Episode 93-Planning Halloween 25

Music. I'm trying to think of the fact that I can't believe I remembered that halfway through. That's the first time it's actually worked.

I was just willing to let it go. But we need Leslie Reed. And I'm Leslie Reed. Welcome, everyone, back to the Haunting You podcast. We are so excited to have you here. Happy, what holiday is this? Happy St. Patrick's Day. Patrick's Day. Yeah. By the time this actually gets out, it's going to be way past St. Patrick's Day. But it's the day that we're recording.

It will be April Fool's. It will be April Fool's, probably. but it's the day that we're recording and so i had to take a moment to acknowledge the fact that i am over here drinking irish whiskey in hot cocoa and it is wonderful i don't actually have any knitting here's to the irish that's tragic.

Sorry less yeah i have lots of other things i'm sure you'll find something to keep yourself busy whilst we continue on but we are very excited to have you back with us again here on the haunting podcast i have internet leslie does have internet holy crap we it's a little backstory we tried to record this episode a month ago not quite three weeks ago something like that and like an hour into it we're just getting into the meat of discussion and leslie just vanishes completely

freaking vanishes and john and i are super confused until she texts out of the people who vanish it's not usually me it is not usually less it's normally john john we expect to vanish he has a small child like that's it's it's par for the course right but leslie is relatively reliable unless one of her puppies crawls underneath the desk and dislodges her wi-fi which does happen which does happen which does has happened it does happen but she usually comes back pretty quickly this time

she did not come back pretty quickly and it wasn't until we got to text sometime later that your wi-fi. Just up and failed out of nowhere was it the card or was it your router no so i have a very very old desktop that does not have internal wi-fi and she has a much better like camera than i do well yeah because i have a i bought one oh she got fancy i have fancy things she has fancy things and essentially because of all of the times that The puppy comes in and knocks my internet out.

The dongle finally gave up the ghost and didn't want to keep working. Yeah. So she just absolutely freaking vanished. And it kind of derailed the conversation. Because let's be honest, when John and I have a professional conversation, it just does not work nearly as well as when Leslie is involved. Because, well, it's John. Well, yeah. You pair any of the two of us as opposed to the three of us, you're going to get a very, very different dynamic. It's a very different dynamic.

Absolutely. It is an incredibly different dynamic. And I'm not saying John has nothing to contribute because he has plenty to contribute. Theft. No theft. No. Theft wasn't really helpful for the conversation that we were having. No, not so much. John, do you want to say anything in your defense? John, do you have a defense? I don't think he does, because he's trying to cook dinner as we're doing this. So, like, his hands are occupied, probably messy, and he really can't reach

the mute button on his phone. So we can really say what we want with impunity. And there's nothing he can do about it for the next few minutes. You monsters! Katie, put it. In my defense, I don't have that much to contribute. If we have already ruled that out of the conversation, then what is the point of me?

Shenanigans. shenanigans and keeping the two of us from being way way way too technical and boring yes yes we we need you to keep us like grounded otherwise you need to keep us entertaining yeah when it's just me and less we are way less entertaining way more technical and i hope some people find value in that but we want to be entertaining too so that's really what you bring to this conversation, John. It's a puppy. We're not thefting the puppy. No.

I just want to be clear on that, John. No, I'm saying maybe it would add to the entertainment value and you have to steal stuff. I stole your heart. That happened a while ago. It did happen a while ago. Another puppy. We have both the puppies. Yes. Mucho puppy. Plural. No, mucho puppies. Muchos. Muchos puppies. Mucho caros. Bueno. Your Spanish is working. Dos cervezas, por favor. Tortuga. Thank you for that. Tengo una tortuga. Sí. Se llama Jackie. Una tortuga. Sí. La Tortuga es 24 años.

¿Es así? ¿Es así? ¿Es así? Está bien. There you go. You get some Spanish. Sí, I remember a little bit. I remember, like, legitimately, I remember enough Spanish to, like, haggle at the flea market. And that's about the extent of my... How about it? Mine's improving. Haggle at the flea market and order beer. Yeah, mine's improving, but in very, very specific ways. because our landscape, our daily ops meetings for my, for my job. Oh yeah.

Cause you're working for a landscape company, which I can only imagine employs a number of Hispanic. They do. And I love it because in addition to the guys just being awesome. All of our management does all of our meetings bilingually. Oh, nice.

You're getting, you're getting all kind of exposure. I get every day at very minimum once a day, i get to listen to meaning in english and in spanish which is awesome that's actually really awesome that's pretty cool i like that yeah but that is not what we are here to talk about we are here to talk about halloween things and it's march 17th we already mentioned saint patrick's day and we have not actually succeeded yet in having a plan for 2025 type discussion and so i'll be honest,

I'm freaking out a little bit because at this point, I have plenty of goals, plenty of ideas, and I need help like consolidate and eternal. And I need help consolidating all of that into a solid plan that we can execute for 2025. So that's really what I want to try to accomplish today to try to come up with a plan for 2025 that we can then take forward and begin to execute, start the building, start the layout, all of the things that we need to do to make that happen.

And I need to get working on that now because it's freaking March 17th. And oh my God, John, I'm running out of time. Why, oh my God, John. Because Leslie's talking to her husband and she's on mute. I'm not convinced she's listening to us at this particular moment. So, oh my God, John. How dare you? We had a good discussion last time. There were some valid ideas. Now, I don't remember any of them.

That's the problem. That part makes it hard. That's actually where I kind of want to start this discussion, where we left off on our previous discussion. Because we were we were kind of at a crossroads where there are two different directions that we could potentially go for 2025 and we need to pick one we need to we are at this crossroad and we need to turn left or right and then commit to it and we we cannot continue standing at this crossroad or I am going to freak out.

