Haunt Weekly

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're tackling yet another difficult subject: Bullying. Bullying is a subject that has touched many haunters personally and it's also not an issue that magically goes away once someone hits a certain age. Fortunately, there's a great charity named Don't Be a Monster (https://www.dontbeamonster.org) that has been taking a powerful mess...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're looking at virtual events and haunting. This includes why you might want to host virtual events and how you can do it successfully. Though we've talked about this in the past now it's time to get down to brass tacks. We discuss the reasons for such events, the tools you need to make it happen and the pitfalls you need to watch out fo...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we sit down with Paul Lanner, the founder and operator of Haunters Against Hate. Haunters Against Hate is a charity that promotes LGBTQ+ inclusion and acceptance within the haunt community. As events over recent years have illustrated, the haunt community has work and effort to put into this space. To that end, Haunters Against Hate has been raising mone...

Send us Fan Mail Building a haunt community is tough. Building a haunt community that is supportive, inclusive and productive is even more difficult. To help us understand the whys and hows of building a community, we're bringing on an expert: Patrick O'Keefe Patrick is a leading expert is community administration and management. He hosts the podcast Community Signal (https://www.communi...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we’re looking at the issue of simulated violence in haunted houses and discussing what boundaries should be set and what is best for your haunt and your customers. There’s not much doubt that most haunts contain at least some implied violence. Severed limbs, dead bodies, gruesome injuries, etc. However, most of those injuries happen away from the custome...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we're doing the news and, after one of the busiest seasons of all time, it's actually kind of nice to have a quieter news episode for the first time in nearly a year. However, that's not to say there isn't a lot going on. We have news that Erebus is up for sale as well as an update on one of this season's shootings. It's stil...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we're setting aside the haunt talk and tackling something much more important: Tearing down Santa Claus. So sit back and relax while we drop all the reasons that Santa Claus is evil and his myth is likely doing more harm than good. It's a bit of a rough ride I admit, but a very important one to go on. This Week's Episode Includes: IntroQues...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're doing interview time as we sit down with Donnie Hoover and "Meathook" Jim Millspaugh of Wrestlehorror to talk about the intersection between wrestling and haunted attractions. This interview covers a wide range of topics including what haunters can learn from wrestling, the overlap between wrestling and haunt acting and why haunters...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're not actually talking much about haunted houses and instead are looking at one of our holiday traditions: The Anti-Christmas PlaylistOur Anti-Christmas playlist is a (nearly) 20-year tradition that started on burned CDs for our car and has grown to a mammoth YouTube playlist with over 80 tracks and 4 hours of music. For the first time ever, we&...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we are doing the news! It has been a particularly busy four weeks for haunted attractions as we have the conclusion of the 2020 season, easily the weirdest haunt season ever, and get to talk about some of the aftermath of it. So, with that in mind, sit back, relax and let us tell all about what is going on in the haunt industry. This week's Episode I...

Send us Fan Mail With the 2020 haunt season coming to a close haunts everywhere are shutting down, evaluating how the season went and starting planning for the new year. But, while a LOT happens in the off-season for haunts one key thing does: Earning money. For most haunts, not being opens means no money at all coming in. However, that doesn't make any sense. Sure, haunt season is only 4-8 w...

Send us Fan Mail To say 2020 was an unprecedented season is a cliche at this point, but it is also a grand truth. That said, getting through tough times can carry with it lessons for the better times and that's what we're on a mission to find. The question is simple, what lessons from 2020 can haunts take with them to 2021 and beyond? It turns out there's a lot and we're going...

Send us Fan Mail This year's Halloween was never going to be an ordinary one. We had already canceled our haunt due to COVID-19 and city regulations but had hoped for a spirited night of trick or treating and socially-distanced festivities. Then, Hurricane Zeta hit the city. Instead of the anticipated mild tropical storm or modest hurricane, we got a solid category two with little time to pre...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly it's time to do the news. That means we get to bring the most unusual haunt season ever to a close by covering the last four weeks of news stories. However, it's been kind of a rough four weeks, setting aside the myriad of fluff pieces about COVID precautions taken by haunts, we have three shootings to talk about, several injuries and several ha...

Send us Fan Mail The headless horseman is one of the most iconic images of both Halloween and haunting. His namesake haunt is one of the best known in the country and his tale is many a child's first introduction into spooky stories. But where did this legend come from and how much truth is there to it? Also, are there other headless horsemen around the world? These questions and more will be...

Send us Fan Mail Previously on Haunt Weekly, we asked you all for your favorite lighting tricks. Many of you, somewhat to our surprise, said Pepper's Ghost. However, through sheer good fortune, Mental Floss Magazine published an article about the history of the illusion (https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/631857/peppers-ghost-optical-illusion-the-toast-of-victorian-london) and it turns out t...

Send us Fan Mail To put it mildly, 2020 has been a rough year and the haunt industry is no different. We're all struggling mentally, physically and financially. However, as haunt season 2020 kicks off, the signs have not been good. Despite well-written COVID plans and what appears to be good intentions, the haunt industry is beset by crushing queue lines, multiple shootings and haunts being f...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we are doing the news and wow do we have a doozy for you this week. COVID news, three shootings at haunts and we aren't even into October! This will clearly be a season like no other and the only episode likely to beat it will be the next news episode in four weeks. So, with that in mind, buckle up and get ready as this is one long and, at times, dif...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we are expanding on a previous question of the week to look at things that haunters wish customers knew. Though the haunt industry has opened up a lot in recent decades, there's still a lot of things that we keep close to the vest. Unfortunately, keeping some of that from customers may actually be hurting us by making the experience worse for them an...

Send us Fan Mail Last month, the TV sitcom Tacoma FD featured an episode where the firefighters respond to a fire alarm at a haunted attraction. That makes it one of the few times pop culture has looked at the relationship between haunts and fire safety. As such, we decided it was worth taking a look to see how well the show represented the industry and how accurate its portrayal is. Needless to s...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're continuing our women in haunting series as we sit down with Amanda Reevenge, a 12-year veteran of the industry that has worked at a variety of haunts as a roaming actor. This interview covers a wide variety of topics including her experiences as a woman in the industry, bullying in haunted houses and ways to make the industry more professional...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we're doing the news and, unfortunately, that means covering a lot of COVID-19 related things including limited haunt openings, closings and more things in between. But that's not all we have this week, we also have a spate of new drive-thru haunts, haunts that are taking a different approach and a lot of other news from the haunt industry. So b...

Send us Fan Mail As bad as COVID-19 has been for haunts, it's been similarly bad for our sister industry: Escape rooms. However, many escape games have taken a different tact, launching virtual experiences that come in a wide variety of flavors. These include everything from simply playing existing escape rooms with a totem to new experiences that were built from the ground up to be virtual....

Send us Fan Mail If you're a haunt in need of a good backstory, we have just the episode for you! Fairy tales have a reputation of being kid-friendly and sanitized but, if you go back to their roots, they are nothing of the like. Filled with gore and violence, fairy tales were scary stories before we had scary stories. So this week we're taking a look at some of the most popular fairy ta...

Send us Fan Mail Last year was a very rough year for us. Due to some serious road work taking place, we were forced to cancel our 2019 season. Now, due to COVID-19, many haunts are finding that their 2020 season is hanging into balance. However, if you do have to cancel your season, it's important to cancel it right. A bad cancellation can make it impossible to recover. A good one can let you...