This weekend we celebrated my niece's wedding and so I saw a lot of the young adults who were my spook house guests twenty plus year's ago. The first spook house I remember hosting featured the "Great Pumpkin". The children were young and we did not not want to scare them so we made the pumpkin about six feet in diameter and it was hung on a plastic sheet that billowed from the fan behind it. We had an audio track of Halloween sound effects and the children reached into the mouth of The Great Pumpkin to get their treat. These four year olds were not impressed and I determined to do better next year.
I read an article on the Disney Imagineers that design rides in the amusement parks. They determined that you have to fool two or three of our senses to make a ride scarey.
I found a rubber finger puppet that we called the Ogre. We designed an entrance to the Ogre's Cave featuring his picture on the front. If you were small enough you could crawl into his cave which was about thirty inches tall and wide. It was carpeted for crawling and had spider webs stretched from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. The cave floor inclined at the entrance and pivoted on a fulcrum like a see saw. The cave had a wonderful creek and groan accidently designed into its construction that added to the spooky sounds. As the floor of the cave started to teeeter downward from the weight of the spelunker inside, an arm coverd in a sock with the Ogre finger puppet shot through a hole in the wall of the cave and startled the victim. This caused the little one to crawl out rapidly and at the end of the cave received their candy.
There was also a giant spider that must have weighed forty pounds that had garden hose legs and a chicken wire and paper mache body. He could be lowered down on a rope and was large enough to be quite startling.
This combination had a much more satisfactory mix of fun and fright. After a year or two I was asked to help with the school halloween spook house. This was much more organized and there was a very talented group of Mom's that ran the spook house and played the characters. We took over the ballet building each year and spent a day of vacation getting everything ready and another day running the show.
When you entered the building there were three rubber skeletons hanging like marionettes. Using pulleys they rushed across the room just above your head. As you entered the next room there were various tombstones and coffins with scary people. The featured attraction was the "Magic Mirror". Using lights dimmed with a rheostat and reflective coated glass the mirror reflected the faces of the school children while the Snow White soundtrack asked who the fairest of them all was. As you peered into your reflection the lights brightened and dimmed appropriately and a horrible old witch on the other side of the mirror screeched at the top of her lungs. Some of the Moms deserved an Academy Award for their performance.
We had great fun doing this for several years and added a few more props each year. Eventually everything was donated to the school for the next generation of spook masters.
Halloween is still a lot of fun and Harris will celebrate his first Halloween as a giraffe this year. We had all the fun today snapping his picture on the pumpkin truck while his parents moved furniture into their house from storage.
When we returned to Houston we celebrated Champ's sixth birthday. He was born the day before Halloween in a National Championship year. That was his treat. This year the Longhorns have tricked him although maybe not as bad as the fright from last year.
