teens who got into and did stupid shit we enjoyed the slender man game yes a lot playing alone in the dark we i remember one we played it until my laptop died after the hurricane power outage yeah like one of the minor storms blew through and we knew it was gonna be enough to knock out power but not much else lo and behold it knocked out power so we sat there in the dark of the night on a laptop running on battery playing slender man yeah we're those fucking idiots so yeah this reminds me of slender man and the way it took off and got all this attention seemingly based on very little um so yeah now now one interesting fact is they did actually find the location the photo was taken it's in wisconsin they didn't say exactly where by the way a lot of this information is coming from knowyourmeme.com um and links from it so if you um want to look up more information that's where i would start, it's a it's a great place to start um when you're looking up with this but yeah they found the actual place in wisconsin and they were able to get more photos of it so yeah basically it um.

[26:01] You know the mystery of where this was taken seems to have been solved but that hasn't lessened this idea of eerie rooms that look like they're abandoned but clearly haven't been completed i mean no and that's the thing that's kind of weird it's like like we live in new orleans right so we see photos and images all the time from the abandoned six flags that's now being torn down finally but we would see photos of that all the time that's not the same feeling no because you know that that's abandoned this one looks like people just disappeared from it yeah yeah or it looks like someone's setting this up as a human trap yeah you know i mean it feels wrong it's like like you said six flags and abandoned places feel abandoned you can see the degradation you can see the damage and the back rooms nothing's damaged right nothing's broken all the lights work all the walls look intact, But it's very clear that this space has not been used for anything in a very long time.

[27:11] It looks abandoned, but has no obvious signs of abandonment. Right. And the original one, it actually looks really clean. Yeah. You know, there's not a lot of dust or anything. It looks like it's ready for somebody to rent out and move in. Yeah, it looks like someone in the 1970s had an office in there.

[27:30] They left and no one else entered it but they maintained it as part of the rest of the building you know and it also reminds me a little bit of sometimes every once in a while this will happen where someone will find like a 1990s taco bell yeah that was shut down yeah but maintained still or did some basic upkeep was done so it looks like you're walking into a 1990s taco bell with no people yeah it's it's just weird it's such a bizarre feeling and i think that this is a type of fear because it's very guttural like you don't get some screaming by it you just feel the little hairs stand up you feel the weird energy in the room it feels wrong feels yeah you know it's so hard to describe and i have a feeling most of you're like yeah yeah we know we've all felt it but it's my job here to try and communicate what I'm feeling and it's impossible so yeah I think this is something that haunts can and should play with if possible now the reasons are it's a very different feeling than.

[28:49] Than most taunts get most haunts including us work very simply on distract startle distract startle, you know yeah and we have such a small space that we have to hit hard hit fast yeah um but if you had a really big place then this is another type of feeling or scare you could put in like we've talked about varying your scares over your haunt if you have the space yeah if you have the space because this isn't a startle no this is very much a squick feeling i guess you can incorporate a startle into it if you wanted especially if you have like in the original photo and the others we have a lot of blind corners because that's one of the other elements of it as you can see there are a lot of places for stuff to quote unquote hide even though it's not hiding it's just you can't see it from the room you're in um so yeah this isn't a startle this is a queasy uneasy feeling. We don't belong here. Yeah. Like imagine if you're going through your haunt. You know all the noises and then you come into a room that has been soundproofed and looks completely normal but is empty. There's nothing going on and you can tell that something was here. Yeah. I think. Like, they didn't just build this and never put anything in it, did they? You know? That'd be weirder.

[30:15] Oh, yeah. But, yeah, it's a feeling, you know, of making a mistake. Yeah. Of being somewhere you shouldn't be. It doesn't require actors. Don't have to worry about sound. In fact, the quieter, the better. Exactly. You know, if I were going to have any sound in a backroom scene, it'd be the hum of fluorescent lighting. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That low hum that you can barely hear. I can barely hear it at all because it hits right at a shitty range of hearing. But most people can just barely hear and it barely registers.

[30:47] And, you know, and it's an amazing change of pace. And here's the thing. I noticed when we were walking around the lobby parts that were more traveled in that hotel, when we got into what I'm calling now the back rooms, because it sure as fuck felt like them. Yeah, it did. When we got in there, our pace slowed. Exactly. We were not, we're both fairly brisk walkers. We like to move it, move it. Yeah, but no, and I think this would help with, like, if you needed to slow people down, this would be an option. It's the opposite solution. Instead of slowing people down by making it turnier and mazier. Or putting stuff in front of them that they have to push out of the way. Yeah, instead of the usual techniques, overload them with choice. Yeah. Which is really what it is. Because that's the thing, you walk into one of these rooms, you can go any fucking way you want. And it's pretty clear like you look at the back it's pretty clear where you're supposed to go even yeah, but there's so much choice it's overwhelming and I know that when we were in those rooms and exploring them we slowed to a fucking crawl.

