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Last year, we made the jump to becoming a "charity haunt," running a canned food drive during our trick-or-treat. We set up a special display to announce the Halloween night food drive and the trick-or-treaters, their parents and friends responded big time! In just two hours, we collected 143 items of food and $74.30 for the Akron-Canton Regional Food Bank.
We had such a great response in our first year, we have no choice but to do it again this year and go even bigger! The announcement display is now up again in the front yard and the word is being spread throughout the neighborhood and beyond!
On Halloween night, any trick-or-treater, parent, or curious onlooker that brings in a canned food or monetary donation to our yard haunt and places it into the coffin will get an extra-special treat bag along with their standard candy handout.
We will have a bag with extra candy treats, a glow-in-the-dark "I Filled the Coffin for a Cause" pin and a cool plastic jumping spider! And if we run out of treat bags, we'll give out some full-size candy bars as a thanks to all who donate.
So if you're in the Akron area on Halloween night, stop by, drop in a donation, and let's do some good for our community! Let's smash the numbers we collected last year!
See everyone in one week!!
I can finally reveal the big announcement for the 2017 haunt season!
Okay, technically it may only be a canned food drive, but this Halloween, we have decided to try and make a difference in our community! I think we are at the point now where we draw enough people on Halloween night and could make a real impact.
This Halloween, we will be collecting canned food items and donations for the Akron Canton Regional Food Bank. We're asking for trick-or-treaters, parents and curious onlookers to bring a couple canned food items, drop them into our "Coffin for a Cause," and receive a special treat bag for their donations. And this will be outside of the standard trick-or-treat candy handed out inside our ghoulish crypt.
After seeing the success of home haunts like Chris Ainsworth's Thornhill Woods Haunted House and Jason Becker's Graves of the Groves, I thought, "Why not Highbury Cemetery?"
The answer was obvious and this became the focus for the 2017 yard display (but don't worry, I still found time to add a few more horrific new props to this year's display, too!). I ended up taking an old, oversized coffin prop - in fact, one of the very first props ever built for Highbury Cemetery a LONG time ago - and ripped it down, resizing and repurposing it into the "Coffin for a Cause." I created the new lid art and painted it up, then turning the same look and feel to the food drive sign.
The sign itself was done on the absolute cheap - tiled printouts wheat pasted to an old piece of plywood. I really hope that the weather holds out, as any ran could make that thing peel like a banana. I'll keep an eye to the forecast and probably just cover it up with a tarp during any periods of precipitation.
Once all the pieces were finally completed, the display was put up on the lawn. Curious onlookers made double-takes as they slowly drove by. By the time I had made final adjustments to the lighting, four different neighbors had already stopped by, excitedly asking if they could drop canned food items in the coffin now. Definitely a very promising start to a new chapter in the history of Highbury Cemetery. I'm hoping that our neighbors and friends turn out with plenty of donations to a very worthy community cause and we can all make a big difference!
This display will be the only thing on our lawn and will remain up until Halloween night, when the big show takes place. The coffin will then be placed at the top of my driveway, where all of the donations will be collected. We'll also have the special treat bags ready to hand out to all.
Less than two weeks until the big night. Let's do this, Akron!!
