Tomorrow is Friday the 13th, a day to celebrate everyone's favorite hockey-masked serial slasher. But for Halloween fans, it means something more... the official start of the 2024 haunted house season! Many haunts will capitalize on the special date and open their doors to start the season a bit early.
And living in Ohio, haunted house season is a HUGE celebration. Incredible haunted houses everywhere you look across the state are a huge part of why Halloween is such a big deal here. And keeping it all straight is no easy task.
Luckily for us, Maximus Christian Bryant over at the Ohio Haunters Association has done the legwork of taking ALL of the haunted attractions across Ohio (113 in total!) and breaking them into regional lists including location, dates and days of operation, AND ticket price. Literally everything you need in one convenient location. So many haunted houses, so little time.
If you're in Ohio, get out and support your local haunted houses. And if you're not from Ohio, October is a pretty good time to come visit! See you in the queue line!!
I am finding that the older I get the more I look back, longing for the black-and-orange nostalgia and Halloween innocence of my youth. As a kid, I absolutely loved getting the Friday insert section out of the local newspaper each October, eagerly and voraciously devouring page after page of glorious black-and-white ads for all of the local haunted houses (and being an 80s Halloween kid living in Northeast Ohio meant page after page of haunted houses! It seemed like every city had one!).
And even with page after page of wonderful ads, there was always one that caught my attention and became the one I always looked for: Akron's Haunted Schoolhouse and Laboratory. The iconic grim reaper graphic really caught my young eye, and it became the one (technically two) haunted house that my friend Jim and I would always beg our parents to drive us to every Halloween season.
And now it's finally in a nice frame, ready to go up on my wall. Amazing clipart and fonts. Admission $2.00. FREE BABYSITTING! They just don't make 'em like this anymore!
And while I will not be guest-acting at this year's event, I will still be there on Saturday night, getting down disco style. I can't wait to boogie with those disco dumpster babies...
Happy Valentine's Day, all!
Jack-o-lantern drop number three is now complete for this year's Great Pumpkin Project! It was a quick drop en route to the evening's main festivities.
I grabbed the freshly carved jack-o-lantern, loaded him into my car, and headed out.
I reached the parking lot, gathered up the jack and the rest of my gear, and headed in. I entered past the ticket booths and into the large Monster Midway, and calmly walked over to the photo op area. I placed the jack perfectly into the scene, and then continued on to the night's final destination: another crazy night of guest acting at the Akron Haunted Schoolhouse & Laboratory.
I will be doing my part by guest acting in the queue line at my favorite local establishment (who happens to be celebrating their incredible FIFTIETH SEASON this year!). And they have never looked better! I got a chance to go through the Akron Haunted Schoolhouse & Laboratory last week and both houses are looking better than they have in years. If you're in the Northeast Ohio area, come on out tonight and join in on the fun! I'll be waiting for you...
This past weekend I was able to go check out HalloWeekends at Cedar Point. It had been quite a few years since my last visit, so I was pretty excited to get back and see how things had changed. And I was especially excited to bring my son for his first HalloWeekends experience. He assured me and my wife that he was ready to tackle the monsters and haunted houses the park is famous for...
We got there late Friday afternoon, and quickly got two coaster rides in. We would have ridden more, but we were really there for the spooky stuff! We then made our way to the main stage to catch Midnight Syndicate's really cool live performance, Echoes of the Brimstone Club (SPOILER: they performed a variety of their tracks live while carnival performers did their acts. It was a really great show with some really great individual acts - I'm looking at you, Ms. Sword Swallower - and I highly recommend catching it.)
We then made our way to the back of the park to take in the main after-dark scare zone, complete with roaming haunt actors, richly-themed scenery, fog, more fog, haunted walkthroughs and the actual haunted houses.
We ended up skipping the haunted houses due to long lines, but the walkthroughs were detailed really well and provided a nice half-step before finally tackling a true indoor haunt. We crisscrossed our way through the scare zone and then headed for our final destination of the night: Midnight, the lone haunted house located at the front of the park.
My son cautiously got in line and waited for his turn to enter...