I'm already breaking out. How can we import Jack? I think the first question is after our discussion, I think it's pretty clear. The first thing is how do we incorporate Jack into the haunt? Well, I think we could probably have a...

So I had this idea where we like take the haunt and wrap it around the house rather than, set up the same way we did last year, but rather than exiting through the yard in the front of the house, we take it around the back where the forest is and where we have the pond. And I want to put a corpse fountain in the pond. Terrifying question. We could have Jackie in the pond with the corpse fountain. Yes, Leslie? I mean, I don't know. I feel like she could be a more central piece.

Or fountain that is spewing out corpse pieces. That's a completely fair question. I'm picturing like a corpse skeleton on a stake in the middle of the fountain with blood gushing up out of it. Blood fountain through a corpse. Okay. Kind of like the idea of a fountain that's spewing out corpse bits. I do. That's fair. I think it would be hard to get that across. You said spewing up out of it? Spewing up out of it, yes. Then I should remind you of the temperament of your

tortoise. She would not approve of that. She probably would not approve of that. She would not like being shot up into the air. Plus, she is a tortoise, not a turtle. She probably wouldn't enjoy the... That wet? The being that wet. She generally does not enjoy being that wet. No. So when I give her a bath, she is not pleased. So keep that in mind. Yeah, I will. I will keep that in mind.

But yeah, so like we are at this crossroads and we really need to pick our direction and then charge forward because frankly, we're running out of time and we're always running out of time. But here we are.

I believe you were talking about like partnering with some places. we were in fact talking about partner because i so i have built a relationship with a local arcade it started when the it actually started with a post for on haunters hangout where a company just posted hey is there anyone handy in the vicinity of waldorf maryland that could help us out And I was intrigued because I am handy and Waldorf, Maryland is like 30 minutes away from me,

45 minutes away from me. So I was like, yeah, I'm interested.

Hit me up. Let's chat. And what had happened was this company built a...

An animation for an indoor mini golf course it was going to be their 18th hole so the thing that collects the balls at the end and yeah collects the balls if you get it in the hole then you win a free game if you don't get it in the hole it just keeps your ball and you don't get to play anymore right because it's the 18th hole and the design of this thing well it's a giant skull with a moving jaw that blocks the hole and the way they designed it was i'm gonna

say sketchy a little bit it's a little bit sketchy where they had a like a wire a piece of aircraft cable that was uh connected between the motor and the jaw to make it move and it had a tendency to get stuck slip off the pulleys and then it would fail and the company's based in new hampshire it's down here in maryland so they didn't have the money to keep sending someone down to fix this thing and redesign it and all that and so they were looking for someone local to assist i'm like i'm handy

i can totally assist so i ended up going fixing this thing a couple of times and ultimately upgrading it my word not theirs i changed the design around a little bit to make it a little more reliable.

It has worked successfully i might add but the owner was so happy with the work that i did for that he hired me on as a as their handyman and so anytime a arcade game would break he would call me up i would go try to fix it using the vast amounts of experience fixing arcade games that i have in my history so like 20 minutes zero zero it's a little bit more than that now but thanks to this but like going into it i have i had good troubleshooting skills i had basic electronic skills

and i was able to put that to use on these arcade games. I was foiled once. There was one game I could not fix. It had shorted out three different circuit boards, and we were just chasing all kinds of stuff. That's the only time I failed. That seems more like a much larger issue. It was a much larger issue. I may have shorted out some of those boards while I was troubleshooting. We don't talk about that part. For shame. We don't talk about that part.

But anyway, I built up a good relationship with the owner of this arcade through this process. And so when I came back to Maryland last year, that is where I have been prototyping my Jellyball business. So twice a month, we go out there, we set up Jellyball in the field outside of the arcade, and then we can use the arcade's point of sale system to basically sell tickets for Jellyball. I give him a cut of the profits. We keep the majority of the profits and we

run Jellyball games for two days a month. and it's worked out well. I disappointed with the amount of money I have made so far doing that. I have not quite broken even on. I think I've broken even once on one of those days based on number of ticket sales and how much I am paying, quote unquote, myself to stand there and run it all day. But I have learned a lot from it and have gotten some more goodwill that I built up with this guy.

So I had a thought that if we wanted to try to build a professional haunted house this is an opportunity that we could potentially build a for-profit haunted house with relatively low risk the.

Arcade the way it's set up they have you know a couple of these big garage doors uh in the arcade for getting machines in and out and i think it would be very relatively simple to put a couple of ramps at this garage door put a facade on the inside and then we could actually have a haunted house behind the building underneath a tent that people will enter through the arcade enter and exit through the arcade we are again able to use their point of sale system we are driving,

customers to them they are driving customers to us and we could have our first for-profit haunt this way i'm sensing a but i mean this is my idea i haven't broached the topic with them at all, that's a big but it's a big but we could just show up and sort of the but the but is almost as big as my own there's that whole it's better to ask for forgiveness to show up all the gear so I want to take a few minutes and just kind of talk about this I think that's a worse

idea than theft that is a worse idea than theft. No doubt like no doubt there are recommending no no no I am not recommending I am just saying, there is no doubt that there are some challenges with this idea But it's March, which means we have the better part of seven months to tackle those challenges. And like the kinds of things I'm thinking of, we don't have a tent. The to get a tent or to rent a tent would cost thousands of dollars. And yeah.

We've never run a for-profit hunt before. We have no actors. We have limited props. We have no design. We've never talked to the fire marshal. There are some real challenges here. No doubt. Most of those could be solved with theft. Let's talk. I'm going to let it go. Talking to the fire marshal, how do you solve that with theft? How do you thieve a fire marshal? It's called kidnapping. It's a form of theft. It falls under the same umbrella.

