We hung up black plastic bags from the door to room two and made a dark hallway. (In the future, I think we'll use black plastic tablecloth or some black plastic sheeting from the hardware store...) My husband painted glowing hand prints on the walls. We had our ground fogger in there and a black light. At the end, I made a glowing spiderweb from glow-in-the-dark yarn. From there, they passed through a "streamer room", which my husband and I put up-- and boy did it take FOREVER because I wanted it thick so you couldn't see through the streamers into the next room. It took two 500-ft rolls of streamers! I even put in some glow-in-the-dark yarn here and there so it glowed mysteriously.
My favourite room (also where my husband and I were), was the room with Brad, our cadaver. My husband really got into the whole acting bit. He would be pretending to be engaged in something scientifically fascinating. People would come unsuspecting out of the streamers, and he'd stop and go "Ahhh!" (in a deep, evil-scientist way) as if you'd just startled him by bursting into his lab. A lot of people jumped! Then, he'd say, "Wait! Wait!"... as he dug through Brad's chest to pull out candy-- yeah, well... it was a bit novel to hand out candy IN the haunted house. Then he'd say, "Take it. Take it and run!!!" ... and I'd stuff a glow bracelet into their hands if they weren't too petrified to take it.
From there, people would wind through a zig-zagging hallway (which got ripped up because people would cut corners short) and the last thing they saw was a silhouette of someone having their guts pulled out.
Overall, it was grand fun. My husband almost lost his voice... and we got upset with people coming through prior to the haunt opening... and all the kids helping out with the house walking through and fooling around (though I expected that). The saddest part was that what took hours and hours to set up only took about 20 minutes to take down. Heh.
After the spooky house wound down, we all went to do some "trunk-or-treat". I'm not entirely a big fan of that because kids go round and round with their bags, but we got over there late because we were shutting power and things off around the haunted house. By the time we got to the "trunk", there weren't so many kids. I was dumping bracelets, hair clips, squirt guns, kazoos, play-doh, and chocolate into bags. At one point, 3 girls were walking by. I called out, "Stop! I'm a doctor," while pointing to my badge before finishing the thought with, "you all need squirt guns!" They happily obliged me by taking one each. It was pretty funny. I also got people to roll windows down as they were driving out and traffic had stopped. I'd hand over handfuls of chocolate and things. It was pretty fun.
... and then we went to get my pumpkin, which had WON! I was so surprised! So we won movie tickets AND we got a gift card to Chili's for helping with the haunted house! I'm so super-happy!
When the festivities had died down, we went back to the house and took it all down. My brother-in-law let us use the back of his truck to put things in, so we don't have to go back to clean up the place! Yay!! AND... we even got a REAL saline IV bag plus drip chamber! Eeee!
I love Halloween. It's like Christmas in that it's so fun to see the smiles on the kids' faces when you hand out a "present".
Captions are above photos!
Front of the old adobe where we hosted the Spooky House
The Spooky House's second room
The glow-in-the-dark spiderweb I made.
My husband in front of the fog machine (while taking things down)
These next two photos make me laugh... but they're my husband acting like a Mad Scientist!
This is awesome! I wish I was there!