He was really nervous as we entered the haunt, but it eventually turned to excitement to see the actors and scenery in each new room. It culminated with a face-to-face meeting with Mr. Midnight, overseer of the entire HalloWeekends festivities, in the final room. He exited the house with a huge grin, telling me how fun it was.
It was the perfect ending, giving him the courage to now go through the full haunted houses back home. And I can't wait to experience THAT with him!
We already have plans to get back to Cedar Point one more time this season to experience the haunted houses and shows we missed on this trip. And my son couldn't be more excited! They really did a great job transforming the park into a full haunted experience for people of any age, and I really recommend it as a part of your October celebrations.
Enjoy some photos from a night at HalloWeekends!
So this one was making the rounds the other day, and it's soooo good I wanted to share it here!
And while I don't yet have an early copy in my collection, Flashbak did us all a favor and posted a ton of the pages from the manual on their site. So much wonderful Halloween and haunted house nostalgia on each page! And even though many of the ideas are no longer relevant in this day and age, I could still sit back and peruse those glorious pages for hours. It really takes you back to that incredible era of haunted houses where literally anything went. Regulations? We don't need no stinking regulations!
Do yourself a favor and check out the truly awesome collection of pages Flashbak posted up. And grab a few of those insanely awesome clipart pages! I'm definitely going to work up something fun with those!!
Enjoy!
There's nothing better than a little Halloween nostalgia, and today we're heading back to those wild and wonderful 80s. So grab the popcorn, get comfy, and prepare yourself for a hilarious look back!
Dr. John's Complete Guide To A Haunted House, Vol. 1 was the first instructional haunted house how-to video to come out during the rise of "professional" haunted house attractions of the early 1980s. It was geared toward Jay Cees and other community groups and was a start-to-finish, comprehensive video guide on how to create and run a financially successful haunted house.
Filled with solid tips on creating a fully-functioning and profitable haunted house attraction, it was also accentuated with enough Halloween creepiness to keep it exciting and thoroughly entertaining. From Dr. John's eccentric character (and the way he "mouths" his cigar while presenting), to the spiciness of the scantily-clad ladies, and even to the somewhat uncomfortable creepiness (I'm looking at you, Cousin It, and the weird Roach Motel "commercial" at the end), the video definitely proves that the 80s were a far different time and place than today.
Unfortunately, Dr. John Anderson passed away just last week, but this slice of VHS gold remains a wonderfully historic look back into the early days of the haunted house industry. Well worth the hour of viewing time!!
(A big thanks to Larry Kirchner of The Darkness Haunted House for posting the video along with the informative intro!)
Rest In Peace, Dr. John...
I have always said that I was very fortunate to have grown up as an 80s Halloween kid in Northeast Ohio. We have an unbelievably rich history of haunted houses dating as far back as the early 70s, and continue to produce some of the best attractions in the country today.
When I was younger, I would race home from school every Friday starting in mid-September and grab the local newspaper. I would immediately pull out the Friday magazine insert, a small self-contained section that would have everything going on for the upcoming weekend. I would flip right past all of the boring concert and festival ads until I found what I was feverishly looking for... the ads for all of the local haunted houses!!
I can still smell the black ink that was slapped onto the porous newsprint paper (you know, the kind that transferred immediately to your fingers as you touched the page?). Page after page of glorious, horrifying clip art, spooky fonts, and outrageous claims. And don't forget the "celebrity" appearances to really seal the deal! I would mark off the ones closest to us, in hopes of having my or one of my friends' parents drive us to one (or more if we REALLY begged!) of those magical locations to get the wits scared out of us while gawking with utter excitement at all the gory props, masks, and scenes. Every weekend up until Halloween night was the same thing. And it was spectacular.
I recently came across this online article from the Akron Beacon Journal, my local newspaper. They had gone back into the photo archives and gathered up a HUGE collection of these old ads that appeared in the newspaper, dating all the way back to 1972.
I couldn't believe the instant joy as I looked through the ads. All those wonderful memories came flooding back as I scrolled, my smile getting wider the further I went.
Enjoy this amazing little slice of Halloween history from my neck of the woods. Most of these haunts are long gone, but their memories are most certainly not forgotten!
Please do yourself a favor and check out the original article. TONS more of these awesome old haunted house ads that offer a glimpse into a bygone era. Enjoy!
