# Nothing ever goes as planned...



## hedg12 (Jul 6, 2008)

So I spent who knows how many hours over the last month and a half writing the script for my haunt, recording the audio, editing each voice with Audacity to make them individual, writing the VSA routines, and fine tuning the whole thing to make it as good as I possibly could. I even went so far as to set my whole haunt up in my barn to test it. Lightning, fog, 5 different routines, everything worked perfectly. So this morning I went out to start setting everything up, & decided to give it one more test run before disconnecting everything to move it. I hit the power button on the PC & something went POP! I looked down & sure enough, the magic smoke was floating out of the computer.  I tore the PC apart hoping it was the power supply, but as soon as I got the side panel off I could see a capacitor on the motherboard that had exploded. Teach me to rely on a 4 year old clunker PC. Any other time I'd have another PC laying around but of course today, no such luck. I couldn't use my laptop because I needed 2 parallel ports to run relay boards. Needless to say, I was not happy.

So there I was, my whole grand plan down the tubes. I contemplated finding a can of gas and a match, but thought better of it. So I ended up only using a small part of my stuff because I spent too much time futzing around with the PC, but ya know, it still turned out pretty good. Once I realized I couldn't do what I wanted, I relaxed & just had fun with it. I'd been so intent on making everything perfect that I'd lost sight of why I was doing it in the first place. I know it's been said here & other places many times before, but it really is all about having fun & enjoying the holiday.




Happy Halloween, everybody!


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## Dr Morbius (Sep 21, 2004)

Tell me about it..My fog machine crapped out, my hangman stopped kicking, and my ground breaker's jaw motor fried. I put it all out anyways and made do like you did, relaxed and enjoyed the night. Love your haunt BTW! That skelly cracks me up!


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## Creeper (Nov 7, 2008)

Popup wall wart fried, Shiatsu Ground Breaker fried from overuse, my version of Fetch's Little Sister stopped pulling her head back up and one other attempt never materialized. It turned out to be a great haunt and a fantastic Halloween. I hope everyone's was great too!


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## Spookie (Aug 26, 2008)

Hedg12, your dead "red head" is a riot. Quite the chatterbox and simply delightful. Love the dialog or should I saw monolog. Sorry you lost the computer at the last minute like that. Ain't that the way it goes sometimes. If it makes you feel any better I took a boxed prop out to use it unexpectedly this year only to find it completely dead. It was a Gemmy Flaming Giant Skull which I bought on clearance a week ago and thought I would use next year, never taking it out of the box. I ended up throwing some lighting inside to illuminate it and made do. Definitely not the same effort put into it as your set up, but dead is dead in Halloweenland but sometimes things come back to life in ways we don't anticipate. Hope you get it going again.


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## figstimpy (Oct 15, 2008)

Yes the goblins were certainly out this year. My MIB decided at 4:30 pm tonight that was done for the year. It has been outside working for the whole month of October. The one night it counts the motor dies. I just ran it with the audio and lights and kids still loved it.

The 30-50km/h winds didnt help the look of my FCG just looked like a ghost blowing in the wind.

I was surprised the near freezing temperature didn't keep the kids from going out and having fun. Still had 136 trick or treaters


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## Kaoru (May 6, 2009)

I think a good bit of people were in the same boat. I know here in CT we had weather problems that kept us from putting up the walls we wanted to set up for our haunt but regardless we still put up 2 major props that Terror had created and set up our porch area for our witch's room. It turned out pretty good and we had about 250 or so haunters pass by. We all had a good time and just dealt with the nasty wind and light rain. Yeah gotta pick up all of that stuff later on today.


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## erie_pa_halloween_guy (May 26, 2006)

Rain all morning here in NC caused my fcg rotisserie motor to short luckily all that happened wasmy gfi tripped. An hour later and a good drynig out all was good. At the end of the night my son fell and scraped up his foot pretty bad. All in all it was an ok night


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## madmomma (Jul 1, 2009)

80% of my lighting went out during a test run in the day. Luckily my neighbor came over to put in a new switch in. Saved the day (actually night)! Spent good part of the day fixing and re-securing props that kept blowing over from the wind. Gusts were very high. Today, mild rain, NO wind...go figure. Still turned out to be a great Halloween!


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## SeaHoCaptain (Sep 20, 2009)

We stress test everything the nights before but still things gave us fits in the moments before the guest arrived. Strobe in the coffin died. The two motion detectors took on lives of their own. But all and all it came out GREAT.

David


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## berzerkmonkey (Oct 31, 2006)

Well, I guess we weren't the only ones with problems yesterday. We had crappy weather, very high winds (the pumpkins wouldn't stay lit), the sound system wasn't as loud as I hoped it would be, and my head popper died before any kids showed up. Oh, and we can't find the tripod, so I couldn't take any night photos, even though I finally learned how to use the manual settings on the camera!

Sigh.


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## michael myers (Sep 3, 2007)

Yes, the gremlins were out in full force last night...

Friday night, our back yard haunt went flawless, we toured over 150 people through, although the board timing on my coffin and kicking guy had to be reprogrammed mid show. 
Last night, well, thats a totally different story...

We kept having different blacklites decide they didnt want to work...the board on kicking guy and the coffin totally fried, and after touring another 205thru, the rain came and we had to turn away over 100 more just "dying" lol to get into our back yard. Come 10:00 pm last night, we were shut down...couldnt take any chances with the guests and all of that electrical wiring back there


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## dionicia (Aug 4, 2007)

We had over 230 ToTs this year. No actors and I didn't have time to set up the 3 axis skulls or the animated pumpkins or set up more background lighting. I was able to spray on some webbing which shocked me that it went up without a fuss. Couldn't find the timers for the fog machines so they had to be pressed when there was a spare moment. The worst of all, the ghosts on the Axworthy couldn't handle the speed. Next year, I need a stronger line for the Axworthy and the Ghosts. That happened at the beginning of the night.

