Dave The Castellean (are you going to look it up, or what?), with a quick post-mortem on this year's Castle. The big news: we set an attendance record this year of over 550 visitors to the Castle. This is fairly impressive (to me, anyway) considering that Halloween fell on a tuesday night. Our preview night on the 30th generated more traffic than I would have guessed, also. When asked, most people said thst they learned about The Witch's Castle from this website or some of the other "haunt directory" websites on the net. Nice to know that word is getting around. This year also marked a sort of triumphant return for the Castle following last year's disastrous fire. We went on with the show last year, but mainly because we were already set up. It would have been somewhat appealing to have packed it in last year after that unintentional horror show. However, forging ahead this year - without the unsolicited pyrotechnics - felt like closing the crypt on an unfortunate chapter.

Speaking of unfortunate closings, this year marked the first year without the incredible Hallowed Haunting Grounds, Myranda's (that's The Witch to you) childhood Halloween inspiration and the Holy Grail of Haunters Everywhere. We miss "the Babcock House" as we called it, but were thrilled to be visited by the Hallowed Haunters themselves at The Witch's Castle. After falling to my knees and genuflecting at the feet of The Masters, the Hallowed Haunters and the Castle Crew had a great conversation admid the fog and noise of the Castle Graveyard. The Hallowed Haunters generously lauded our efforts, while I slyly admitted that for the first time, The Witch's Castle had outdone The Hallowed Haunting Grounds. Hey, I grab glory where I see it!

Several of our props were refurbished and thus redeployed this year, with a few new additions. Our Dot Room, constructed of theatrical flats, underwent a complete repaint and the addition of fog and more lighting effects. Several immensly satisfying shrieks resulted. Also returing to the Castle Graveyard after a one-year absence were our computer-operated, pnuematically-driven props. The four-bar pop-up goblin worked flawlessly all night. The pop-forward skull-and-hands contraption, however, was a different story. Actually, it never survived refurbishing earlier this year, but instead subcummed to what I call CASD: Catastropic Aerial Self-Disassembly. This phenomenon occurs when an over-powered and under-engineered prop is test fired, leaps into the air, and disperses it's component parts in all directions. The pnuematic valve assembly survived, so I modified the entire prop to shoot a styrofoam wig head up a vertical track with a quick blast of compressed air - ala the pop-up heads in the attic scene of Disneylands's Haunted Mansion. This simpler design worked much better, and produced very satisfactory results amongs visitors who were checking out the graveyard.

Also returning to the graveyard was the casket that I built last year. However, as I was loading it into the back of my pickup to transport it to Studio City, I couldn't resist quickly adding a windshield wiper motor to cause the lid to pop up and down at random intervals. Looked good in the graveyard, so this will be a keeper.

The newest major prop this year was a talking skeleton chained to the wall at the side of the house. The skeleton was equipped with Scary Terry's audio- driven servo circuit and mounting design, and recited a creepy verse that was based on a 19th century Halloween poem tailored to The Castle by the Witch and myself. Looked good and worked great - another keeper.

All-in-all, a very successful (if exhausting) year. After packing up the Castle, I'm off to Las Vegas to work on the return of Comic Relief. During my off hours in Vegas (after losing my per diem at the craps tables) I will try to get some video from this year onto the website. Keep an eye out (eeewww) for that! Finally, huge thanks to everyone who helped out this year - a complete list will also appear here soon.

See you next year - Happy Haunting!

- D. H.

Greetings!

Dave here, the Castellean (I said, look it up), Webmaster, and Head Technogeek of The Witch's Castle. Wow, what a year. Keen observers of this website will notice that it has not been updated since last year. Evidently the are many observers of this website! Despite not updating it, as soon as I arrived in Studio City to start setting up the Castle for '05 several people came around asking if we were in fact doing Halloween this year, saying that the website had not been updated. So, I will endeavor to update more frequently. . . maybe twice a year!

As I said, what a year. We almost did cancel the Castle for this year due to personal commitments. The Witch's alter ego, Dr. Myranda Marsh, opened her own charter middle school this year. Opening a school is kinda like setting up your haunt everyday for a year. At the height of the school-opening frenzy, we talked about just foregoing Halloween this year - this would have been the first time in over 20 years! Later, we found that thought too depressing, so we decided to go forth with it but scale back a bit. For me, scaling back on Halloween is like Hitler saying, "All I want is Austria and Holland."

Two new props of note were deployed this year. The biggie was a hand-built casket. I say casket and not coffin to differentiate between a six-sided box and a rectangular one. I built a casket because I felt it would have more cultural signifagance in this country than a coffin. It's also easier to build. I thought the casket looked pretty good when completed. Being a scaled-back year, I did not outfit the casket with any pneumatics or electronics. It just sat in the cemetery with an occasional green glow emanating from under its slightly ajar lid. The casket also provided a handy place to hide the lighting controllers and fog machine/chiller. I eliminated the long hose I had coming out of the fog chiller, and the effect was much, MUCH improved.

The other prop was built almost immediately after last Halloween. I bought a faux "Regulator" pendulum clock at a local drug store, installed a flickering green light, changed the clock face so that it had 13 numbers instead of 12, and re-geared the motor so that the hands spun fast. A nice bit of set dressing, and easy to do.

