Haunt Weekly

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're talking about holiday lore again, and we're turning our attention to Santa's reindeer. Sure, the lore about the fat man is interesting, but we've done that already. So now we're discussing how the reindeer first came to be and how they got their names. Along the way, we'll discuss a naming dead end (thankfully) and the...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're doing the news. A lot has happened in the industry this past month as we mourn the loss of a member of our community, find more problematic haunts and some haunts that were especially charitable this season. And, for a bit of levity, we discuss some of the biggest escape room disasters and much, much more.  This Week's Episode Includes: 1...

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 Playlist Our 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 While it is true that most of your haunt's visitors will be from the local area, there will always be some who come from far afield. However, those customers often have different needs from your local customers. As such, there are some considerations you may want to make to entice them. The good news is that, almost any improvement you make for out of town visitors will also...

Send us Fan Mail First off, a big thank you to everyone for your patience with me as I recover. I'm not 100%, but I'm well enough to do this, so thank you all for your patience! This week on Haunt Weekly, we did a non-haunty thing. Namely, we helped Elli open a yarn store.  Fortunately, we were well-prepared for much of it. Running a haunted house helped us immensely as it gave us experi...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're covering all the news from the previous haunt season. We're playing catch up as we cover the past eight weeks in haunted attraction. Fortunately, this was a relatively incident-free season, very different from 2020 and 2021. Still, there is a LOT of news to go over, so here's a look at all the news that's fit to talk about. This...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we are looking into the future as we discuss the things that we are going to change next haunt season. Our 2022 season was great. It was our first time open since 2018 and it went amazingly well. However, every year is a learning experience and this one is no different. So what lessons did we learn? That's what this episode is all about. So stay tun...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we are continuing our look back on the 2022 season and, specifically, the things that worked. This was our first full year back since 2018. So, for us, it was also a year to try a LOT of new things. Some of it worked well, some of it less so. So we're focusing on the wins this week and looking at seven things that were new this year that we are defi...

Send us Fan Mail The 2022 haunt season in the books. After three years of forced closure, we were finally able to open our doors again and, with a largely new crew, bring Halloween back to our area. It was a wild season with several ups and downs. While it wasn't our busiest ever, we definitely enjoyed being back in the full swing of things.  So, what you get in this episode is two exhausted...

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 wil...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, haunt season continues! For us, that means doing a lot of work in our home haunt, which we have some great updates on, and getting a few more haunt visits. This week, we first crossed the river to hit up The Mortuary and then headed west to visit Decomposed Haunted House and Haunting on DA Bayou. These are three very different haunts in just about every...

Send us Fan Mail  This week on Haunt Weekly, we are heading to Mobile, Alabama to visit the area's haunted houses. On that trip, we hit up five haunts along the gulf coast. This is after we visit the 13th Gate in Baton Rogue AND discuss a haunt we forgot to talk about last week. So strap yourself in for one of the longest episodes of Haunt Weekly as we talk about 6 and a half different attrac...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're discussing the progress we made on our haunt, our first regular haunt visit in three years and, best of all, YOUR advice for new haunters. Not sold yet? This episode includes a lengthy rant on holiday lights and the problem of finding the correct part in a pandemic-induced shortage. That should get butts in seats. If not, well, here's wha...

Send us Fan Mail No views  Sep 26, 2022  This week on Haunt Weekly we're doing the news, and, I hate to say it, but it's kind of a heavy one. We have updates on two previous shootings, a potential new one and another haunt owner arrested for sexual assault. As positive as we try to be about the haunt industry, much of this one is going to be a downer. However, we do have some more upbeat...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're reaching out to the new actors, the people who are just starting their first haunt season. For us, it's been over 20 years since we were those fresh-faced youths, but there is a lot we learned in that time. To that end, we're going to break down nine things that we wished we knew when we started. This Week's Episode Includes: 1....

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're talking marketing! Specifically, we are talking about our 2022 marketing plan. As many of you know, we've been closed forcefully since 2018. First it was a road closure and then two years of COVID. Now that we're coming back, that's the message we need to get across. So, how are we going to do that? That's especially diffic...

Send us Fan Mail Preservation is not a topic that haunters talk about a great deal. We talk about building, tearing down, scaring everything that goes into them, but rarely do we think about how future generations will share in this experience. The truth is, haunts are temporary things, and much of what makes them special is impossible to preserve. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't...

Send us Fan Mail Note: Though we waxed poetic about our love for the Lost Souls Haunted Bus tour, we have to caution that they SOLD OUT of tickets before we published. So please follow them and stay tuned for next year! This week on Haunt Weekly, it is time to do the news! And we are inching ever closer to haunt season that means we have a LOT of great news stories for you including some innovate...

Send us Fan Mail It's ticket buying season for us haunt lovers, and that means a myriad of things. It means spending hundreds of dollars, it means scoping out the best deals possible, and it means realizing the ways haunts put the screws to their customers. However, much of this is, most likely, unintentional. It stems less from a desire to put one over the customers and more of a desire of n...

Send us Fan Mail The 2022 haunt season is coming on strong. Haunts are already announcing their dates, builds are wrapping up, and it's getting very close to spooky time. For us, this will be our first normal haunt season since 2018. Cancelled in 2019 due to road work and then again in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID, it'll be our first open season in four years.  However, it will also be our...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're pulling out our magic lamp, blowing on a dandelion and tossing a coin into a fountain as we're going on a wishing spree. We love the haunted attraction industry, but we think it is capable of so much more. However, to get to that point, some major things are going to have to change and that is where our wishes come in. So, this episode we...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly it is time to do the news and boy do we have a lot of news to cover! We have an urgent plea from one of the nation's oldest Jaycee organizations, another major charity haunt closes, Fear Farm moving and Spookers having new owners. In short, it's a month of big changes in the haunt industry, and we are here to cover all the shifts and alterations...

Send us Fan Mail Haunts put a lot of thought and effort into marketing and trying to build a brand, but far too often sabotage it with unforced errors and simple mistakes.  You work hard to make sure your customers think highly of you and want to come back year after year. However, one small misstep can damage or even wreck all of that goodwill. So, it's not enough to have a good brand strate...

Send us Fan Mail Due to COVID, this week's episode is a redux episode, but it's an important one as we revisit when we sat down with Paul Lanner in January 2021 to discuss Haunters Against Hate.  ----- 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...

Send us Fan Mail This past weekend was Haunters Against Hate: The Event in Lexington, KY.  This is the second year for this particular conference that focuses on eliminating hatred in the haunt community and supporting members of the community that are often targeted by prejudice.  The conference itself was three days of vendors, talks, drag shows, goatmosas, and much, much more. We break it all d...