Haunt Weekly

Send us Fan Mail Last week we paid a visit to St. Louis, our first trip since the start of the pandemic. Though most of the trip was about family, we decided to take a day to visit the legendary City Museum. Though City Museum may not be a haunted attraction in and of itself, it has a lot in common with one. To that end, there's a lot that the museum gets right when it comes to being an attra...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're looking at a different Halloween tradition, trick-or-treating. Trick-or-Treating may seem like something that doesn't have a lot to do with haunting, but the truth is that it is where many young haunt lovers get their start, and it's a potential way to expand your audience and reach a younger crowd. So, whether you're a first-ti...

Send us Fan Mail Two episodes ago, we talked about event planning for haunts and harped on the importance of communication. Now we're exploring that topic more fully. So take a seat and let's discuss some ways that you can improve communication in your haunt, and ensure that everyone knows what they need to know. We will look at everything from communication with the core staff to your e...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're spending the Fourth of July with you (you can probably hear the fireworks in the background) and working hard to bring you the best and biggest stories in haunted attraction news. And it is a very busy news cycle this go around as we have one haunted prop builder pleading guilty to tax evasion, another haunt destroyed by a flood and new schola...

Send us Fan Mail Running a haunt is about more than building it and staffing. A haunt is an event, and it needs to be planned like it. But, while event planning is very much about setting up the best event possible, it's also about preparing for the worst and developing alternatives and backups for just about everything. So, that's what we're teaching this week, the rules and techni...

Send us Fan Mail It might seem unusual for a podcast named Haunt Weekly. After all, pretty much everyone who listens to this podcast has probably visited a haunt or 10,000. However, you know someone who has never gone and, if so, this episode is for them. Here, we take a look back at the dark times before we became haunters and talk about our first visit to haunts and the things we wish we knew be...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we're taking a look at outdoor haunts and the unique opportunities they have to make revenue from their property all year long. Whether you have an empty field, a wooded forest or something in between, there are ways that you can turn your haunt into a year-round source of income. Best of all, a lot of these approaches do NOT require a large investme...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we are doing the news, and it's a jam-packed news episode with haunts, opening, closing, being sold, being demolished and even a restaurant. Safe to say, this is not your typical early-summer news month, that much is for certain! This Week's Episode Includes:IntroHousekeeping NotesQuestion of the WeekWaco Haunted Houses up for Sale (https://www....

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we're talking about prop-based layout! What is prop-based layout? It's a way to save on lumber costs, give customers a more varied experience and create some new scares along the way. However, there are drawbacks and concerns with a prop-based layout so we're going to, well, lay it all out for you in this episode of Haunt Weekly. The good,...

Send us Fan Mail The prices of lumber are insane and keep getting worse. This is forcing many haunts, especially those with lower budgets, to start rethinking their build. For those haunts, we are here to help. We've got six different build types that can help you reduce the amount of lumber you need, save you money and give customers a truly unique experience. However, there's no such t...

Send us Fan Mail Dealing with the press can seem like one of the most daunting tasks for haunters. However, it doesn't have to be. With a little effort and some planning, you can get excellent media coverage for your haunt... for free...The idea of dealing with the media can feel daunting to many haunters, especially newcomers. However, there's really nothing to be afraid of and getting...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly it's time to do the news and we have a lot for you. From haunts shutting down, haunts helping with tragedies and haunts opening new attractions, this has been an amazingly active spring for the industry. Learn more about how Easter State Penn is rebounding from the pandemic, changes for Disney's upcoming Halloween celebrations and much, much mor...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we're sitting down with Alex Berland from Conjured Media (https://conjured.media/) to discuss haunt marketing and ways to supercharge it through storytelling. Conjured Media is a full-service marketing firm that works with haunted attractions to not just build campaigns, but great backstories and experiences. Alex is here to talk about his experience...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we're talking straight to new haunters and offering some of our best tips, tricks and hints from 20 years of haunting and 15 years of running a haunt. Many of the tips in this episode are from past episodes and many more are from reader suggestions. So thank you all that sent in some great ideas that we got to include. So, whether you're a new h...

Send us Fan Mail Launching a pro haunt is an incredible amount of work. There's all the usual challenges of starting a business plus issues of financing, staffing, building, decorating, marketing and much, much more. But what if I said there were ways that you could ease the transition from home to pro haunter? What if there were some roads less traveleled, that might help you get on your fee...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we're doing the news and covering all the haunted attraction news that's fit to print, or talk about, from the last four weeks. To that end, it's been a surprisingly busy month for haunted attraction and adjacent news. We have an update on the shooting at Erebus, news about COVID spikes following Halloween and much, much more. So, sit back...

Send us Fan Mail You've seen the memes, you've laughed at the jokes, you've ouched at the prices. There's a crisis in the world of lumber and it is starting to hurt haunts badly. We're going to take a deep dive into that crisis as we find out what is causing it, when it will likely end and what, if anything, you can do about it right now. So, buckle up as we're going...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're talking about conferences. As the world starts to open up from Coronavirus-forced lockdowns, that means new haunted attraction conferences, such as Transworld in May. So we're sitting down with Japes Palles to discuss haunted attraction conventions, what newcomers can expect and what rules one should abide by while on the tradeshow floors...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we're looking at that sinking feeling we all get when looking at something that's human-ish, but clearly not human. That's right, we're talking about the uncanny valley and all the ways it can add a little unease to your haunt. We're going to explore how it works, why it is so effective and ways that you can exploit it. So sit bac...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we're doing the news and, much to our surprise, it's a VERY busy month for haunted attraction news. We have a haunt owner that was charged with child sex crimes, a police department being sued over an incident at a haunted house and, yes, the latest news from Halloween Horror NightsWe also have an update on our new store (plus lots of new items...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we're having to shift plans. We had wanted to talk about a topic but it turns out that, not only had we done it, we did it a year ago and with most of the same points. So, the new point that was added we decided to expand into a new episode and take a look at the future of escape rooms. Escape rooms, obviously, have had it rough during the pandemic....

Send us Fan Mail To many, haunting is just a silly hobby. To others, haunting is a business. However, very few people make the argument that haunting is important in a societal way. The argument is pretty straightforward: Art is important. Haunting is an art. Therefore haunting is important. However, haunting has ways that it is important beyond any other kind of art. So sit back as we explore thi...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we're taking another look back at episode 77 (https://www.hauntweekly.com/77) where we talked about the possibility of crowdfunding your haunted attraction. However, crowdfunding was in a dark place then and our discussion about it came across as excessively negative. So, we wanted another crack at this topic where we could talk about the successes a...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we're finally getting caught up on the news. Fortunately, it's been a bit quiet these past few months. With so many other things dominating the news, haunted attractions haven't exactly been making headlines. That said, we still have a lot of haunt-related news to go through plus some things you as a haunter definitely need to be aware of....

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly we're finishing up our (current) interview run by sitting down the Teddy and Jared from the Code Yellow Podcast (https://www.codeyellow.info/).In this interview we first and foremost learn more about htem and their podcast(s) as well as their haunting history. But from there we dive into the themes of the past few episodes as we talk about building a...