RF Haunt: Raymond's Halloween Website

Haunts: 2003

Planning and Set-up:
Pulling It Together

I drove home late Thursday night so I would have all day on Friday to set up the haunt. I encountered the most trouble when I went to set up the projection ghosts. For one thing, I had decided to string a mosquito net across the back of the cemetery to serve as a translucent screen onto which I could project the ghosts, and that proved to be much more difficult than I had anticipated. The netting was too small to cover as large of an area as I wanted, and it's irregular shape made it even more difficult to stretch to a wide enough area.

After I had set up the net screen, I spent a good deal of time experimenting with and positioning my mirror ball and projector so that I could have projected ghosts flying across the cemetery. It was not until after I had everything set and ready that I plugged it in and discovered that the mirror ball would no longer rotate. Since Radio Shack apparently stopped selling rotating motors that would work for a mirror ball, and I didn't have time to shop around at that point, I was forced to replace my projection ghost effect with a still projected image. Bringing out a small outdoor holiday projector I have, I settled on an image of a moon and bats to accent the cemetery.

The other main difficulty was in putting together the fanimatronic grim reaper. My initial idea to construct the body was to stack boxes under a robe and set the head on top. This turned out to be more difficult than it seemed. I had a lot of trouble in finding boxes that would work, but after some hunting through the garage, I was finally able to find two boxes and a small trashcan that I could stack to about a person's height. Since the odd shape of the boxes prevented me from using any ghoul costume or robe, I grabbed some black fabric and simply wrapped it around the boxes.

After placing the head on top, I had what appeared to be a very convincing replication of a stack of boxes wrapped in black fabric with a ghoul mask on top. Something needed to be done to make my grim reaper look more like a human and less like the contents of a storage closet.

I found a large collar from a sorceress costume and added that to partially hide the extreme square shoulders, but there was still something missing. I needed to somehow define arms and bring the fabric out away from the boxes. To do this, I found a two by two beam of wood about four feet high. I duct taped that up against the boxes and wrapped the fabric over it so that my ghoul appeared to have his arm extended across his chest. The result was a convincing animated ghoul that would greet guests at the gate.

The rest of the set-up went relatively smoothly. My mom came up with the idea to dress up one of her mannequins as a gypsy and set up a fortune teller scene on the front patio. The billowing ghost went up without much trouble. And I ended up simply closing the curtains on the window looking into the living room and putting a fan and strobe light behind there to add some movement. After setting up the lighting, we added the torches over the gate, put a dead tree in the cemetery, and added some other last-minute touches, and we were ready for trick-or-treators.