NickG
09-11-2006, 11:15 PM
I grew up a couple miles up a dirt road in VT.. as a kid we always had a neat setup at my parents house, we had a ton of aged netting that was used to cover some sort of fruit trees to keep the birds off.. we would staple it all over the front of the house and the shrubs and light it up with blacklights and use strobes and such... my last year at home before going to college we had the best setup every, and we got about 4 tots. my little sister's generation was basically the last bunch of little kids on our street and everyone had grown up and moved away or was "too old" to go tot'ing.
After I finished scohol I moved down to TN and got married, I was really excited to be able to start haunting my own because we moved into a new subdivision and surly we'd get tons of kids... well, not the first year. I think we got aboug 10. I actually wound up doing it in reverse. nobody was coming to our back section of the neighborhood so I walked around and was handing out candy, a couple streets closer to the main road. You get -lots- of wierd looks when ou do that. (though it's prefectly ok to walk up to a strangers door and ask for it)
Then the next year I built a 15' spider web out of neon green kite string and lit it up with two 18" black lights, it was a huge hit for the 20 or so people that stopped by. again, very disappointing. The year after that I added some more stuff... we live over the crest of a hill so I made a trail of 1 gallon jugs w/ gravel and a tea candle in them leading over the crest of hill we live on down to the rest of the subdivision spelling out C A N D Y with an arrow up the hill... and more folks started coming through.
2 years and a bunch of hard work later, last year was our first big year.. we got about 200 tots. I discovered the halloween monster list, and before I knew it I was building a FCG, corpse hands, PVC static prop guys, some wooden pvc tombstones, added a fog machine, my folks flew down from VT and my sister and her b/f drove down from VA. There were people standing out in the driveway calling their friends to "come check out this cool house" which isn't even spectacular compared to other amateur haunts, but apparrently I'm the only guy in our town doing it, so I can't let my fans down. :)
This year I'm adding some more props and trying to organize it better, I read skullandbones article and lighting and hope to really put that to use combating our street light... adding a witche's lair in the garage.. all sorts of stuff. I've been pretty busy, spending 80% of my free time on props, 10% of it on the internet reading about props and such...
so anyway, that's it I guess. I also have a personal website but it doesn't have any halloween stuff on it, gavush.toplessrabbit.com if you're really bored.
After I finished scohol I moved down to TN and got married, I was really excited to be able to start haunting my own because we moved into a new subdivision and surly we'd get tons of kids... well, not the first year. I think we got aboug 10. I actually wound up doing it in reverse. nobody was coming to our back section of the neighborhood so I walked around and was handing out candy, a couple streets closer to the main road. You get -lots- of wierd looks when ou do that. (though it's prefectly ok to walk up to a strangers door and ask for it)
Then the next year I built a 15' spider web out of neon green kite string and lit it up with two 18" black lights, it was a huge hit for the 20 or so people that stopped by. again, very disappointing. The year after that I added some more stuff... we live over the crest of a hill so I made a trail of 1 gallon jugs w/ gravel and a tea candle in them leading over the crest of hill we live on down to the rest of the subdivision spelling out C A N D Y with an arrow up the hill... and more folks started coming through.
2 years and a bunch of hard work later, last year was our first big year.. we got about 200 tots. I discovered the halloween monster list, and before I knew it I was building a FCG, corpse hands, PVC static prop guys, some wooden pvc tombstones, added a fog machine, my folks flew down from VT and my sister and her b/f drove down from VA. There were people standing out in the driveway calling their friends to "come check out this cool house" which isn't even spectacular compared to other amateur haunts, but apparrently I'm the only guy in our town doing it, so I can't let my fans down. :)
This year I'm adding some more props and trying to organize it better, I read skullandbones article and lighting and hope to really put that to use combating our street light... adding a witche's lair in the garage.. all sorts of stuff. I've been pretty busy, spending 80% of my free time on props, 10% of it on the internet reading about props and such...
so anyway, that's it I guess. I also have a personal website but it doesn't have any halloween stuff on it, gavush.toplessrabbit.com if you're really bored.