Haunted Castle

Last year for Taylor's birthday party, we decided to celebrate a couple of weeks early and have a Halloween party with a Haunted House. My SIL Kelly decided that she wanted to do a Halloween party for her day care kids, and my neice Jadyn wanted to have a party as well. We got the keys to the building on Friday afternoon, and by Saturday at 1:00, we had decorated the party room and put up an AWESOME Haunted House.We didn't do a lot of pre-planning for the HH part, but it still turned out really well, especially considering what we had to work with. We didn't buy anything new, just used our own combined (mine, my MIL's, and my three SIL's) Halloween costumes and decorations. The HH room wasn't very big, maybe only 20x25 feet at most. I'll have to see if I can dig up some pictures from it.

Anyway, since we did such an amazing job (when the parents came to pick up their kids, they wanted to go through, then told some of their friends, so we were guiding people through for about 2 hours after the last party ended!), we were asked to put together another one for the Holstein Community Foundation as a fundraiser. It was held on the lower level of the old Holstein school. Kelly was dressed up as Spiderella, and had written out a history of our castle that she told our guests as she gave them a guided tour through the basement of our castle.

All in all, it was a pretty good weekend. The foundation raised a little more than $1500 (which is really good for a town that has less than 250 people and the closest town to them - Roseland - has less than 275 people). Friday night was our Kids' night, and we just changed a few things to make it a little less scary for the little ones that wanted to come through. Saturday night was our biggest money maker (we charged $2 more per person, and had more people come through). We had several drunks come through, but only had to kick one out after he kept yelling at us to show him our "ladies" (he used a quite vulgar term that I won't repeat). Other than him, we all had a great time!

Here are a few highlights (there are more pictures here):

Last week, I showed you a picture of my nephew Holden doing his little dance. The above picture is what he looked like on Saturday - pretty freaky with a strobe light going!

My SIL Brooke was CREEPY! She just followed people and moved from room to room, not saying a single word. (The picture is foggy because she's in the crypt where we had the fog machine.)

My nephew Cole played the headless guy. My father-in-law had built a small guillotine for us, but we couldn't figure out how to make it look real without hurting someone. So we hid FIL, Cole, and the guillotine behind a curtain with a slit cut in it. Cole started yelling stuff like, "No! No! Don't kill me!", the guillotine would drop, and Cole would fall through the curtain at peoples' feet. Then FIL would stick his head out (with an executioner's mask on), grunt, and pull Cole back through. Poor Cole's elbows and knees were swollen by the time we were done Saturday night!

Behind Cole, you can see another one of my SILs, Jocelyn. She and I were in the same room, and she played the Alchemist. We had a really good time, and got quite goofy on Friday night (we were the comic relief between scary rooms), and on Saturday night we broke out the Flash paper. Between groups, we were rolling the paper, and couldn't stop ourselves from singing (a less vulgar version of) a Jay & Silent Bob "song" (**WARNING** Not for little ears, and not appropriate for work!).

We were lucky enough to have Mark from Gentert Packing volunteer to be our butcher. He brought his saw, a couple of cow hearts (one is on the tray next to the table), and a cow tongue (hanging over the front of the table) to add to the grossness of it all. Kelly kept telling people that the tongue was real, but few believed her and touched the tongue anyway - YUCK!

This is poor Claude. We made him for our Halloween party last year, and this year, we added the ribs. The ribs were made from cardboard and monster mud, then my SIL painted them.

Would you believe that these pumpkins are made from newspaper, paperbags, egg cartons, cardboard, paint, and "monster mud"? They took a little while to make (mainly due to drying time), but were a lot easier than we had thought. I wish we had taken pictures after each step, but we had them almost done by the time we thought of it. I'll try to get a little tutorial put together in the next few days, and I plan on making some for our house in the summer, so hopefully I'll remember to take pictures of each step.