Before I start talking about what went right this year, I want to go over what went wrong in the past. The first year I did any kind of display for Halloween was back in 2006. It was the first Halloween after we moved into our first and current house. I had been looking online at a lot of other people's yard haunts and decided it would be fun to do my own. We had received some gift cards from a house warming party and used those to buy the metal fencing I use today. However, because the fencing was a little on the pricey side we only fenced in about a third of our yard. We had only 6 tombstones and a noose that I hung in the tree. The decorations were nice for Halloween, but they definitely weren't going to scare anyone. On Halloween night I had creepy music playing as well as fog. The fog machine worked well in tests I had done, but it couldn't handle the load I tasked it with on Halloween night. The nozzle on the machine melted and I think the heat exchanger stopped working as well. This occurred around 8pm so it was still early. We had only a dozen trick-or-treaters that year so that was disappointing as well.
The next year I upped the ante. I doubled the amount of fencing and it went almost the entire perimeter of the front yard. I added more tombstones, I made a few wooden crosses, a toe-pincher coffin, made a zombie-ground breaker out of a kid's Halloween costume, I boarded up the windows on the house, and I bought a skeleton for the noose. In preparation for the event I bought a new low-end professional fog machine at the end of September. I received it mid-October but it was DOA. I sent it back immediately, but due to low stock I wasn't expected to receive the replacement before Halloween. With this in mind I scrambled to get a fog machine and I bought one similar to the one used in 2006. Once again it couldn't handle the load I put on it. It still works to this day, but only for light use. I even made my own soundtrack for the event (this can be heard on the Music page). I did everything possible to make sure Halloween would turn out great. Unfortunately, between having defective equipment and an intermittent mist on Halloween we only had around 20 ToTs.
I told myself that this year would be different. I wanted to make a big impression on the kids. Additionally, I had already planned on having a party the week before Halloween and I wanted to make a big impression on those guests as well. For the graveyard I added a few more tombstones, ground breakers, and I bought all new LED floodlights to light the haunt. On the inside I used scene-setter material and covered all the walls with a stone wall motif. I made a coffin coffee table, made bloody hand prints on the back door, and had bloody knives in the kitchen sink. The party went well, and to a certain degree served as a test for the fog machine in the front yard. I did another test a few days prior to Halloween and I made a few adjustments to my setup. I wanted to the music to be even better than last year so I created a 5.1 Dolby Digital track. The speakers next to the house played spooky music, and I strategically placed the rest of the speakers in the yard by ground breakers with corresponding sounds.
On Halloween night everything worked fabulous. Several people were taken by surprise with the random groanings of my my props. The wind was less than 3 mph and due to the adjustments I had made the fog just floated over the graveyard all night. Lots of parents stopped at my house to watch the graveyard as their kids went down the rest of the block. People stopped their cars and took pictures with their phones. Other folks who I had only talked to online made a point to stop by to take a peek. Younger kids made their parents come with them to the door because they were scared. Even older kids were afraid. A mom came to the door with her daughter and commented that she came to the door because her daughter was scared. After the girl got her candy and was walking away, the mom confessed that her daughter was 13. When you can scare a 13 year-old just by having the right ambiance you're doing it right. I had no actors or moving props to cause jump scares. I just finally achieved the perfect atmosphere to allow people's imaginations take over and do the scaring for me.
By the end of the night we had over 60 ToTs. Over triple what we had the previous year. Granted, having weather in the low 70's that night as well Halloween being on a Friday night didn't hurt. I would also like to think that handing out full size candy bars along with having an awesome house aided in that total. The only thing that went wrong was the battery life on an MP3 player I was using. I setup a heartbeat sound in the coffin with a red light to pulse with the sound. The MP3 player had a rated battery life of 6 hours which would have been sufficient. However, I think it lasted only 3.5 hours. So towards the end of the night that effect was no longer going. On the plus side, most people who saw the yard after that stopped working didn't realize that was there and they were still usually very impressed. So while not everything worked as planned, it was as close to perfection as it could have been.