The Mansion of Terror 2007 Season is in full swing...

Usually around July I get a few emails from haunters who want to start a professional haunted house and they ask for advice on what they can do in July to prepare for the coming October season. The answer is really you're too late and you need to start planning for the next year. By July we need to have all of our legwork done and begin our buildout process. A haunted house is definitely a year-round part-time labor of love. When our 2006 season ended, we were already planning for the 2007 season in how we stored our props, information we gathered from the season wrap up and exit polling, and how the workshop would be reconfigured for the next year.

Here we are at April 19th. In the off-season (From November until now) the managers have been meeting at least once a month to brainstorm new themes, new marketing strategies, new prop construction, and new prop purchases. One thing we do to stay fresh is to rebuild our haunted house from the ground up each year. We try to reuse existing props but in new ways with new theming and always adding in new elements to the production. Our customers definitely appreciate this and they always know they're not going to see the same haunted house over and over again.

So at this point in the year, we have our new themes for each haunted house. For anyone not familiar with Mansion of Terror, we run two haunted houses at the same location. Each haunted house has a completely different theme. It's more work to do this, but it's also a powerful market advantage and our exceptional growth year over year tells us it's a good thing.

Along with themes, we have our room designs and the major elements for those rooms. This lets us know early on what props need to be constructed and which need to be purchased. Our sound and lighting plans are finished. Phase I of the website overhaul will happen over the next couple of weeks.

We are gearing up for a road trip to HauntCon. Looks like we'll have a caravan of two vehicles to take 7 of us to Detroit for the show. I'll be presenting on Friday about our infrared flashlight haunted house from 2006. We'll also be purchasing some of our 2007 props at the show. Normally our managers and actors will split up at Hauntcon. Some will take in all the actor classes with the intent to imploy some of what was learned with actor training in September. The other managers attend the classes on haunted house operations, scares, and marketing.

It's going to be an exciting year...

- Norm