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Valerie and I had been meaning to go out to Worlds of Fun for Halloween Haunt this year, but we hadn't had a chance because we had been busy with our own Halloween festivities. We also needed to go out there to renew our season passes for 2009 while they were still discounted. We got to the park around 3pm and our first stop was to pay for our renewals and get them processed. This took less than 5 minutes and it was much easier than having to deal with it at the beginning of next season. Once the administrative part of the visit was taken care of we headed over to Lore of the Vampire. Lore is the only "Extreme Haunt" open on Sundays. In the past this had been one of my favorites, but I was a little disappointed with it this year.

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.

I just wanted to make a quick post letting everyone know that my wife and I are celebrating our 5th Wedding Anniversary today. Below is a picture from that day:

Wedding day: Valerie and I opening presents

Around this time every year after all my outside Halloween decorations are up, and I am able to start putting up my inside decorations people start asking why I do it. Am I charging admission to see my display? Doesn't this take a lot of time? Are you a Satanist? The answers are no, yes, and no respectively. I could leave my answers there, but I feel each deserves a further explanation.

In regards to the first question one of the unspoken rules among home haunters is to never charge admission. While there are some haunters out there that ask for donations to help to defray costs, most that ask for donations are doing so to give to some sort of children's charity. When you start charging admission you become a commercial enterprise. As such you are subject to all sorts of nasty things such as having to abide by fire codes and having to pay royalties for any music you use in your haunt. That's not to say that your haunt shouldn't be as safe as possible. If children are touring your attraction it should be as safe as possible since it is on your property and you probably don't want to have to make a home owner's insurance claim. Again, this is another reason most people don't go commercial since home owner's insurance doesn't cover business activities and you would need to purchase more expensive business insurance.

If you have been following my photo blog you have probably seen some teaser pics from my Halloween set up for this year. If you haven't checked it out recently that's okay too. I needed to take a break from theme park posts and decided that there was no better way than to summarize my haunt progress thus far. All of the photos that are below were taken with my BlackBerry 8330 so the pictures are a little grainy. I plan on taken better pictures with my regular camera, but for the time being these will have to suffice. Over the next couple of weeks I still have more work to do and I will continue to post more pics on my photo blog. A few days before Halloween I will post a large overview of both the outside and inside of my house. Until then, enjoy this preview.