HALLOWEEN CANDY

Last year we had approximately 2,300 kids visit the Thornhill Woods Haunted House on Halloween night and another 400 kids from the local public school Carville Mills a few day before Halloween.

We know this because we counted the candy that was donated and what we had purchased. Believe it or not, we ran out candy around 9:00 pm and still had many kids coming to our door.

This year I'm happy to say that we were able to get two major sponsors to help us out with the overwhelming amount of trick 'r treaters, which will also help us increase the donations that we give to Sick Kids Hospital every year.

Old Dutch Foods for the second year in a row has graciously donated potato chips.

Cadbury is a confectionery company that manufactures chocolate, gum and candy. This year they have also agreed to help us out by donating various products from their Maynards line.

Most off all, thank you to all of you for your generous donations to Sick Kids Hospital.

PROJECTOR TOMBSTONE

I can't believe it's only 40 days until Halloween!

What ever free time I have in the evenings and weekends, I spend on getting all my props and decor ready for another spooky Halloween season.

I attended the Transworld Haunt show earlier this year in St. Louis and picked up some new props for my haunt. One of them is a custom banner from Illusionator who specializes in full-color, photo quality, custom banners and signs for haunted attractions.

I wanted to in close my porch area and create a haunted hallway for the kids to walk through to get to the garage area where my laboratory is. So, I had a custom banner made up 21' x 10' and had it match the brick and stone work on the outside of my house. I also had two of my windows copied onto the banner, one window will have a five foot terrifying skull face coming out of it with moving eyes. The other window will be plain, but will have projected movies played continuously throughout the night with creepy ambient music.

Once I hang the banner up later in October I'll take some photos, in the mean time I've been busy creating a tombstone to hide the projector and DVD player that will be playing my movies on the banner. Most tombstones are made out of Styrofoam, but I wanted mine to be extra sturdy because of what it's holding, so I made it out of 3/4 plywood. I purchased a Styrofoam tombstone from from a local Halloween store and glued it onto the wood, picked up some crows, foam letters, and a leaf vine from Michael's and painted everything with three different colours of paint.

Be sure to check back more frequently now that Halloween is getting closer because I have more exciting news to share about the Thornhill Woods Haunted House this year.