The Seance

Okay, I mentioned that I would be doing more in-depth walkthroughs of each room, and talk about some of the effects and techniques I am planning on using in each. Here, dear readers, is the first.

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(I realize very few people reading will actually be visiting the haunted house, but spoilers matter!)

First of all, there is the line. We're doing a rope leading to a large, stone entryway made out of Styrofoam and fabric. The reason for that is to lock out any light, and to allow "Lurch" to gather tickets from guests. One of the problems with our space is that we only have access through one door. Because of this, people will have to criss-cross through the seance room, and out the door. The entryway allows us to hold groups back while other groups exit. The seance allowed us a nice excuse for them, plot-wise to be returning through a room, something you normally don't do in a haunted house. In the seance room, guests will encounter a gypsy woman (played by my sister, Rian) who is swirling around a crystal ball. Overhead, a chandelier swings ominously, and there are pillar candles all around. The room (hopefully) is hung with rich tapestries, and feels heavy with magic.

The candles, obviously, can't be holding a real flame, and I sure as heck don't have the budget to purchase led candles for the amount I am looking for. So, sacrificing a candle-like flicker, I designed a little trick to make lots of pillar candle clusters for pretty cheap. The idea is to use cardboard tubes to fake the body of the candles, glue them into bundles, and hollow out the bottom of the bundle, and place a single low-voltage lightbulb in there. the light glows up through the now-disguised tube, and nobody's the wiser!

Since the seance doesn't have much spooking going along with it, I thought I'd pair it with the next area, the Ghost's Warning! This room comes from another awkwardness about the room. the third area, the vortex, is set up to be a straight shot down to the back of the room, so that guests work their way forward after that. But to get to the starting point of the vortex, they first had to travel behind the librarian's desk, a short hallway, without much room to manuver. It left us without much space to do any tricks, except on top of the desk, which had to be isolated, to keep them from messing with things. What My brother came up with was spooky warning from a ghost, behind a wall of white plastic. There's a plastic available that's semi-transparent, almost milky, that should work well for this. We're planning on doing a Pepper's Ghost Using the library computer and a pane of glass to project an effect in front of a life cast of my brother's face to create the illusion that the face is on fire, and murmuring warnings to turn back. 

Overhead, we're putting a our-foot fluorescent light with a shade on it. The shade will be punctured a billion or so times to scatter small dots of light across the area, without really brightening it much.

Those are the first two areas of the haunted house, visible on the MAP in red and orange. Tune in soon for a glimpse at room number three, The VORTEX! Dun Dun DUNNN!