Problems for any Haunt

The key to a good Haunt is the personnel. The people that you have working for you must be willing to work together and actually do what they are supposed to do: Scare customers. It doesn't matter if you are a charity haunt, or a for profit haunt. The job is scare the customers.

One of the biggest problems that we had this year was making sure that actors stayed in their assigned areas. This became hugely noticeable about half way through the season. I had actors roaming the Haunt, going into others areas and ruining scares. This is pretty ridiculous. Now, we have a lot of kids that volunteer down there, but the adults that we had were just as bad. Especially on the last weekend. Now to me, the last weekend is just as important as the first weekend. Those customers are paying for a show, and a show they should have. Unfortunately, there were quite a few actors that felt it was time to play and have fun for themselves. From a customer service aspect, they really failed.

Now, I mentioned kid actors. Well, actually, most of our kid positions are behind the scenes. This is where we run into problems. The kids get bored, and don't want to do their jobs. My philosophy on that was to get rid of them. I would rather be short handed then have someone in their not doing their job. But there are others that are: "Oh, they are kids, let them do what they want to do." What, we are not supposed to expect a certain kind of behavior out of kids when it is a volunteer situation? Whatever happened to responsibility? You are going to benefit from the work that is going on, at the very least you should do the best of your ability. With the problems that I encountered this year, I am actually of a mindset to make an age limitation on who can work at the Haunt. My proposed age would be sixteen and older. That or automate it even more and take more kid positions out of there.

Season is Over

Last night was the end of our Haunt season. Quite a few accomplishments for the Lewisburg Haunted Cave and Cave Crew. Ohio Valley Haunts, the most prestigious Haunt Raters in our area ranked us 2nd place in the tri-state area. Active Dayton ranked us 1st place in the Dayton area.

This was a great year and an even better learning experience. I chronicle all that I have learned over the next few months. The main things that I will concentrate on are volunteers, children, and of course, stars.

I hope to work more on props, make up techniques, and a few other things that I wasn't really happy with this past year.