I was gonna say that's less less what are your thoughts on this idea john and i talked about it a fair amount see we did have a discussion i knew it we did we did have a discussion on this none of that is making it into this episode but i'd really like to open up to leslie first and i actually sounded coherent for once i know and god damn i miss that.

So let's take it away for a moment i like the idea i'm having to ask myself if my hesitance in saying yeah let's do it is out of an overabundance of caution because there are so many things that we have not worked out or if my hesitance is well-founded and giving us ourselves 19 months and planning it for next year, with the idea that we're going to do all of the prep work this year, beta test, the haunt process, and then basically it's the everything but.

I had a similar thought about the time thing, in all honesty. If that is truly enough time. I mean, it is i know we can do it i also we put haunts together in six weeks in vastly different circumstances vastly different circumstances true remember the only ones left to answer to are us and that's it accurate accurate answering to you know your partners you've built up goodwill how far is that going to take you if something does not go well is this a. Bridge with a high risk of burning?

And is that something that you want to do? Or do you want to, again, slow walk this and do a 19-month plan, 18-month plan instead of a seven-month plan? I most definitely do not want to burn this bridge.

I really value the relationship that we've built up and long term i see potential for like our i see this as being as i see this relationship as having a lot of potential to helping us make the the leap to pro down the line because like this this arcade offers yeah, a lot of the takes you need but no no mcdonald's has a whole bunch of businesses that are own franchise it offers for this arcade offers franchise opportunities

so like we could potentially franchise under this banner and that gives us a way to have year-round revenue, and give us a venue to build a haunt so let me ask you let me ask you a question then what, What is the downside? Like you said, we value that relationship. What is the downside of waiting one year? I don't think there's any downside. I think there is zero downside whatsoever. What's the upside of not waiting a year? Exactly.

I mean, there's just the pure fun aspect of it, but if this is a business, probably the better. Sure. i mean timing is always a concern because i'm in the military and god knows what's going to happen.

We have halloween on a friday this year but we'll have halloween on a friday next or a saturday next, so like i don't know that there are any pluses that are really driving us to try to make this happened this year i don't think that would be the thing is we would need it to be some incredible okay it's this like there's a blue moon or something we can't miss this opportunity.

Let's i think also again you know you guys when you were there round one in maryland we really had built up you know quite a lot we had and we kept a lot of it we kept a lot of it so what would you say to taking again a year rebuild that you're like hey we're back here's our test and we test things with the intent of this is going to be pro next year so instead of instead of kind of kind of now whether we do that soft open at your house or at the arcade that's

something that we can kind of discuss. I don't see the arcade being an option unless there's revenue involved. Concur. I think if we're doing a soft open, we're doing the soft open here. More than likely. And I think that's, again, our approach is going to be different, because of the scale and the intricacies that we know are going to be involved when we're planning this as a trial run for revenue generation in 18 months.

Mm-hmm. And if we do this, if we plan this year with that in mind, it's going to make planning for next year and implementing a revenue generating haunt. I'm not going to say easier, but it takes a lot of the plan work out of next year. Like if we have our layout done, we have drawings, we have all of the equipment, we have the props, we know what actors we need. We know what the costs are going to be. Because I can build a budget off of that. Yeah, exactly.

Right now, I don't have enough to. That's steps ahead of where we are. And I think one of the good things would be to see it. First off, we would need to put together like a pitch just to make sure they're interested. If they have no interest in it, then there's no point in... I mean, if they have no interest in it, if we have something ready, we can take it anywhere. Well, there's that too. But no, no, but that's exactly it. If they're not interested,

we already have the pitch. We can take it anywhere. And you know what? There are other potential venues in this area.

There's a water park that closes down in the fall there's this outdoor there's an outdoor mini golf and batting cages and rock climbing wall like that kind of activity center, here in Prince Frederick there are other venues that we could potentially pitch this to that might be remember you have to be careful you tend to get injured near aquatic based haunts accurate, but they drain it they drain the haunt they drain the they drain the haunt.

Believe it or not that does not reassure me that i wasn't trying to be reassuring nope nope no there is like three percent. I i really think we plan for a income-based haunt for 26 and everything we do this year is done with that in mind. I think you've sold me. I think, yeah, seven months is not enough time to plan a house. Bullshit. Bullshit. Not a good one. What, you want to go to jail? We're going to need a wheel man. Pretty sure that both Oceans 11 and 13 were planned in less than weeks.

Are you saying any of us are Daniel Ocean? None of us are Daniel Ocean. That is accurate. We are not Daniel Ocean. Can we sidebar for a moment? You guys don't want me to be Daniel Ocean. It's only this. We're going to need a few more people. Accurate. But I showed my kids their first heist movie the other day.

Last family movie night. what what movie man what movie the italian job italian job okay paying attention i missed it, i'm cooking while i'm doing this fair they freaking adored it particularly my younger walker loves lyle's character the napster set by seth green like he was cracking up it was wonderful so we have they not seen oceans 11 yet they have not seen oceans yet like that is the next heist movie i think i want to show them yep 11 13 don't bother with 12.

I feel like we have to go in order redeeming element of 12 is julia roberts playing her character pretending to be julia roberts that's that is hysterical i that is hysterical i love the scene where the frenchman's going through the laser grid that was that's a super cool That's a super cool scene. So anyway, yeah. For those of our listeners, we're obsessed with those three movies. One person says one thing in our group chat with one quote from Oceans, and it goes for at least a day or two.

