Wednesday, October 18, 2006

There was a haunted house I liked a few years ago in Granbury

Yesterday turned out to be a beautiful day. We are well rested and I am feeling much better now. Outside now looks gray, but not so much as yesterday, so I'm sure it will be another beautiful day. Not that we'll do anything with it. He has to work, and I have to work on the Halloween costume. I'm afraid our big plans for the day are pretty much limited to lunch and watching cable. We're probably going to check out a place called Eggbert's.

I absolutely must finish putting the costume together while we're here in Kansas. There just won't be time for much work on it after we go home. I'll have even less time than I thought I would, since my manager says I'll still have the silly job when I get back.

Since I've recently written how most haunted houses now days aren't as good as they were twenty or thirty years ago, I thought I'd write about one that I was impressed with a few years ago. I think it was in 2003 (though it could have been the year before that or the year after), and it was in Granbury, Texas. I don't remember the name of the place, and I think when we were there was their last year (or maybe their only year).

My sister had this voucher for a bed & breakfast in Granbury, and it was going to expire at the end of the year, so she invited me to go with her to Granbury. With school and everything, we ended up going Halloween weekend, and I looked on the Internet and found a nearby haunted house. So after a nice dinner at an Italian place on the town square, we headed to the haunted house.

It wasn't a really large place, but there was a really long wait. But there was room for about a hundred of us to wait inside, and it was decorated with these dragon lamps, and maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but I think they had a fountain there too. Anyway, it was a nice place to wait, and the only thing that would have made that part better would have been some chairs.

Anyway, when we got to the front of the line and a guide took us to...a lawyer's office.

A lawyer's office???

So the lawyer explains that even though we have been invited here to hear the reading of the will we are still expected to follow a few rules, which I don't remember what they all were. And under no circumstances were we allowed to touch the actors, and they would not touch us either, except that some of them might make an exception for my pretty sister.

Actors???

We giggled a bit at that one. The people who worked in the haunted house were repeatedly referred to as actors. And we were thinking, right, actors. I don't think that someone who puts on a mask and screams at you qualifies as an actor.

But, we were wrong. They were actors. Most of them had little parts to play and lines to say, and for the first part of the house they kept with this theme of there being a recently deceased person who might have left us something in his will or he might speak to us from the great beyond. Later it got away from the theme and was more like your typical haunted house, but if you have nice props and costumes that don't go with the theme, why not use them anyway?

So I really liked the place. There were talented people who cared about their appearance and their performance, nice costumes and makeup, nice props and set decoration, and mood lighting. There was very little stumbling around in total darkness. And if there was an idiot chasing people with a chainsaw, he must have been near the end and didn't bother us much.

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