Jack Skellington was a hit as was my coffin with the animated lid. I didn't have enough lighting under the pergola so it was a chore to see the openings to the ToT's bags aka pillowcases.

A few friends stopped by and two of them stayed to keep me company. I ended up just wearing the cape that I had made to go with my dress as I was too tired to change. None of the ToTs seem to notice. Of course it was dark under the pergola so I doubt they could see me.

*sigh* now to take it all down.


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## Merlin (The Quiet One) (Feb 23, 2006)

Isn't it amazing how we stress over our haunts that didn't turn out nearly like we had planned - yet someone comes by and is thrilled with what we have thrown together. This has been one of the worst years for decorations, I finally gave up and just took part of them down. My shiatsu guy was dressed haphazadly and made some kind of weird noise that I found to be a little irritating and nearly everyone commented on how cool it was that he made that noise! We had about 35-40 TOTs - up from the last couple years. And had more fun than years past. Now to take it down and prepare for next year!


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## Ironside (Aug 1, 2008)

High winds broke a few of my tomb stones in half... kept having to re-adjust and anchor everything on the lawn... one of my crypt ghoul props broke a bit on the lawn (again, stupid wind) and about an hour into trick or treating, my body-bag thrasher stopped working.

Boooo-urns on this Halloween... still worked out awesome in the end, but would have been that much nicer without the set backs.


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## Haunt Master (Nov 2, 2005)

A combination of too many 3- way plugs and drop-cords and too much rain had me shut down with in an hour. everything worked great until "showtime". After a couple of blown bulbs and constant tripping of the GFCI i decided to leave well enough alone before someone got "lit up". Once again this year I learned that the old saying "if you build it they will come" is not true. I've rode the neighborhoods and can't find anybody that is even close to the level of work that I put in my haunt but still no one comes. But never fear I will be at it again next year


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## hedg12 (Jul 6, 2008)

Dr Morbius said:


> Love your haunt BTW! That skelly cracks me up!





Spookie said:


> Hedg12, your dead "red head" is a riot. Quite the chatterbox and simply delightful. Love the dialog or should I saw monolog.


Thanks, guys! "Grandma" was originally supposed to banter/bicker back and forth with "Grandpa", the tombstone with the 2-axis skull on top I built last year. She's just a Gemmy skull that's using a "toy motor" circuit to control the jaw. I found her monologue online somewhere (sorry, can't find the link just now) as a bunch of individual sound files that I edited together. I just dumped the file on an old iPod & set it to loop continuously. She sure saved the day!


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## Bilbo (Dec 13, 2007)

I couldn't find or come up with a suitable script for my talking Boris's (Bori?) so they got left out. The flying bats flapped but wouldn't fly in their circle and my thunder track on minidisc kept quitting instead of repeating. Bat still looked cool and I had the track on CD too, so that still worked. 

My biggest scare was when I tried to use my web gun (homemade) with the air compressor I borrowed from my dad. The compressor would not turn over, and was blowing fuses left and right. I was on the phone to a master electrician friend of mine and my father for over an hour before I figured out the issue was the extension cord I was using. After I plugged directly into my well-wired garage it ran like a dream. PITA to fill up, roll to front yard, web, then wheel back to refill again, but worked. Best part is I didn't break the compressor like I was afraid happened!


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## fick209 (Aug 31, 2009)

2 hrs before tot'ing time 2 of my workers called in sick (lots of flu going around area) no time to find replacements but a quick shift around of jobs for remaining workers to do and all went well. I had planned on being in charge of videos and pics all night but ended up being the replacement worker in the house so didn't get too many pics, oh well there's always next year


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## CAH (Sep 8, 2009)

All of your nights sound like mine. My stirring cauldron binded up and stopped working during my test run the night before. I had tested her for over an hour on three different occasions without a hitch. My Boris talking pirate was great until my i-pod just stopped working for no apparant reason an hour into the haunt. My Donna the Dead did not work even though I had put fresh batteries in her (she worked flawlessly the next morning taking everything down!). The worst part was that we were unable to put up our dot maze. This is my favorite thing of the whole haunt but it was just too darn windy the day before and day of to put it up. Our night was not windy at all and it would have worked great if we did have it up! Oh well, always next year!! Our neighborhood loves it and we had die-hards stay until three in the morning!


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## smileyface4u23 (Apr 1, 2008)

Wow - sounds like we were all having some sort of problems this year. The LED's in my 3 axis skull and my dead bride worked fine for weeks before Halloween - put the 9 volt batteries on them right before it got dark, and they blew. Fog machines wouldn't work, blew the circuit breaker in the garage so I had to reroute a lot of power, and one of my brand new gemmy's (heads up harry) fell on his face and decided he was broken.  But, we still had a lot of great stuff and a great time! 

Hedg - LOVE THE SKELLY!!!


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## hedg12 (Jul 6, 2008)

Thanks Smiley!


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## Dead Things (Apr 4, 2009)

I thought the gremlins only lived around these parts. Lost the rotisserie motor in the cauldron, had a gfi circuit die as well as a fogger and a compressor (thanks to friends who came thru with both a fogger and a compressor). My axworthy which worked like a charm all month long kept getting tangled up, eventually failing catastrophically. And a hanging ghoul kept getting blown down even landing on the roof! Lessons for next year, waterproof waterproof waterproof.


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