It spirals out of control from there, no doubt. You think we need one more? Yeah, do you think you need one more? Okay, we'll get one more. We'll get one more. So maybe can we agree to that? That we will, like you said, we would need some help. But we will only enlist more people. I don't know. It depends on what the layout ends up looking like. Okay, so... Why are you a thief of joy? I want you to know that I do thief something. Damn it. I wish I could thief one of these pens. Random.

Yeah. You're shopping, aren't you? I am. Yeah, you are. I'm window shopping.

You're hilarious. so i think that we're kind of settled i think that we're kind of settled on where we want to go for this year we will build a home haunt with the going through all of the steps as if we were going to try to make this go as if we were going to go pro this year we want to have everything laid out so that we can take that package and pitch it to potential venues next year ooh there's a vfw here too like vfw fundraiser there are possibilities is my point,

so i think i think that's where we're at i think that i think that's the way to go it's it also takes some i mean i i think about what it would take for us to put together a paid haunt in seven months and the time that it would take for the three of us to do that and specifically the time going to take for you because you're going to be doing a lot more of the legwork than we are for obvious reasons now that we have a now that we have chosen which direction we're going

to go for this year i think it is a great time to take a break hear from our sponsors and then we will jump in with a discussion on what are we going to actually do this year. Music.

Okay and we're back thank you to all of our sponsors you are amazing and this would not be as fun as it is without you and if you have a message that you would like to get out to the haunt community definitely check out hauntingu.com our website and click on the become a sponsor link where it will give you all of the information on the ways that we can help you get your message out to the Haunt community.

And I promise you, you will not find cheaper advertising than here on the Haunting You podcast. So dedicated Halloween enthusiasts, exactly the kind of people you want to get your products in front of, and it's relatively cheap. Really, really relatively cheap. So check it out and reach out to us at hunting university at gmail.com. If you would like to become a sponsor. But in the meantime, we have some planning to do.

So now that we have a the direction that we're going to go for 2025, it's time to talk about the haunt that we are going to build for 2025.

Now we very consistently talk about the haunting you method this is the haunt this is the steps that we take every single year when we are designing our haunts to make sure that we are capturing all the aspects that we need to to put on a successful haunt and it is broken down into three phases you can see all this on our website as well hunting you.com but it's broken down into three phases the planning phase the production phase and the presentation phase in the planning phase

we are doing all the on paper planning in the production phase, we are building things, physically building. In the presentation phase, we are executing the haunt, executing the plan that we have put together over the course of the year. So we're all the way back in the planning phase once again here early in 2025. And so we have lots of things to discuss. Let's give a quick overview of the planning phase and the steps that we need to talk about here.

So as we've defined it, our planning phase starts with defining your goals. What do you want to accomplish with your haunt? Like really, you know, what's the point and purpose? You know, are you just there to scare the shit out of your neighbors? Scare the shit out of your neighbor's kids? Or are you wanting to build a business with it? Which again, as we've talked about, that's kind of the approach that we're going to be taking. The next step is to identify your audience.

So since we are looking at this in kind of a two-stage approach, plan, one stage is setting everything up and doing kind of a soft run this year with the intent to do a paid haunt next year. Our audience is going to be a little bit different than kind of what we've done, which is neighborhood and whoever we can bowl in off the street with the giant weenies that we're doing. Please listen to episode 10. We need to identify our theme.

So that is, again, that's what's going to ground our ideas and keep us in one coherent thought process and plan as we go forward. Once we have that, we need to create a backstory. So what is our haunt? We've got a theme. What's the story surrounding it? So again, we're looking at this not to just have a bunch of random rooms thrown together with clowns and zombies and, you know, chainsaw killers. What is our backstory.

What is the overarching thread that's from the theme? And then how do we tie that all together into a coherent storyline? Next is creating a budget. This is going to be crucial because again, we are looking at this of how do we turn this into a paid haunt? Budget is going to be key. We want to make sure that we're bringing in more money than we're spending. So we.

This is another one that's going to be crucial because as we pitch to partners for 2026, we need to have a marketing plan as to how are we going to help bring in clients and customers to the haunt at this location, whichever one we decide to go with. And then last but not least is the layout. We need to design a layout.

What is the walkthrough? What is the space that we're going to be occupying? how do we take the backstory that we've written and adapt it to any potential space so again if we're potentially pitching this to maybe three different locations to see which one is you know going to fit our needs we need to be able to adapt our layout and design so we need to have a very very strong plan as to not just how do we design it but how do we write it how is it going to work how does the you know

the flow of the haunt function that was a perfect overview of the planning phase we so let's let's kind of take it one at a time real quick we're definitely not going to get into all of these here on this episode but i want to hit the areas that we kind of already know goals we are in this case are we have a couple of goals i think one to.

Kind of work out the kinks in the plan that we have to ease our transition to trying to go pro for 2026 and of course as always we want to collect as much food as possible for the southern maryland food bank which is a local charity that we have been supporting as long as i have been in maryland so goals check oh that is a nice pen right is it 15 wait what head yeah dollar no is it pen 15.

No it is not 10 15 i certainly hope not i mean that's expensive but if it was it'd be a heck of a lot more expensive i'm saying i had a boss i had a boss who was absolutely obsessed with like fancy pens and he once showed me a pen that he spent four hundred dollars on, yeah that's i i am i can't i love i can't love my fountain pens i love my fountain pens i have not spent more than 30 dollars i attend 30 dollars is still an expensive pen like it's still a pretty

nice it is it's nothing compared to that one yeah no i i was holding it like two hands uh-huh i'm like i i don't feel comfortable holding this like take it back i don't want me to anything i write with that needs it's only insurance policy i'm up. Exactly anyway so sorry we talked about goals we we have our goals for the season audience.

