I can’t believe Hallowe’en is just a couple of months away.

We just finished a huge marathon build over the last 6 months, for Midsummer Scream. I feel like it almost killed me.

But it was worth it in the end. To hear all of the “Oh my God!”s and “Holy Crap!”s was worth it.

We had some major issues but I’ve come to learn to stop using the word “failure” to describe our Midsummer Scream haunt – It was no where near a failure… just not what we’d expected.

Anyway, now Halloween is 77 days away. We’ve got a LOT of work to do. The backyard looks like a tornado hit, and we are just now recovered from MSS.

Then there’s the unexpected expectations we set at Midsummer Scream. We weren’t planning on doing the great big huge room we have now lovingly named “the Rotunda” – at Hallowe’en because it won’t fit in the backyard. When we designed that part of our Midsummer Scream haunt, we hadn’t really thought about how that would be such a big surprise to guests, and it set some high expectations for people who visit us on Halloween. Every group that went through our MSS haunt were super-impressed by that room. Now we have to fit it in somewhere. We’re actually discussing temporarily removing part of our house to fit it in the backyard. Heh, I think we might actually lost our minds this year.

One of the challenges of haunting our backyard is it’s very abstract in both shape and elevation. We have terraces and rock walls to build around. I had a good idea of how we were going to haunt it when we bought the house, (I specificially evaluated the homes we looked at for “hauntability”.) but we totally blew that up when we designed our MSS haunt.

This will be the first year in the new house that we have an actual haunt. I’m writing to all the neighbors to gently warn them of our plans. We have never had any issues with neighbors where we lived before, but I’m nervous in the new neighborhood. We are on really good terms with all the neighbors so far. I hope to keep it that way. I’m hoping that giving them prior warning, describing the situation and letting them know it’s for charity will instill some goodwill in it, and even get them involved. But I’m still nervous.

We’re also doing 6 nights this year, which is also a big change. Because of Halloween falling on a Thursday it is difficult to schedule a good clean “Weekends only” thing.
Despite our challenges, I’m excited, and as my husband said last night “You’ll pull it off.  You always do.”

For information on our haunt, visit www.GothicHillsCemetery.com