Set

The idea for this project is to make a haunted house that is several orders of magnitude better than your average DIY haunt. The house facade should block our actual house so that you can't see it, and the haunt should take up our entire property out front, or very close to it. Due to the shape of our existing house and property, the house will be two-sided, one side facing the street and the other side facing our neighbors to our left (North). The House will be three floors high - or maybe two floors plus a sloping roof that has dormer windows coming out of it. The total height should have building no higher than 30 ft. high. It's ok if ornamental rod iron or the chimney goes higher than 30 ft. but by law the physical building should not exceed 30 ft.

The House should reside on the gray tile in front of our house up to the edge of the artificial grass. The yard and cemetery should be in front of the facade on our artificial grass. I want to paint the main Prohibition Party Floor panels green so that we can put those down as the ground, and then cover them with landscaping as appropriate, and then any graves could go a few inches down to our actual grass (that we can't dig up) and gravestones can be screwed to this flooring so they don't fall over. plus wire can run underneath everything that way.

The house will have a large porch on the first floor that may have a step up, and right now there is only plans for one front door to the house on the first floor. Mark Andrew's seance pepper-ghost effect scene can be seen out one front floor window, possibly from the porch and probably right of the front door. The yard/cemetery will have a rod iron fence around it, with a cemetery gate to the right at our driveway. Guests can enter the cemetery via this gate. There will a walkway from the gate in the cemetery that is or represents a stone/cement walkway. There will be a working water fountain in the middle of the cemetery guests can walk around and see. The walkway will also go up to the front of the house and the front door.

The boulevard area will be fenced with a smaller rod iron fence, and will generally match the cemetery. It doesn't have artificial grass so we can decide what to do. Unlike our artificial grass covered front lawn, our boulevard can be dug up if needed. I already have pipes running from the boulevard underneath the sidewalk to our front lawn so we can run power, speaker wires, water, compressed air, or anything else we need to the boulevard without guests seeing it. Right now I expect the boulevard to have two things in it - A huge faux dead spooky tree - which will be used for projecting video onto the house as needed, and will also be struck by lightning at various points and "smoke" for a while.

The (horse missing) horse-drawn hearse will also be in the boulevard and I hope to animate that so it looks like there's a horse there. The carriage will be secured down so it won't be stolen. Guests can see the things in the boulevard but not go in the boulevard. Guests can go in our driveway and hopefully there will be things to see and do but mostly they will enter the cemetery gate to the left. Inside the house There will be what hopefully passes for the first floor of a house (or partial) but guests will be able to go into the Living Room, and Library at minimum, and there should be a hallway that they can see down but not go down.

When guests who are in the know activate a special button or pull a special book in the library say, a hidden door will open and they can enter the bar in the back. The bar will seat 6 to 10 people max (TBD) and will serve beer, wine, limited cocktails, and horse ovaries (hor'dourves) (TBD) and the bar will be manned. Bar Guests will be able to sit and play with Android Tablets that have several screens/pages that have both maps of the haunted house and camera views of several rooms and outside. Bar Guests will be able to do things like push buttons on the screen and cause a Wolf to howl or air to blast someone in a rooms or lock a door behind guests and turn the light off (TBD).

Operations

Primarily this event will be automated. It will be driven mostly by audio, video, lighting, and prop animation. There is currently no plan for actors to be on the Set interacting with the audience. That said, I do expect there to be a Host, who will oversee guests entering the cemetery and exiting the House safely and calmly. I do expect this Host to be in character. I expect there to be a bartender in the hidden bar, who is also minimally in character (meaning he/she will portray a haunted character but also be lively and can converse with bar guests in a modern way). I expect myself and possibly others to be on-hand to address issues. Traffic and parking may be an issue? (TBD)