2008 in Review

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Category: In Review

Written by Guy Wolford

For Halloween 2008, The Haunt @ Boo completely restructured itself.

Over the past 5 years doing the haunt, the festivities and scares of trick-or-treat were always carried out in the front yard of Boo. This always posed a logistical problem because our house is located on a rather busy street where the speed limit is 35 miles per hour and most motorists travel faster than that, even on a night like Halloween. Other problems always plagued the front yard versions of The Haunt @ Boo including traffic patterns, space restrictions and large amounts of light pollution coming from the huge overhead sodium vapor street lights that cast an orange glow that our flood lights just couldn't overcome.

Earlier this year, we invested a large bit of time soldering, and manufacturing LED pin spot lights. The purpose of these was simple. Coupled with our recent purchase of 110v LED based spot lights (see the blog for information on these) we could accent light the haunt with as many of these low voltage LED spot lights as we want. This year we had 22 of our homemade LED lights in the graveyard and 4 in the Amazing Gorilla Machine all running off of ONE 12v power supply. The power savings was amazing, totally reducing the fear of our lighting overpowering a circuit. Not to mention the economic savings and the support of "going green" to save the planet!

Revisions continued on several props for this year. Our Blucky's Barbecue finally got the rotisserie motor it deserved, and a smoke effect was added to our barbecued blucky to finally get him tasting great! Our Electric Chair victim was completely rebuilt to look more human, (he got several great scares this year, especially due to his added blue strobe light). Our Guillotine finally got a reimagination this year, Jen built a fabulous gravity fed bleeding mechanism and a severed neck completely on her own. It dripped a torrent of blood throughout the evening! All of our scenes and props got a proper sprucing up for their relocation and were placed over a 2 day period starting October 30th.

The weather for October 31st was beautiful, we started set-up at 11 AM and by the time trick-or-treat started we all were costumed and ready to scare in the beautifully clear 60 degree evening.

Our turnout for 2008 seemed smaller than last year by only a small margin, we believe this may have had something to do with the fact that we have moved into our back/side yard (we're on a corner lot, so we still have street visibility) and some of the people that come by in cars may not have noticed us up and running, although we DID have a giant orange banner that read "WELCOME" stretched across our entrance!

Our cast this year was all veterans of the haunt @ boo except for newcomer Becky who did a great job in her first year here. Everyone did their part do make it another successful year and our crowd was as always a fun bunch of victims! We were visited by some special guests associated with the city of Euclid and hopefully will be featured in the upcoming Euclid Sun Journal. We did our best to "plug" the website as much as possible this year.

By 8:20pm we were done, and by 9:15pm the haunt was dismantled and brought back inside and our cast relaxed and reminisced. Our haunt, whose planning begins in July and construction takes hundreds of hours and dollars, always seems to end so quickly, but the memories and thrills always remain, and we hope above all hope that everyone that comes to enjoy our little piece of Halloween keeps that memory with them for the rest of their lives.

In summation: Euclidboo 2008. A rousing success. The best yet.



... just wait till 2009!!