Who is our audience in this case? You know, traditionally, we have targeted trick-or-treaters because we are a home haunt, we are expecting trick-or-treaters, and we want it to be a fun and memorable event to help build the next generation of haunters. That has not worked out so well for us here in Maryland because I live out in the boonies.

And the neighborhood i'm in has i don't know six seven houses and it is three families four families have kids like it is not a big trick-or-treater neighborhood and so what we have generally found is on halloween we are not getting the traffic here because they're going to the big neighborhoods with lots of houses because that's how you get lots of candy i can't even dispute I would be doing the same thing. I do the same thing with my own children. Like I get it.

But that means that like our traditional audience is not the people that we are seeing. And so I think this is the time that we actually open up the audience, our target audience and really start targeting the young adults. Because those are the people who we saw come in 2021 when we had our most successful year. Yeah. Yeah. We saw the 20-somethings. We saw the 30-somethings.

We saw people coming all the way from Prince George's County because they heard about our haunt on Facebook and thought it was interesting. Like, adults driving an hour and a half to come see our haunt. It still warms my heart that they did that. Yeah, and I think you're right, especially because, you know, we are looking to push the bounds, turn this into a pro haunt that automatically ups our age group.

Yeah. And with the backstory and the haunt themes that we have tested, it's very, very easy to up the level and the scare factor with what we've written. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, seriously. So I think our target audience, the early 20-somethings, the 21-year-old frat boy, the 21-year-old white frat boy, the person who has the least of fear in the world, that is our target audience. That is the person that we are trying to scare with this haunt.

Make them terrified. Theme and backstory. We have been building our theme and backstory really since 2020. And Les, can you give a quick overview of the theme and backstory that we have been building for the last several years? So the backstory of Sanguine Creek Estates and really where we focused it for the past couple of years has been on our slightly mad scientist who...

Moves back into kind of the old family manor. And in an effort to continue his research, he ultimately becomes possessed by the spirit of the Wendigo, which has been haunting the land surrounding the manor for centuries. And takes all of his, I'm just trying to do medical research and turns it into much worse things. Exactly. Exactly. And I had a thought because I caught something that you said. You said Sangren Creek estates.

I've been making the same mistake. I think we need to change it to estate, singular, because estates makes it sound like a 1950s neighborhood full in the suburbia with lots of houses.

We have a single estate. we could do that no not this time not this time we could do that for our time skip, yes no i i agree i even like as you were talking i went back and looked through my pictures to make sure like the sign that i made last year does say estate singular so i, want to be more deliberate about calling it an estate and not estates yep so yeah so that's that's our theme and backstory and that's kind of what where i want to focus here for the rest of the episode what do we

want to do with that theme and backstory in the haunt previously we had a asylum type theme that transitioned to a a zombie type theme as the creature that the doctor had created, turned out to be a Wendigo. Was starting to corrupt people and turning them into zombie-esque creatures. And absolutely love that storyline. And I think we can, I absolutely think we could continue with it. But let's talk like the spaces that we're going to build this year inside the estate.

Yeah. So I'm actually going to pull up a, a spreadsheet now or not a spreadsheet, but a work document so that we can talk about the types of spaces that we want to see inside of the estate this year. So I think starting with the asylum still makes sense.

Yeah. and what we had in 21 was the doctor was outside welcoming people into the estate yes i think we need more of a welcome space though we need a foyer aka foyer leslie's twitching i enjoy making what leslie twitch so we i still think we put the doctor outside and he welcomes the guests into the foyer but i think we need like a nurse or an orderly inside the foyer to give the the intro talk except yeah essentially the the spiel the

spiel so we're gonna have less nurse orderly What's more appropriate nurse, probably an asylum. We're doing this late eight. Oh, well, let's talk about that. Like previously we had been talking about late 1890s. Do we want to stick with that time period? Yeah. I'm kind of inclined to. I like it. I do, too. Okay, we'll stick with it. My other option is 1930s and fuck fascism. What's to the 1890s? So 1890s asylum. In that case, it would be both.

Maybe not both. So we'll stick with the nurse. I would start with a nurse and then have that kind of a nurse receptionist of a, hi, welcome, nice and happy, and then transfer off to big, burly, orderly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so nurse receptionists give backstory and welcome into the haunt. Okay, backspace. From the foyer, they're now going on a tour of the asylum. The idea being that the guests who are coming have a family member that they are thinking of sending to the hospital.

And so they are here to check out the... What's the word I watched? Facilities. Exactly. They're checking out the facilities to make sure that it is appropriate for the family member that they want to send. So they started on the foyer with the nurse receptionist who was giving the backstory, welcoming them into the haunt, and then they proceed down the hall. And where do we go from here? A couple of options, one of which is we go to kind of an intake room.

What do you imagine with an intake room? This is where I would see you sit down with an orderly and they would go through, we're just want to ask you some questions about the family member you're looking at committing so we can properly show you the best case scenario of our patients as to what would happen if you committed a family member. I'm a little bit concerned about asking guests questions. Yeah. Because that can go off the rails very quickly.

Yes. So with that, the next step would be allow us to show you some of our patients and our quote unquote success stories. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we had, I liked the electroshock therapy room. I don't think we have that yet, but let's just get like the types of patients out.

So patient success stories we have electroshock and treatment examples yeah so the porcelain doll is receiving etc the treatment examples electroshock therapy we have the porcelain doll, who else who else did we have we had we had my reagan dummy which was just you know character in a bed same with we had an orderly pushing the wheelchair with the heart bursting out, so i think this is where we need to refine our not necessarily our backstory

well we need to refine our backstory a little bit what's your thinking that i need to do research.

