All Hallows' Eve...Eve

Two days until H-Day. The installation is going well. Too well. I find I can't spend more than a little while in the room without feeling like something is going to sneak up on me. Part of that is the soundtrack I picked. Last year I used a piece of a "ghostly voices" track for my Evil Eye, which was a big part of its success. This year I'm using that same track, but the whole thing, looped over and over. And over.

It whispers things like "Get Out," and "Help Me," which served as inspiration to decorate the walls with those phrases. The "walls" are just a series of solid color bedsheets that I stapled to the garage ceiling to block off the rest of the junk I've got in there. This is so visitors don't have to experience my Drill Press of Doom, or my Electric Sander of Mild Annoyance.

Anyway, I've got the room laid out with most of the decor in place, but one of my challenges was to figure out how to light all this. I didn't have too many choices, really. I could spend a lot of time and effort laying out some kind of lighting scheme and then figuring out where and how to mount lights, or I could just throw some fluorescent blacklight bulbs into my existing ceiling fixtures and call it a day. Actually, I was a little hesitant to do even this, because using blacklight is one of those things that I might consider cheating in some circumstances. In the end I'm glad I did it though. It creates a truly ethereal look when illuminating a room full of white sheets, and it also lets me do the aforementioned painting in blacklight-sensitive paints. Nothing says "Go Away" like glowing red paint on a glowing white sheet.

While I've got the bed and dresser in place and working, I've decided to not do anything with the mirror. My plan initially was to suspend it from a ceiling joist with some fishing line so it appears to be floating on the wall, but I just don't think that's going to happen. When putting a real dark ride together at a theme park, there's an extra layer of safety that goes into anything that's suspended over people's heads. While the mirror isn't in the same ballpark as some of the contraptions that would normally fall under that spec, that is one of the things that cross my mind when I think "Well, why don't I just hang it from the ceiling with fishing wire?" There's a lot that could go wrong and I'm not willing to risk that. Scaring kids I'm okay with. Injuring them, not so much.

Last week I promised to write more details about the haunted drawers, so I apologize for not doing so today. The problem is that I want to do that when I have time to write a really good description, complete with diagrams and pictures to illustrate how it works, and I just haven't had that kind of time, what with actually trying to construct this whole thing. I promise more details soon.

In the mean time, there are still a few things to complete before Wednesday. I've got to finish cleaning up the room and getting everything off the floor, decide what other pieces of furniture I may need in there, and come up with a sign to put in front. Because this is turning out so sublimely unnerving, I've decided to make it an optional experience, giving people the choice to just bring their kids to the front door for candy if they want to skip it. This way the only nightmares they'll get are from eating too many Smarties and fun-size Milky Ways.

I'll leave you with a couple more bad pictures of the current state of the room (standard cameras are not good at dealing with primarily ultra-violet light sources without special filters).