This month I spoke with Chris Baker, creator and host of Hauntcast (the podcast for home and pro haunters) about Haunted Tiki Island. The episode dropped today. Download it here.

Chris did a great job of editing, cutting 1.5 hours of me blabbing into 25 +/- worthwhile minutes. The interview starts at 1:32:40.

There is one prop from this year that we all loved, and almost everyone had a hand in its creation, but for some reason it would not be photographed. Only one picture came out sharp and it doesn’t have the fog machine going, which really brigs this prop to life. Even photoshopping in some fog doesn’t quite cut it. However he came out great as a prop. So without further ado let introduce Lava Creep!

As you might imagine, Lava creep lives inside our volcano. He is about 8 feet tall and and bellows smoke from his mouth and slits in his ribcage. He stands in a stream of lava which you can see in the picture, but in real life looks very cool. It was rope lights laid out on the ground in a stream pattern, and then two layers of thin black ground cover cloth were laid over them. The criss-crossing patterns from the cloth made a weird effect where it looked like the lights were moving. The rope lights were also on a flicker circuit, so they had a cool smoldering ember look to them. Lava creep was surrounded by lost souls, who were emerging from the magma to wreck havoc on the world.

Here are some other shots of him. They show the smoke and light, but are blurry.

He used to be this guy from 2008:

HedgeBreaker

This guy was out on the hedge and got put away before I could photograph him on Halloween night. He was one of my first scratch built corpses of the year and now I hate him. I think I’ll saw his arms off and cut a big section of his ribs and make then cavity smaller. I like his face though.

This is the bulk of images from Halloween Night. I need to photograph a few props that were taken down too hastily and sort thru the point &shoot pictures. Thanks for looking!

I was just looking at my google calendar for November. It’s mostly empty now. A few bills here, a couple holidays there, and eye exam follow up. It was a big relief.

Just for fun, here are the last three months. I have removed all the personal events so this is just prop making things I needed to do. Dark orange is for weeknight tasks, bright orange is for working in the garage at Patty’s house. Welcome to my nightmare! By the way, I had started way back in april but it was a casual thing. Those were easy days!

Here is one I like; a view of the yard from the street featuring FireBringer.

Next year I am going shot everything in sections and stitch it together into a giant high-res panorama. I would have done that this year, but I am not so sharp at 2:30am and I forgot.

However, by 11 am on November 1st we had all talked it out and decided we were just being nostalgic and we really were excited to do our haunted carnival theme for next year that we all agreed on two years ago.

So we spent yesterday cleaning it all up and throwing out stuff we aren’t going to use or can’t store.

Good bye paper mache bugs.

Good bye Lava Creep.

Good bye Volcano.

Sorry Cauldron Creep, we left you out overnight and the wind wrecked you.

Sorry Praying Mantis, but we need to put this prop away.

Sorry Moth, these webcaster webs actually work.

(Luckily this web has no spiders so he was still alive and got free and flew away when I pulled then webs down.)

Halloween 2009 was a great night!!! We had 500-600 hundred people come thru. Luckily we had enough candy and treats on hand to get thru the ravenous hordes of Trick R Treaters. Quick thanks to Tricia’s Portland family who sent us a box full of halloween pencils, glow in the dark fangs, and spider rings to give out. That really helped spread out the fun.

As always thanks to Patty and Joe for letting us mess up their house again this year. Thanks to my fellow haunt builders and scare-actors. Thanks to all the Trick R Treaters who came by and had so many nice things to say. Thanks to Hauntforum.com for helping me to learn all this crazy stuff.

I am pouring thru hundreds of pictures and a lot of video. I will start posting those here in the next week so stay tuned. Haunted Tiki Island the yard haunt might be done, but Haunted Tiki Island the blog still has quite a bit more to see.

Let me tell you a little story about a man named “Ed”….