[32:04] Like it took us forever to find the room we ended up actually working in because we had to find a room with the tables and the chairs and that was not the first room we looked in. No it wasn't. It took us like 15-20 minutes to check out three or four rooms because we were moving that slowly. It's a hell of a change of pace. And I think that it's a potential idea, especially if you are a haunt with a lot of square footage and maybe not a lot of ideas for what to do with it all. This might be something really worth looking into. Now, that said, I do have reasons for being skeptical of it working. Right. And these are my taking what I said and then couching it moments.

[32:49] One is that I don't know how this is going to fly with a crowd of people. No, because as soon as you put more than a couple of people in it, it no longer feels like a back room. One person, holy shit. Two people, still holy shit. We can testify. Three people, probably still holy shit. But once you've got Scoob and the gang in there...

[33:09] Yeah. I have a feeling it's not going to work as well. This would not survive a conga line. No, not at all. It would not survive a group of like eight people. But if you do smaller groups we'll say four or less to be safe this could work really really well and the reason i think is quite simple a place can't be abandoned with people in it, exactly you're not people i'm to me you're not people to me to you i'm not people right but now we're with strangers in this place those strangers are definitely people exactly and now there are people in this place other than the not people and therefore it's not abandoned anymore it kind of loses some of that edge and i do think that while this will help with runners as we have seen in our haunt nothing you can do completely discourage runners no some are going to hit this and just make a beeline through it and not slow down and not pay attention and not get the impact, and i don't i mean did it it also i don't know i think that it would depend on how long of a room it is yeah like if it was like a long skinny room they may get to the middle of it and go.

[34:30] Whoa where'd everybody go where the am i you know did i just run into the storage room yeah am i supposed to be here is this an actor area yeah it might work you see it could also work especially for individual runners because I think one of the major problems goes back to the pack mentality here but when you get a group of people who are running, God help us all, they tend to all push each other they do, sorry I'm just remembering the tornado of runners the ones that were pushing themselves in a circle throughout the haunts hitting every corner as they passed. Oh, God, I remember them too. That was before we had decent security cameras. I would love to share that one with y'all. Yeah.

[35:21] And the other problem is it's clearly not an efficient use of space. No. This is a lot of emptiness. Yeah, but if you have one of those areas that you don't know what to do with, like every haunt has that problem area. And we've talked to multiple places that have unless you've built from the ground up and planned every inch of it you're gonna have that area and you know which one i'm talking about it gives you headaches every year because you want to change it but you don't know what to do with it well here's another idea for it yeah uh yeah so it's a potential idea and perhaps my weirdest fear when I wrote these notes out was, if it does work, it may confuse people a little too much.

[36:10] Especially if that transition is really harsh. Like if you went from a swamp to a backroom scene. Yeah. Did I just walk into the actor area? Yeah, exactly. Is this the office? From the butcher scene to a completely clean office with no furniture. What you could do is, if you could transition in it a little better, save from like a supermarket scene or like a store scene to a back rooms. Yeah. That could work. But yeah, if it works properly, it's going to create a ton of confusion. And that, like I said, may make, that could create A, some throughput disasters.

[36:51] And it could also really hurt the customer experience some, especially if they have to find someone and they have to break character that, oh, you're on the right way, you know, type thing. Well, I think that's why you do build a startle into it, a from behind to flush them towards the exit. Always scared from behind.

[37:13] So, how to make this work? This was the part we had the most interesting conversations about. Because we tried to, like, if we were going to do this, how would we do it? And we ended up, like, much beer was consumed in this conversation. One is make the spaces look modern-ish. Yeah. But abandoned. If you go back to the original photos and to the other ones of the mean, they all look to be about 50, 60 years old. Yeah something like that um but also i think just making it really out of place for the rest of the haunt um some people aren't going to get it some people will um but i think that that is probably more important than making it look really modern yeah i don't think it has to look modern modern in fact i don't think it should because one of the reasons i think the back room's photo is so unsettling is nobody sees that color carpet or that wallpaper in the year of our lord 2025. Yeah so go back like a decade and see what was popular for decorating. Yeah or even go back for you know a little bit further if you want and basically find designs that look like they would have fit into an office a long time ago.