However, no one got to see the clock this year.

It's every haunter's worst nightmare, and it happened to us. While doing a dry run of the props and effects on the 30th, I was in the backyard when I heard a strange noise. I came out front to investigate, and saw flames through the living room windows. A faulty light fixture in our front window tableau had set the curtains on fire. I ran into the back of the house and called 911, and then grabbed a kitchen fire extinguisher. I cautiously entered the living room and saw the one entire corner of the room was ablaze, the flames going from the floor to the ceiling and starting to creep across the ceiling towards me. I opened the front door and stood about 10 feet from the flames and fired the extinguisher. I managed to beat the flames back about halfway before the extinguisher ran out. I came out the front door to wait for the fire department to arrive, and saw two neighbors running from across the street with another extinguisher. I grabbed it and went back to the front door to have another go at the fire, but the smoke coming through the doorway was too thick. So I went to the window, smashed the glass with the end of the extinguisher, and was able to spray the dry chemical directly on top of the flames. The flames were out only a minute or two when the fire crew arrived. They went in, made sure the fire was completely out, took reports, and left.

So, here's a list of how lucky we were:
1. The fire did no structural damage to the house
2. Nothing of sentimental value was lost
3. All the damage, including the destroyed furniture, was insured.
4. No one was hurt.

A word about no one being hurt - in retrospect, I took one hell of a chance fighting the fire myself. While the property owners were grateful to me for preventing serious damage to the building, I implore you to NEVER do what I did. Looking back, I have a whole list of things that could have gone horribly wrong. I could have been trapped, overcome by smoke (you have no idea how nasty smoke from a house fire is - it's like breathing liquid crap), hit by falling debris....just don't do it, okay?

What you SHOULD do is check you smoke alarm batteries, have decent fire extinguishers handy, and avoid situations where a fire can start - and this is just day-to-day living advice. If you are a fellow haunter, use low-power lighting as much as possible, avoid flammable materials, and make sure that heat sources (such as fog machines) are safely set up and located. If in doubt, the local fire marshal will be happy to look things over and tell you what you should change. If you are told to change something - do it!

Okay, end of safety lecture. We didn't keep a count this year, but we had a pretty good turnout. Many people commented that the cemetery looked especially good this year - and I think the photos in the "Backstage" section bear that out. Have a look, and we look forward to next year!

- D.

Greetings all,

It's Dave, the Castellean (look it up), Webmaster, and Head Technogeek of The Witch's Castle, here to give you an update on what we're cooking up for this year.

Four big changes are in the works for this year's Castle. The biggest is that we are making a tremendous leap into the world of pneumatics... or at least getting our feet wet. I've been busy converting screen door closers into pneumatic cylinders and getting very pleasing results. So, this year, we will have a number of air-driven props jumping about and hopefully catching a few people off gaurd.

Big change number two was begat by big change number one: How are we going to control these new pneumatic props? Fifteen-some-odd years ago, it would have been manually. What a pain in the *#@! it was to drop rubber spiders on people with one hand, yank a rope with the other to make a dummy sit up, and set off lightning with a foot pedal! Over the years, our use of automation has been getting steadily more sophisticated, and this year we are making the leap to computer-controlled firing of the props. I have built a control unit, based on the well-known "Kit 74" that connects to a PC-based computer in our "control rack". Using the Frightmare Forest Haunt Controller software, the controller box can control up to eight props, including pneumatics, lights, motors, or anything else. The FFHC software allows you to program routines for each output channel that can turn on or off at intervals down to the millisecond, repeat continuously, or be activated by input from, say, a floor mat switch or IR relay.

We are expanding on last year's flirtation with animatronics, which consisted of stripping down one of those dorky nodding reindeer that people put in their yards as Christmas and making into a smoke-breathing....uhhhh, dragon...I guess. You know, ugly head, glowing eyes, smoke coming out of it's nostrils...like that. Anyway, this year we have hacked yet another whimsical Christmas prop into something disturbing and profane. This is the ubiquitous "Singing, Swinging Santa", a creepy 5-foot-tall Santa robot that sings Christmas carols with scary enthusiasm. I won't divulge what we have transformed Santa into, but let's just say you wouldn't want to run into this guy in a dark alley - which you will at The Witch's Castle!

Another change this year is the abondonment of our beloved gothic archway. It served us for about two Halloweens more than I thought it would, and spends its off-season in the garage as shelving. It was a big and heavy set-piece to drag out and set up every year, so I finally got around to dusting off my long-lost stagecraft skills and have re-created the gothic arch as theatrical flats. Lightweight, easy to move and transport, and stackable for storage. Also, the new arch will incorporate some design changes that will allow visitors to actually walk through it. This facilitates our first enclosed feature, which again I won't divulge - you'll just have to come experience it for yourself!

So, that's what's going on in the Witch's Workshop. Very soon, I'll re-activate the WitchCam, allowing you to see us working away at a feverish pitch until Halloween. And again, we will be webcasting live from our haunt on Halloween Night, so check back on the WitchCam page soon!

See you Halloween Night, and Happy Haunting!

- D.