Our last year at Lochwood was to be strange, not that the haunt business was in and of itself normal. It seems that the mall was not doing well. Money seemed to be disappearing, not going to advertising as it was supposed to. Many vendors had left, but the upstairs haunt returned and so did we. We cut back on entertainment during the day and opened the haunt for lights on tours, no actors till 7pm. The folks upstairs were using the stuff from the year before and apparently producing the same show for the first two weeks. I know, because the word got out and our business was booming and they never fully recovered. They blamed us. We added our sign to the front of the mall and placed direction banners across the mall hall leading to our haunt.
We tied our two shows together. First the customers were seated in the puppet theater for a ten-minute show. They were then escorted to the exit, which was the haunt entrance. We kept them entertained for an average of thirty minutes and could move 120 people per show or 240 per hour. Our price went up to $4 and we had a good-sized stack of dollar bills to play with when it was all said and done. The haunt changed into more of a path connecting scenes. It was not all 90 degree, but we were still using two-foot wide passages. This year we had two swinging walls and tried something new (and I promise never to do it again). We actually could turn the customers around and back onto themselves. This was fun for a while, but it proved to be dangerous, as customers began to confuse themselves with actors and some customers became actors. This was done as part of the maze and the scenes before and after the maze. The maze is where one of the problems developed. This was the first time I had seen people pay to get in and set up shop as an actor in the haunt, usually in the maze. It didn't seem bad at first, but then it became apparent that these people could/would and did get carried away and created problems. The situation could have been worse had we not nipped it in the bud. It is one thing for a member of a group to move quickly ahead of the group in order to scare one of his friends, it is quit another for an individual to join the cast. Cast implies that you know who they are, have information on how to get in touch with them and require them to be accountable for their actions. 1992 would present a similar but different problem. October would be it for the mall. None of us knew that, but the management was not paying the rent. When the hammer fell our stuff was caught in the web. It took us nearly a month to get most of our stuff out. It was not a pretty sight. We had no true lease; a verbal agreement was it. But the mess extended to flea market vendors as well. Tuesday November 1st was a deadline. When vendors returned for the next weekend they discovered that they were locked out. An interim solution was found and the mall owners accepted weekend rent from vendors for what would turn out to be the last weekend. This was only one of many times that my lack of management skill would become obvious. Our attraction was outgrowing my ability to manage it. Not the creative/show side, but the detail side. Advertising, marketing, contracts and other types of agreements were foreign to me. I mention this because a haunt is a blend of creative talents and business skills. Although my haunt continues to survive, it should be doing better. We were growing and changing as well. I was the creative part of a group trying to establish one of the early satellite networks. We built some nice studios, sets and shot a stack of videotape. The haunt would relocate to our film/video production studios, which contained classrooms for the acting school.Mad Hatter
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