[38:30] It's a modern layout. By modern layout I mean you're going to have the the standard office walls and doors and things yeah i know what you would do you would put up cubicle walls put up the the cubicle walls then you've got an actor playground in there but it feels creepy and if you wait until the people get halfway through then you've got them in that gives them enough time to feel the feeling like they shouldn't be there, but a cubicle labyrinth yeah um combined with office style fluorescent lighting wallpaper, um and otherwise nothing else but the cubicle walls and i bet with the way work from home is and everything there are some places you can find cubicle walls on el cheapo right now oh yeah definitely because there's got to be places looking to get rid of fucking those because Even the places that are doing RTO are often transitioning to open office, which, fuck you, open office. Nobody likes you. Go away. No, that is a terrible idea. Nobody likes open office.

[39:41] My anxiety goes to $8 million just thinking about it. Yeah, I'm glad that I left the job I was at before they went and implemented that plan. Because that was the plan, was to have an open office. Including me, who was, you know, in charge of sensitive material all day, every day.

[40:04] Speaking of the back rooms, right? Well, we're on this topic. But, yeah. But, like I said, the main thing is to be almost completely empty and feature a lot of blind corners. One of the reasons I think your cubicle idea is amazing. I think that's excellent. Yeah. And I was actually thinking a lot, because one of the memories I have of those episodes was the taste and the smell. It's so weird. It was stale, dusty air. Yeah. You know what I mean? It felt wrong to breathe it. Because we're so used to either fresh outside air or very conditioned and coordinated inside air anything in between feels wrong and so i actually went on froggy's fog site to see if they had any scents that might bring it i do not know these scents these are just suggestions based upon the names but some of the ideas i came up with were mothball because that does feel about right mothballs have that grimy dusty smell thing it's hard to explain it is but mildew mildew i think is probably going to be the winner yeah yeah mildew and if they have a musty scent and that's why i put urine in there yeah because there's your musk i mean must.

[41:22] Um, yeah, I really think one of those three or a combination thereof could really get the scent down and make it feel. Now, obviously, you can't have this be overpowering. Right. Which is, so I would look deep into their smell delivery systems to make sure you don't do what some haunts do when they get their hands on Froggy's Fog and completely overload a scene with a smell. Yeah or you know put out your little container of it um way in advance yeah like a month in advance before opening so it has time to dissipate some yeah and especially if the air circulation isn't particularly good which it should not be for our back rooms right um yeah you're gonna want to give it a chance to oh yeah that would be a good little detail is to put the the old style.

[42:15] Vents the circular vents yeah up in the ceiling with little streamers hanging down not moving yeah oh yeah just just little prop vents yeah yeah that'd be cool too so yeah all in all i think this is an idea that really has some legs and the haunt industry could do but we've never seen it done in a haunt right we've not seen every haunt so if you do know a haunt that has done something like this once again please let us know what all the places we exist hauntweekly.com hauntweekly on facebook and youtube.com slash hauntweekly please drop us a line i would love to learn more about haunts playing with us and i would love to talk about it and talk to them perhaps yeah i think so i just had an idea i think the closest i've come to this sensation in a haunt is going through a school bus because it's a place you're not supposed to be walking, and you never know what's on the other side of the seat.

[43:13] It's that constant unease i think we actually kind of did this intentionally one year in our haunt it was one of the worst designs we ever had it was the hallway that went all the way from the entrance to the back but you went there was a beautiful set it was and the problem was i think we put too much in it to really get the illusion because we had the candelabras and the spiderweb, but if we had not had that stuff it would have been a very back roomsy feel because we had the house field we had the the paint that made it look like a house right it just felt like an abandoned hallway but we put too much stuff in it and it was a terrible design for a million other practical reasons namely the fact that people would hit that drop panel at the very end and run right into me standing outside and if you've ever seen anyone get a good spear in wrestling, i took quite a few that season yeah that was like year two yeah that was year two or three of this location and i think it was the first year we used the entirety of the garage exactly because we like yeah let's make our first stroke a big one and do a hallway that runs full 25 feet right down to the end no you don't do that no do not do that bad bad bad bad bad at least not at the The very beginning or the end.

[44:38] You will die! Exactly. All right. Well, on that note, everyone, thank you very much for joining us this week. This has been episode 479. I'm looking forward, by the way, to building on this. One of the reasons we're doing this episode now is we have a couple episodes, hopefully in the coming weeks, where we'll be building upon this. Thank you for joining us for the episode. Next week is episode 480. That's divisible at 4. It means it's time to do... The News. and we will see you all next week.