Ravencrest Cemetery

I have been into Halloween since I was very young. I mean, as a kid, who isn't? (Except those poor tortured souls whose families believe Halloween is all about the occult and Satanism and the like) But I was into it in a different way. I do have to give a large amount of credit to my Uncle Dennis (or Uncle Bummer, as I used to call him...another story, anther time...). He was ALWAYS into Halloween and while his sons were growing up and they had a neighborhood full of kids around he would go all-out. I spent a few years there for Halloween and was blown away! A coffin! People buried in leaves in the front yard jumping out and chasing kids as they came by! Hacked electronics stuffed into cheap masks and triggered by motion and sound! And for the longest time, I believed he and I where two of a kind in an all-too-normal world...

My first "haunt" came about when I was somewhere in the ball park of about㺊 or 11 years old. I got my hands on some stretchy spider webs, cased the garage for spare chunks of wood to prop up in the front yard as "tombstones", added a strobe light "borrowed" (I still have it) from my Mom's friend at work and some cardboard skeletons and I was in business! The one comment I remember was from a guy down the street..."Love the graveyard...leaves me screamin'."

 By golly!....I KNEW sarcasm when I heard it (or at least I thought I did...I was used to people harassing me and making fun of me at school. I was a nerd, after all). Well, that would not do, so next year, I got a Crypt Keeper mask(I was a HUGE Tales From the Crypt fan!), hacked an RC car I had (At 12, no less! I got that packrat mentality from my Grandfather...always taking stuff apart and saving it...a Haunter in the making for sure!) and used the servo to make the Keeper's head turn from side to side when people came up to get candy at the door. I hid the controller in a belt under my robe my Mom had made me and could control it unseen. I also worked in a haunted house put on at the gym where my Sister did competitive gymnastics. I built a prop of a guy getting hung from one of the high bars, and his body would drop as kids climbed through the foam pit underneath him. That was was somewhere around 1992...

 It was finally around 1994, when I was in High School, had a job, made a little money, that I was able to make things get a little more interesting...

I decided one year to build a frame covered in black plastic to enclose the front porch of my Parents' suburban Detroit house. People had to go past the graveyard out front (still not scaring anyone) and enter the very dark, except for a blacklight and a strobe light, enclosure around the porch, where I awaited in costume, with my Crypt Keeper, and cool-mist vaporizer connected to a network of Pipeworks (remember those?) to distribute anemic "fog" to the enclosure. Behind the front door was a friend holding a string connected to a big, hairy spider hiding in the shadows above, and when people came in, they passed the spider to get their candy. He would then lower the spider down behind them to just about eye-level, and when they turned to leave....MAGIC!

 The next year, 1995-ish, was my first experience teaching me that haunting is not all fun and games and everything does NOT go right the first time (translation: I'm not as clever as I thought I was last year...just lucky).

So I built the same structure as the year before. Still had the flat-black painted wood, some left-over black plastic cut to the right sizes...but something else showed up this Halloween....WIND! Now, had I used 4X4s and carriage bolts, all would be right with the world. But I was 16, and the warped, cheap 1X2s with 2-inch drywall screws were just as good. I mean they worked last year, right? Well, let's just say, me and my friends ended up dressing up, the "structure" ended up in a crumpled mess under the deck in the backyard (along with Jimmy Hoffa?) due to my temper, and I ended up chasing people around the yard with a weedwhacker since we didn't own a chainsaw...not the best Halloween.

 After that, I spent another year or two helping my uncle and then it was off to college for some Electrical Engineering learning and not much Halloween.

2001 brought a transfer to Northern Virginia, a new house of my own, and a wife who was...less than enthusiastic, or helpful, when it came to Halloween. We got married in August, so no Halloween really happened other than carving pumpkins and handing out candy.

2002-2005 I reinstated my front yard enclosure idea. Only this time it involved fencing stakes pounded into the ground and 2X4s bolted to those...not going ANYWHERE...pretty much. I had joined a band, and the drummer and the singer where Halloween nuts as well. The drummer had a fog habit...the first year he ran the fog machine so much that the entire street was foggy...no lie. We could see the rays of light from the streetlight down the road trying to pierce the dense clouds that had rolled outward from the yard. These years also brought a bigger, better graveyard, fog chillers, an FCG, fancy lighting, scene setting, more fog machines, misters, large amounts of spider webs, etc...And, my first encounters with kids who were destined to be just as obsessive as I was about Halloween. I mean, when you pull up in the driveway, coming home from work, a few days before Halloween and there are kids wandering around your yard asking if you're doing the Halloween stuff this year, and expressing GENUINE concern that you won't have enough time to put it all up in the next few days (to the point of telling you, a complete stranger, that you'd better get started right away), THAT is a kid that will end up one of us!

2006 brought a divorce, a move to a condo, finding a girl with a Halloween fixation almost as strong as mine, and expanding the haunt to the home of the parents' of the singer in my band (her Mom always wished she could be at my house for Halloween, so this year we brought Halloween to her, in a bigger and better fashion than ever before!). For details on that, check out the first installment of the blog, since it was just over a year ago and I still remember it rather vividly.

 After that, my new sexy beast and I moved to my Motherland of Detroit, purchased ourselves a home in a historic neighborhood (1928 brick Tudor...PERFECT for Halloween!) and had people looking at us weird almost immediately. More on? in the blog section as well.

NOW...we're in Kansas just outside Kansas City (no, we're not military). We have a house with a huge corner lot and a 3-car garage with enough space to park "Rose" our '77 Cadillac Hearse! We wowed the neighbors in 2008 by putting on a display the likes of which they had never imagined, and probably scaring the crap out of a lot of people in the process (Ghosts and hearses and corpses, OH MY!). We added our mausoleum, more fence sections, better lighting, better sound, more tombstones, Ichabod (our own "Pumpkin King") and our rising Nosferatu. We had a few hundred kids and a lot of adults as well on Halloween night. 

 Its merely March, and I've already started building props for this year. The future sure looks scary(the current economy notwithstanding...)!

 Hauntingly yours,

 -EEric