items walking away

[scattered screams]

How do you haunts keep your props from being knocked over picked and walking away? What I mean is I have a lot of small items sitting on tables and shelves and really don't want come up missing.

[Darkangel]

Glue or screw the things down on the table or shelves?

DA

[Jim Warfield]

that 1st October.

I opened my haunt I lost things that were original and hand made by me!
I was very upset. Then I calmed and computed the money I now had that I would not have had before and I considered it "selling" those missing items, and they sold for alot of $ at that rate..so I wasn't as upset anymore.
But it stills "Sucks".
I envision a shrine someplace full of Ravens Grin momentos kept by some strange "Fan".
Then it gets scary.

[soultrkr]

Gorilla glue

[Dr. Giggles]

Gorilla glue or the threat that they are being monitored. But i would recomend that as a last resort. Usually jusst the threat of security cameras are enough.

[The13thHour]

Screw it down, glue it down, wrap wire around it and run a screw where it cannot be seen and wrap the wired around it. I try to keep anything I don't want to walk off put far enough out of reach it would be hard to get to but I still secure it. We usually put a thin coat of um, water soluble lube on things to make it gross if someone grabs it.

[Allen H]

#1 Have a quality show, people don't piss on the sidewalk at disneyland. the more it looks like you care about your show the more that caring is passed on to them

#2 Give them options, If there are three things in their reach all will be messed with, If there are 70 things they can reach then none of them will be messed with.

#3 Gorilla glue on the bottom and KY on top. Dont put petroleum jelly on latex props, it eats them. Also it helps to put a curtain after the "lubed" tops because they will find a spot to wipe their hands. At Skull kingdom we lubed a few props and then the next set was down some stairs people kept wiping the lube onto the stair hand rail which was really unsafe.

#4 use props that people dont want to touch, If its fabric make it wool, if it needs to be wooden make it unsanded, their is a visible texture to things that we dont want to touch and sprinkling that in your haunt really helps keep the touching down.

#5 Spray adhesive, I really like Tandy leathers spray contact cement, it adds a bit of texture to things you spray it on and makes them stay "sticky" for a long time.
Allen H

[Banshee]

We have just about everything screwed down to the surfaces. Plumbers strapping, wire and fender washers come in handy too for the hard to mount things.
Allan has a good psych point there.. if the first & nearest things are secured then they are more likely to think the others in the rest of the show are too..

[Jim Warfield]

"Securing" the big rubber snake

I really did not want to put screws through it or wires around it, so I put a clamp on it, attached a 1/4" steel cable to the clamp. The steel cable was about 15 inches long, then it attached to a block of wood about 10 by 2 by7 inches. Kind of the" Gas Station rest room key design treatment ".
People would think they were going to steal or just carry it through the house but that block of wood changed their minds, it became sort of unweildly.
It never traveled too far away after that.
I actually have pretty good customers here who don't steal. There are a few people who will not quit touching items no matter what you threaten them with. The classic example was the 14 yr. old boy who kept touching everything, I told him to stop it, and as I watched him, he slowly removed his right hand from the item as his left hand simultaneously arrived on the item when the right hand lost contact with it!?
Many times I would think something had been taken only to find it somewhere else inside the house.(This might happen because they are in the house for such a long time?)
There are some very real cases of people stealing an object from here and extremely bad luck befalls them almost immeadiately.
A borrowed video tape was not returned, the kid's house burnt down.
Another kid stole a small figurine, his friend told him he should not have done that, he hit a deer on his way home 30miles away, and demolished his new truck.
The young women who stole and mysteriously became pregnant....that's just an urban myth..wait, we are rural! It's a rural myth.
"Excuse me Myth, did you just hide something under your dress?"

[Terrorknight]

We scare the shit out of them so they don't have any time to think about picking something up and taking it. Seems to work well. Haven't had anything go missing yet.

Robert

[Dreamreaper]

Vidio cameras seem to work if they know they are being recored.