ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, October 29, 1996 TAG: 9610290029
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
THE dark hallways have potential and you're armed with a bag of synthetic spiderwebs, but Halloween is approaching quicker than a bat out of hell.
Which leaves this question: Supposing you aren't a card-carrying member of the spirit world, how, exactly, do you go about haunting a house? Or, in the case of the Vinton Police Department, a recently abandoned school building?
"The hardest thing is coming up with the ideas," says Lt. Bill Brown, who is coordinating this haunted house, just as he has the past eight years. "But once you get the ideas, everybody helps."
Volunteers from Kroger and the Vinton fire and rescue squads, Cox Cable and Parents Without Partners - all are responsible for turning tiny dark rooms into a swamp, a crypt, a witch's hovel and hell. Last year, the project raised $16,000 for the police department's needy family program.
Vinton's haunted house is one of the biggest in an area dotted with creepy casas.
But before the ghosts and guides learned their lines, before people lined up for their annual dose of Halloween thrills, there were building inspections and fire code considerations. There were nights of painting and gathering severed (rubber) limbs.
There were adjustments.
* * *
"She won't go down," says Mark Vaught, an investigator with the police department. He is working on a cylinder that is attached to a smoky skull with blazing pink eyes. "She" is supposed to pop out at the appropriate moment in a room that shall remain nameless, and scare the bejeezus out of the rest of us. But she's stuck.
The problem: a blob of glue on the cylinder. "If that baby's not slick, she won't slide," Vaught says.
He scrapes away the offending glue. "That'll do her."
Before a dress rehearsal, Brown leads a tour through the eight rooms of the Vinton Haunted House, a trail of his cigar smoke wafting through the darkness.
His hand flashes past a sensor that activates a train - or a set of speakers that will sound like a train. But the music coming out right now is "California Girls." Not the stuff of nightmares (well, maybe).
In the next room, Margaret Sanders is laying down the law. "We need to put a rope here so people won't walk over me," says the would-be corpse. Last year she had a casket. This year, she's on the ground.
She stops Brown to discuss the merits of dry ice versus a smoke machine.
"Smoke machine," Brown says.
The tour continues: "This is hell."
Or it will be. Picture a devil with glowing eyes (a gift from Dr. Neal Jessup, a local optometrist) and a strobe machine for some extra disorientation. Some of the costumed monsters will reach out and grab the scared guests.
The police department's haunted house is an institution in Vinton and in the lives of the volunteers.
Donnie and Joyce Bain spent their wedding night here four years ago, behind the hot-dog wagon. They celebrate their anniversary the same way.
"If we ever quit the haunted house, I don't know what we'd do on our anniversary," Joyce Bain says.
At 6:30 p.m., it's time for Brown's organizing speech for the dress rehearsal. He talks about having fun and working hard. "We ain't taking no breaks," he says. "We ain't no union."
But as his speech ends, duty calls - police duty. A man is threatening suicide. Brown leaves, the corpses and witches will have to work things out for themselves.
Eventually, they do.
They've done this before, after all. They've made the necessary changes, year to year.
Jackie Bobbitt points to a collection of snakes (fake) lurking in one of the hallways. Last year they used rats. Real ones.
"They were terrified," she says. The rats, that is. "But after the first night, they slept through the whole thing."
The technical hardships of being a witch?
"You lose your voice and the costume gets heavy," she says. "All of the little kids pull at you. Even the grown-ups pull at you."
* * *
Haunting houses is Paul Hartle's sideline business in October.
Last year he opened his own haunted house at West Salem Plaza. He broke even and cleared his investment of some $3,000 in props. This year, he's joined with the Roanoke Jaycees to redecorate Roanoke's Fishburn Mansion.
Maintenance workers have told him about slamming doors and mysterious footsteps on the staircase of this 90-year-old-house in other seasons of the year, Hartle says, but he can't count on them for nightly performances. Instead, he relies on volunteers and the appropriate lighting. Flickering candles and a little fog for ambience, a strobe light and a black light, and he's in business.
"The spider webs are a real pain," says Hartle, who asked some of the Jaycees to deal with that this year. He's coordinated the rooms, established the themes, doctored the bathroom sink so it would spit out fake blood, put oozing eyeballs where a pair of contacts would normally be.
He's dealt with the technical glitches.
The tapes, for instance, which set the mood with all kinds of moans and howls and music, get messed up when an overanxious vampire hits the record button rather than play.
Hartle also coaches the volunteers who turn out at 6 p.m. each night, an hour before the doors to the mansion open.
"I've seen every room at one time or another bomb, with nobody being scared. And the same room later that night can scare the crap out of everybody. A lot of it depends on the actors and actresses," he says.
Take the witches' room, which is equipped with a bubbling cauldron of dry ice and your standard assortment of toads, lizards and bloody rubber body parts.
Hartle makes his voice creaky but sweet - not a saccharine Glenda the Good Witch but no Wicked Witch of the West, either. "If she comes in and says 'How are you doing tonight, blah, blah, blah,' it won't work."
Then he makes his voice creaky as a 100-year-old staircase. "If she jumps out and says, 'Helloooo, my pretties, come inside ' it works."
Hartle also wrestles with another strategic dilemma: Just how scary should a haunted house be?
"It's hard to tell," he says. "I'm always afraid of scaring people too much. People come and tell me I almost gave an old lady a heart attack."
But that's what haunted houses are for, he says. "We put up signs and say they're not supposed to be for little] kids or older people.
"This year, I'm going to go all out and make it as scary as I can."
LENGTH: Long : 131 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: NHAT MEYER/Staff. 1. Melinda Steele of Roanoke holds herby CNBnephew, Langley Hawkins, 6, and her daughter, Marisa, 7, as they
brace for a scare at the Vinton Haunted. 2. Greg Meinel is properly
devilish for his role in hell at the Vinton Haunted House. Meinel, a
seven-year veteran at the haunted house, had a dentist make him
custom fangs and an optometrist fit him with contact lenses that
glow when illuminated with "blue light." 3. Elizabeth Wade applies
makeup to Katie Griggs at the Fishburn haunted house. They were
preparing to be evil clowns in the "Toy" room. 4. Ross Miller helps
Jeff King adjust the dry-wall stilts he wears as part of his
Frankenstein's monster costume. King took his place in the
"Laboratory" room of the Fishburn haunted house in Roanoke. color.