That's what we can do research yeah so research is definitely needed porcelain doll, and for all of our listeners who do not remember our porcelain doll is a a patient who believes that she herself is a porcelain doll and so the room that we had set up was like a bedroom with as many porcelain dolls as i could find at estate sales which was a considerable amount and then she in the middle of them all dressed up as a porcelain doll herself she was an

excellent character played by our friend christina she was wonderful well chef's kiss of course we had the electroshock therapy uh which really basically an electric chair i had taken a old broken spirit animatronic turned it into a pneumatic that when activated with a peekaboo made him you know thrash about wildly it lasted a day because the construction of said animatronic was i'm gonna say a little bit sketchy so i need to do some work on that this year build him a

more i'm gonna say sturdy frame that can take the abuse a little more than the previous one did. But otherwise i think it was a very effective uh a very effective space, Leslie's doing research. Uh-huh. Ooh, yay. Pictures. Pictures. Pictures are good. Uh-huh. Okay. So in an effort to, you know, not bore you all by listening to me make funny noises while I read research on the internet, which I know Kay's infinitely amused because he gets to watch my face as I read all this shit.

Not to mention I get to listen to it a second time when I go and edit it all out again. In an effort to not torment you all with that, which should be enough to put anybody in a sane asylum. More research is needed so big sticky note leslie needs to do research.

Leslie i'm adding notes leslie will how many of these rooms and characters do we want knowing that again budget constraints space constraints time constraints short answer i don't know yet there's gonna have to be a separate discussion on layout once we kind of figure out what our our target sizes i think i want to do some research and like i really want to find a tent right because if we're going to do this pro we're going to have to have

some kind of structure that can protect the haunt while we are not operating so you know it's one thing if i'm at home and i can bring all the sensitive stuff inside the garage at the end of the night no big deal but But if we are actually in some sort of venue, that's much more difficult to accomplish. So we need much. We need more protection. So I'm going to have to figure out like some tense ideas, figure out what that's going to cost, figure out what kind of sizes we can work with.

And then we can base the layout around that. You know what would be fun is we could, when we say stuff like that, you could just, you could literally say, okay, get that to the insurance teams or get that to the layout team without people realizing it's just the dream. Leslie. Here's the thing. Leslie and John are the story team. I am the layout team. Leslie's the finance team. John is the marketing team. I hold tools. You do hold tools. That is accurate. Hold, not use.

With help and supervision. I'm allowed to use tools. You are not. Sorry, I was tricky to do that. I'm a four-year-old, which is tricky.

So we're going to have a variety of patient success stories, treatment examples at some point where i think we want to keep the morgue and the crematorium yep the we had this idea for for lack of a better word the basement where there were cages electrified cages where the doctor was keeping his more violent patients yeah i would love to build that i i want to bring that in i think we should one of the i don't know if i sent this

one to you is at the science museum yeah so if you scroll down on the link i sent you there are some fantastic images of differing restraints that were used oh yeah i like this straitjacket, and this and then various restraint harnesses chained to the bed chained chairs, strapped into a chair. What is this thing? Oh, some kind of restraint collar. Yep. So what I would recommend for you, well, wait, what, sorry, I forget what year is this supposed to be?

We're in the 1890s. 1890s. Never mind ignoring anything that I was going to say. What were you thinking? Cause maybe we can adjust it to the appropriate time. Just you, you said something about the more violent inmates being on a lower level or more secure level.

Uh huh. one of the like first starts of when you walk through arkham asylum the the game is like a 10 minute walk through the asylum with guards while joker is restrained and it you go through most of the asylum like the secure wing the less secure and all this stuff yeah it looks pretty cool it's you know i was just saying that for research and i get some decent ideas sure but it's all most of the things they share yeah yeah yeah that that's okay

like we can And I think Arkham Asylum is a fantastic source of material, source of source material, source of inspiration. We should absolutely be looking at all variety of source material in order to draw out elements that I think are useful. And granted, Arkham Asylum, much more modern day. Not everything will be perfectly, well, yeah, relatively, relatively modern day.

Not everything will be a perfect fit for what we're doing but that doesn't mean we can't like take those ideas and make them old-timey to to fit that the to fit the time frame and again it is all fictional so as much as there are going to be parts of me that are going to cringe, i'm there's still some things again you know to to build up a hot even if it is anachronistic, if it brings value to what we're trying to do and to the goals that we have then it's absolutely worth

doing yep we've got one inaccuracy in each thing just just for giggles it's kind of like the candlelighters hiding a cat in every scene i was gonna say that makes me think of in sight there is a pineapple pineapple every episode yep yep because so we can find something in fun view after the basement the jail cells previously we had had like an underground tunnel that I absolutely loved how it came out and I would like to do again.

And then when they emerged from the tunnel, we had them emerge into a cemetery. I don't know that that is going to be possible if we are doing this in a venue. Yeah. There's never going to be some additional restrictions. Like maybe the underground tunnel is our escape and they like, and that's the actual exit coming up out of the root cellar. You know, they go in the front door, they come out the root cellar and having them want to go chase them out of the root cellar. Exactly.

Exactly. Something like that. I like that. Again, it kind of, because again, we're looking containment, physical containment, which we're going to have to have at pretty much any venue that we're going to do.

And that gives us a little bit more control. And it does keep the idea that the doctor has, in his mind, harnessed the power of the Wendigo only to have an escape. Lies! Okay other scenes that you guys have thoughts on because that we've got, one two three four five six seven we've got seven right now plus a couple more patients that leslie will bring up i'd like to have a little more flexibility to to work scenes into a layout.

We have to be careful of not doing too much, especially for just to make sure we can handle it all. Certainly. Certainly. It's more about kind of seeing what fits in the space that we have available.

