The Line

Year two at Lochwood Flea Market was upon us. I saw no reason to change my ways too much, so I began in a corner and started building the haunt. The Mall had given us more space. We had over 4,000 sq. ft. I was nearly lost in a space so large. Then I was hit with a surprise. We were scheduled to open Thursday the 13th. Because our location was in the basement and the closest entrance was in the back I seldom visited the front main entrance of the mall. I was coming back from the lumber yard (before Home Depot) and noticed a large sign for a haunted house over the main entrance. I was surprised that the mall would do such a thing for us (serious ego problem here), but I surmised that they were very happy with the show we put on. HA!

I drove around back and delivered the lumber. Worked into the night till about 8pm. Staggered up stairs and drove around to the mall front to see the sign again. OOPS. It was the Friday before we were to open and there was a line out the front doors. I parked and entered the mall to see what was going on. In a space of over 10,000 sq. ft., a prime entry location, another Haunted House was open. I was in shock. The management explained it to me this way, 'If one Haunted House is good, then two must be twice as good.'

This haunt was a completely different style. Inside they built elaborate sets, placed distance between them and presented a theatrical production. They would take groups of about twenty at a time and the cast produced a vampire wedding. I never saw it all, but it took us some time to recover from the surprise. You see, the production was about twenty minutes, only one group at a time was allowed inside and a very very long line formed. They could have held the line inside the mall. Instead they forced it out the doors onto the front sidewalk. At the time I thought this was stupid.

The crowd mentality was; see a line get in it. We did our best to have no more than a fifteen-minute wait. On Friday & Saturday nights you could stand in line for two hours upstairs. Their success was great enough to add a second cast so that they could do two groups at a time. I am no mathematician but they could only handle 120 people per hour. But, they were charging $8 per person (this is 1983, we were charging a whopping $3 per person). The down side was that our initial attendance was down. Our only advantage was that they allowed no children at all.

We did more for the mall. We provided daytime entertainment (costumed characters), opened our haunt during weekend business hours and provided discounts to vendors. Our competition did none of this. Latter I found out that they did pay rent, which we did not. Out of desperation we finally began to work their line, this paid off and our second season at Lochwood was better than our first.

Our style changed this year. We had larger scenes and the crawling maze was gone, it was now a walking maze. This would be our first year for a fog machine and strobe lights. We also added some black light puppets. Our stereo sound system was supplemented with portable cassette players and loop cassettes playing random sounds along the customer path.

And, sorry to say, we created a line out the front and up the stairs. We never got it outside the mall entry door, but not for lack of trying. When people from the other haunt came to check us out they would get into a long line, but would leave if we had no line. That mentality exists till this day. They enjoyed our show as much as the one upstairs and would not have gone through had we not had a line.

I find this curious. A long line indicates a superior show, one worth waiting for. No line indicates a lousy show and that one should leave. Its part of the haunted thing for Halloween, I guess. But I have seen this for other amusements as well; Six Flags and Disney Land come to mind. There is a science to crowd mentality, I do not understand it; I accept it.

The bottom line is (if there is one) charge what the public is willing to pay. I know of no magic formula for this. I am sure that the upstairs haunt had a higher overhead than us and equally certain that they made money. Our goals were not the same. They operated strictly for the money; fun for us, student training and some change left over. Till this day I note that a line out the front door of my haunt is the best sales tool for those driving by, because if I do not have a line, they do just that… drive by.

Next Week, 1984

Mad Hatter

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