HALLOWEEN 2004
October 30th - Day 30
Friday, I spent the day putting out as many props as possible.
Ugh!
That's all I had to say by the end of Friday night. The wind came first followed by the rain. Blew my stuff all over the place. The tent tried to fly away. Props tried to blow down. We had some damage but the turnout was still good. I went to bed Friday night at 11 p.m. This was the earliest I'd been to bed since September 30th. I awoke around 10 a.m. this morning. No new prop to put out. I had the trike in reserve to put out this morning but in my zeal to put out the electric chair prop I let the trike run by itself for two hours. This would have been fine if it hadn't run off onto the grass. After a while of that the wheel went sideways and burned the motor up. Oh well. Spent the day putting out more stuff and a few things that a friend that owns a few commercial haunts loaned me at the last moment.
The Electric Chair
This was one of the two props that Scott from Haunts NW loaned me. He came to visit so we could go license a hearse I sold him and he brought this and the coffin jumper with him. Must be nice to just have stuff like this laying around extra.
The guy in the chair jerks back and forth. We hooked a fog machine to him to make it look like he was being cooked and a strobe light on the front of him completed the effect. He was set up right next to the donation/raffle tent so as people were standing in line we'd set him off using an X10 remote. As he was shaking someone at the donation table would hit the fog button and he looked great. We had to put a sign on him explaining that he wasn't part of the raffle.
The photo above was supposed to be today's prop. I put him out on various occasions during the month but wanted him running all day today. He's powered by a windshield wiper motor and a 12 volt deep cycle battery. He was built mostly to prove that I could as I'd been told by several folks that it wasn't possible. I ran him several times for over an hour without him ever slowing down. He had a tendency to slowly drift though. After about 30 minutes it would work its way off the driveway. In a straight line that wasn't a problem. It was strong enough to motor right through the grass in a straight line. The motor tended to shift while circling in the grass because I never got around to fastening the motor in place. I just cut a hole in the step and shoved the motor through. For next year I'll throw another motor on it real quick and put it back out. I messed traffic up pretty well when I did have it running. You'd see folks turn around and come back by to see if I really had a skeleton stabbing a kid in the face doing donuts in my driveway. Like I'd have anything else.
There's a video below of him pedaling around in my driveway.
It still made a cool prop in the yard over the weekend.
Click here for day 31 - Halloween