Yeah. And that's something, again, as you're making these pitches and planning ahead, it's beneficial to, I'm not going to say over plan, but to have additional elements so that way, as you're doing a pitch, if something doesn't land, you can say, we do have other options that we can put in here, you know, pending whatever the concerns are. You know, that's something that we didn't really bring into Sanguine in 21, emphasizing like the fact that this place is fucking haunted. Yes.

And I would love to bring more of that into... Right. I think it'd be a really good idea to add in ghosts. I think we should add in ghosts. Like... Don't want to say old patients previous patients deceased patients patients who have the. Bone to with the doctor and his descendants ghosts yeah i think we need ghosts and you know to some degree we have.

We have ghosts i mean we already have what four who do we have we have i mean we have certainly we have our uh the four that we have haunting the the morn hunting the ground oh sorry yeah hunting the grounds but then we also had like the the signal woman spirit who was guiding people out of the of the graveyard and yeah there's oh the hatbox ghost yeah hatbox lofx version of the hatbox ghost yeah so definitely want to have ghosts so actually we could

have like previous owners of the estate potentially as ghosts previous patients previous inhabitants and happy happy tense there we go of the grounds all all ideas that that's where we're brainstorming here yep yeah and we can and we can work some of those into the to the haunt on top of that I want to incorporate more of that into the grounds as well like just on top of yeah again we want this to feel as haunted as we can as haunted as possible exactly.

Exactly heavy on the haunt I like it.

Especially now that I have all my stuff hey it definitely helps, okay okay so I think we've got some we've we've got some ideas les is going to do some more research on ideas for you know les i was listening to our our episode on the west virginia penitentiary do you remember the inmate who stabbed himself in the eyes yes with the pencils yep i want that as a character okay inmate who stabbed self and eyes with pencils perfect so we need a costume design for that as well less

it's given the era it's not gonna be pencils it's gonna be fountain pens even better so then we can do ink drips down the face i like it i like it i'm thinking potentially bloody bandage over the eyes with the pen sticking out. Okay.

Because then we can like attach the pens to the bandage and then just wrap that around the head, to to put it on big thing with that is going to be figuring out how to make it make sure they can see and actually yeah exactly so i leave that to you to figure out okay okay so yeah let's come up with a couple other potential patients and then we'll go from there okay so that gives us our kind of the basis for our our theme our backstory the kind of type of characters that we're going

to be looking at the types of uh costuming we're.

Going to need and that will all go into the layout that we need to or that i need to start sketching out designing exactly so i think we're kind of at a stopping point for as far as we can get tonight you know the rest of the planning phase marketing we will use a lot of the elements that we are designing for this in our marketing but a lot of the actual marketing will happen once we get closer to the haunt itself and of course creating a budget we'll probably

do a whole episode where we talk about building a business plan and kind of looking at the types of expenses that we would expect to incur as part of this build and that will help us set pricing and all of those things all that will go into into the business plan that will dedicate a whole episode just to that sorry guys it's gonna be a bit boring but if this is your goal there's gonna be a lot of value to it exactly and we'll have john to make it as entertaining as possible but if

you don't like it you can certainly go to haunting you.com and check out any of the myriad other episodes that we have on building haunted houses and you.

Know we bring a ton of professionals from the haunt industry on to talk about what they do and how they do it all of those episodes are available to you wherever you get your podcast apple podcast pod bean google podcasts pandora amazon music like literally anywhere that you get your podcast you can find the haunting you podcast go back and listen to any one of these episodes and hopefully take something away that you can use in your own haunt so

i think we're kind of at a stopping point tonight i i have a would you rather do you really i do i would love to hear your would you rather well you volunteer so you better come up with one it's fun to see your face okay.

Oh excuse me shenanigans is that the segment title, like that if you want to sponsor our synonym segment yeah exactly man wouldn't that be something people just pay us to say stupid things i cannot wait for that day to come true someday someday someday just even dumber things than usual exactly speaking of dumber things than usual john can you see what's behind me i don't assume that was a show that me oh no can you i don't know if you can see the this right here or i can't i can see

some sort of object i cannot make it out what it is it is a 3d printed shark with muscles going like this do you remember that indeed i found it, i have you sent me what you sent one of them to me i did send one we printed a couple clearly i have one left over because he's up there now where you have an excellent fantasy football trophy should you need it?

Anyway, yeah, so go ahead, John. I did some one on Etsy that I wanted to buy for Art League that was just a wood version of Thor's hammer that you just put plaques on for each ten of them. Oh, sure, yeah, yeah. It was also like $600. I bet I could build it for less. Kind of would. Well, no, so I'll give you the wood you rather. I actually had this for the episode that I missed, unfortunately.

So I'll read it over. I'll read it to you guys and then I'll go with mine just to give you guys a minute to come up with yours. Go ahead. So I saw this the other day and it was, would you rather be the main character in the last show that you watched most recently or the last book that you read most recently? So... Book. Well, Leslie, that was fast. What was yours? Book. I know, but what book? The Poison Study. Poison Study by Maria V.

Snerter. Either that or The Hobbit. Either way, I'd be happy. Good either way. Yeah. I mean, TV show wouldn't be bad either because it's NCIS, but, you know. Okay, fair enough. See, at that moment, no, I'll go back to the one I was, when I came up with this. I had been watching Downton Abbey. So pretty solid. Your main character, I assume it's Robert. Pretty solid. I mean, it's the early 1900s, but she was very wealthy. So that's not so bad.

But I had, the book I was reading was about Jessica Jones. Oh. Not As much as I love Jessica Jones I'm not sure I want to be her Yeah There's some stuff So I think I'd pick Wealthy guy Even if it's the 1900s I'm still picking Wealthy British aristocrats, What about you? I'm having to think back a little bit. I think the last show I watched was Skeleton Crew. Okay, solid. And I'm in the process of reading through the Hunger Games books. Wow, you are late.

