Haunted Trail on Golf Course...Any ideas?

[Rick Crane]

Greetings to all,

In October, a friend and I will be turning his golf course into a haunted trail attraction....I have experience with Indoor Haunts, but am stumped as to what I can do to make a haunted trail, a scary and memorable experience for patrons....I am a professional special effects makeup artist, so the props and makeups will all be state of the art....It's really the layout that I'm worried about.....Any ideas will be greatly appreciated...

Thanks,
Rick Crane

[drfrightner]

Are you wanting to incorporate the golf as part of the theme? Because if you did that would be where I'd start for sure.

Larry

[mikeq91]

You want to use relatively dense woods as much as you can, and clear the path from there. The more open space you have, the more building you'll have to do to define the path that they are walking through. For our trail this year, we build 2 open-air structures about 1,200 sf each, and had a long path through the woods between them. We didn't end up finishing half of the stuff we had planned for the woods, but people just love being out in the woods in the dark at night. Put little structures out in the woods that they'll come upon and have to walk through. Instead of trying to adapt normal haunted house things, utilize the new space and try and do things that fit the woods that you can't do in a normal haunted house.

Another thing to keep in mind is sight-lines. In a normal haunt it's easy to block view from one room to the next but this can be a bit more difficult on a trail. Keep this in mind when you're designing it because it will ultimately affect your throughput/quality of show if people can see all the scare ahead of them.

Best of luck.