Several years ago I built a spider for the wall of the house...we live on the corner
and one side wall fronts the street..I tied rope to the roof at various points and to the
ground (using tent stakes) and weaved a quasi-spiderweb using thick rope. Then I made a
giant spider out of a piece of 2 foot long 1x4 for strength and a black plastic garbage
bag filled with crumpled newspapers. The legs were made of black pipe insulation with bent
coat hangers nailed to the wood to keep them pointed the right way. Even now, 5 or more
years later, people still talk about that spider!
That was fun for decoration leading up to Halloween but we wanted to do a mini-haunted house, something to make the kids "earn" their candy...haha... we dreamed up the idea of using the garage as a haunted house. At first I made a long "hallway" out of 20 foot long 2x4's laying on top of the garage door when it was up and sticking out down the driveway. To keep things cheap we bought some $2 black plastic rolls and stapled them to the boards and roof of the garage, holding the bottoms in place with bricks to form a "hallway" or "tunnel"...then more sheeting formed creepy walls in the garage itself, where we waited at the end, looking down the hall to watch in glee at the little kiddies trying to work up their courage to come in.
Over the years we enhanced things, bought a couple items each halloween to add to the atmosphere. We tried out different things, like I made a little Visual Basic program of giant red eyes that blinked and we set up the monitor where it was shrouded in gloom but the glowing red eyes could be seen..
I used fans set to oscilate to get hanging papers moving and tied strings to the fan letting the movement raise and lower spiders on strings, things like that...some worked, some didn't last to the next year.
When we finally gave up parking the cars in the garage, closed the door and started piling things into the garage I knew I wasn't going to be building the "hallway" any more, besides it was logistically difficult. I had to build the thing on the day of halloween since I couldn't leave the garage door open overnight. So we came up with the idea of using the side door into the garage..it meant we couldn't see the kids faces as they approached but made life a lot easier.
NEW! For a atmospheric
"Guided" Tour of the 1998 Haunted Garage, click here
This part is to describe what we did and why, with links to project pages. In 1997 we didn't feel very good so we didn't do much, so in 1998 I was determined to try and get something new, something really fun going... It got closer and closer to halloween and I was really busy but finally got going on painting the witches (see number 1) which I had been thinking about since the year before.
I also went up on the web and looked around to see what I could find for inspiration.. I remember a terrific description of a real-live haunted house put on by Richard Garriot (designer of the Ultima games) where he hired a team of 200 actors and engineers and electricians and spent $100,000 to make a wild house ...I found lots of pages with midi music and funky graphics, not what I was looking for and then I stumbled on some pages where the guys detailed their "experiments" and inventions to spook people...this is awsome stuff! and I highly recommend them...click here for a good list of projects. Anyway, they got me really stoked and eager to do a bunch of stuff but I was out of time, I did manage to get the "giant hand" built (see #5 below) and enhanced the "hallway" but I want to do so much more...
There isn't any pictures because I have some video I shot but don't have any way to move the video to the web, next year I'll shoot some pic's. Below is a partial map of our house and driveway with showing how I set things up for halloween. Each area of interest is numbered with description and how/why I did it..just use your imagination and hopefully you'll get a feel for how it all went together.
1. As you walk up the
driveway the sounds of a severe storm wash over you and you see a evil witch painted on a
2x4 foot sheet of plywood. The witch is pointing to the left, towards the entrance of the
whole thing.
Description: We always try to get people in the mood by playing a halloween cd out the bedroom windows fairly loud. Its plays one of those combination "songs" with wind and storm and howling and doors creaking, etc.
The witch was created because even though all else is dark we still had people come to the front door rather than around the side. I put a spotlight on the witch so it would be visible. It points towards the entrance. A simple painting, no glowing eyes or anything.
The other thing I noticed was that in the relative darkness of the evening, the strobe light (see number 2) bounced off the nearby houses and was an attention-getter.
The Long Hallway
2. Following around to the side you are confronted with a hideous face above you extorting you to "Come On In" and a spooky flashing hallway.
Description: At the point where our side yard has a gate there are a couple of 4x4 posts sunk into the concrete. This seemed a good spot to set up the "welcome".. I built a arch out of 1x4's nailed to the posts (the door was lashed in the open position) and a 1x4 across the top. On the top center I placed my custom welcome... it consists of a speaker, covered by a mask (with hole cut for the mouth) and pointing straight down is a strobe light. The speaker runs back to a stereo unit in the kitchen playing a custom-made tape. The tape has my voice (properly deepened and echoed) telling people to "Come on in, its only a little house of horrors" and laughing, etc. I recorded about 5 minutes and then dup'ed it over and over to fill in a 1 hour tape. The strobe is the only light for the hallway and lends a nice touch.
3. Down the black hall, disoriented by the strobe you go until another witch points the way into the "house"
Description: Purchasing cheap sheets of black plastic (about $2 for 100x10 ft) I draped it over the side fence and piece of wood behind the door to create a black menacing corridor. At the end, propped up was the mirror of the first painted witch, this one points right, into the side garage door.
Special Note: I was told many times that the mask/strobe and black corridor was the best part and the actual haunted house was not nearly so scary..There were plenty of kids that saw the strobe and hallway and wouldn't go in. The arch was just a simple affair, needed to hold up the mask/speaker but after the success, next year I want it to be much more impressive.
4. Inside, the black walls open up to reveal a skeleton, relaxing on the couch, almost ready to get up and join you.
Description: The garage was lined with black plastic sheet, stapled to the ceiling and with a few bricks on the bottom to keep it from billowing in a breeze. Since we couldn't fit an old couch behind the wall we decided to make it part of the show.. we sat a full sized skeleton on it.
5. Beneath the skeletal remains of a giants hand and inside the cauldron, distributed by a fearsome witch is the promised candy.
Description: Using the description of a giant hand made of sprinkler (PVC) pipe and expanding foam I found on the Internet, I made a 5 foot high "hand" and stuck it on a stand right behind where we sat to give out candy,the stand was made of PVC and it wasn't quite strong enough...but it ended up great as the hand kind of slowly waved back and forth on the pipe giving it a great movement . The candy itself was in a big plastic "cauldron" purchased from the store with white christmas lights up inside the lip and lighting up the interior. We sat on a chair, decked out in black/white facepaint and clothes to give the right impression.
6. On the table is a grisly corucopia of ghoulish delights, the shrunken headed sailor is lit by the grinning skulls.
Description: The Pool Table in the garage turned into "the table of all the little stuff we could think of", including the lighted statues, the plates of spaghetti with eyeballs in it, the brain jello mold, etc. It also had a full pirate costume with skeleton hands and feet, but we couldn't find a head so we ended up using a skull-shaped candle (about half size) and it worked great for a shrunken head.
7. The ghostly surfer waves goodbye as you complete your journey.
Description: The far wall seemed too boring, so we dug out the black light and found that a plastic skeleton (that we had most of) glowed really brightly in it, so we added the wetsuit to fill in the gaps, added a boogyboard that glows as well and some dead seaweed-like stuff and hung it all from the ceiling..it worked great and glowed quite brightly!