That answers the question. Yeah, I'm doing a reread because a new book is coming out this week. A new story all about Heemich's games. And I'm so excited for it. But I wanted to read all of them before I go to that. So I'm actually on The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes right now, which is President Snow's backstory. And so that would be the main character of the book. I really don't want to be President Snow, even though young eventually will be President Snow.

So I think I'm going to go with Skeleton Crew. Yeah, I think that's fair. Yeah. There's not a lot of ones you would want to be in Hunger Games. Most things are going to be.

There's nothing good there not all but most yeah yeah just nothing good there would you rather be in hunger games in any capacity fair or would you rather be a member of the call out rockies hunger games hunger games sorry rocks maybe you bring it upon yourselves maybe someday maybe i have doubts for like a month and then it's back to you know our regularly scheduled programming exactly exactly yeah okay poison study because yelena is awesome

and really really great story and she has awesome magics that you know makes up for the horrible torture in her backstory, or the hobbit i'm happy to be bilbo so you got it but now you're making me think because You know, Jessica Jones has terrible things happen to her, but she does have some pretty cool superpowers. I'm going to pick Wealthy to the show Instagram. Legit. Legit. Very legit. Yeah. John, you want to give us a, John, will you give us a quick rundown of our social

media? And then I think we have one more segment to knock out real quick. Chambers quarter. Dun, dun, dun. So John, would you give us a quick rundown of our social media? Sure. It is indeed on the internet. So Instagram at hunting university on YouTube at hunting you.

And then what did you say facebook.com slash hunting you i don't know that's it that's it holy crap i did it you nailed it well done good job john only took two tries, you know what that's better than the number of tries that leslie normally has to do so you're you're you're doing all right excellent well that leaves us with just one last thing to knock out today and that is of course the chambers corner.

The hunting you podcast is the official podcast of the chamber of haunters and so every month we like to give the chamber an opportunity to tell us what they have going on in their world so from mr robert knowlton chamber president of the chamber of haunters what do you have for us for april the chamber of haunters is preparing for some awesome changes and updates there'll be a great benefit to members in 2025 the chamber

of haunters is celebrating five years in operation as the haunted attraction industries chamber of commerce know that we are here to help you when you need us most. We have you covered for your insurance needs, legal help in all 50 states, discounts with premier vendors, support and guidance, etc. In order to assist you in taking your haunt to the next level.

We are excited to make some key announcements over the coming months, so be sure to watch the Chamber of Hunters Facebook page, as well as our magazine, as we tell you all the exciting plans we have for 2025 for our members and for the haunted attraction industry as a whole. We will be attending the East Coast Haunters Convention in April. This is Keone. I also intend to be at the East Coast Haunters Convention in April.

But the Chamber will be attending the East Coast Haunters Convention in April as well as the Texas Haunters Convention in July. We hope to see many of you at one of these amazing events. Stay tuned for more news from the Chamber of Haunters. Cannot believe you did that all from memory. Well done. Thank you. Thank you.

I quick, quick side note for all of our listeners who don't normally get to see into the, the background of the making of the haunt of you podcast, but normally I am not on top of my shit. And so we will record our introduction to the chambers corner, record the coming back from the chambers corner. And then I have to reach out to Rob separately, ask him for the chambers corner, record it, and then insert it when I'm doing my post-editing.

Tonight, I did not have my shit together and I had to reach out to Rob, but Rob had his shit together and he said it to me while we were recording in time so that I had it ready to go when we got to this moment. Well done. It was amazing. I could not believe it. Thank you, Rob, for having your shit together more than I do.

My favorite part about that whole thing is when you when you did the original read of the fish I know obviously you can't see it on my camera on but the closet in the room I mean is open and that massive trout that we used to have that would hang outside of the roof of your fire is still in that closet looking at it. Hey John Yeah. Can I see your trout? Hold them all. Sweet. Sweet. So thank you Rob for the Chambers Corner. I am so excited to see you at the end of the month to at East Coast.

Hope, hopefully everything works out and we both end up making it there. All right. We have done our social media. We've done the Chamber's Corner. I do want to do one quick shout out for a couple of events coming up. The big one for us, Haunt Fest April Ghouls is scheduled for April 4th through 6th in Athens, Georgia.

So just a couple of days from now, if you're in the area, definitely go and check them out and then of course east coast hunters convention we just talked about in oaks pennsylvania april 26th and 27th they do have a pre-show hunt tour happening on friday uh if you want to check that out you certainly can and then a bunch of other shows happening later in the summer midwest excuse me midwest hunters convention june 6th to the 8th in rosemont illinois illinois texas

hunters convention july 26th 27th in irving texas haunters against hate the event number three season of the witch august 8th through 10th in lexington kentucky haunting you podcast will be there come see us at the booth and midsummer scream august 15th to the 17th at the long beach convention center if you are in the area for any one of these conventions highly recommend you check them out and look

for us come check us out when when you're there all right do we miss anything guys I don't think so. Alright then let's call it a night less. Music. Everybody haunting you is a production of the rocky mountain home haunters llc all audio clips and sound effects are used under a creative commons attribution or public domain license from purple planet music at www.purple-planet.com or the sound bible at soundbible.com please see our facebook page for more information. Music.

On all the clips used in this episode, We'll be right back. Haunting University can be reached via Facebook at www.facebook.com slash HauntingU with the letter U. Or on Twitter using the handle at HauntingUniver1. That's Haunting-U-N-I-V-E-R-1. Be sure to check out our new page on Podbean at www.hauntingyou.podbean.com. I have a scissor. I have a scissor. I have a scissor. Snip, snip, snip, snip. Well, that pause is exciting.