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The Old Mill I’d used for an attraction years prior was still there, but it was too costly ($10 million!) to bring it up to current zoning regulations. Immediately after we all signed on to the idea, we set to work finding a location for our new haunted house, but this proved to be our first real challenge. Fortunately, it wasn’t a hard sell to get them involved, though at the time we all planned on keeping our day jobs to better fund the project. We were inspired to take the plunge because we missed haunting, of course, but we really wanted to do something that could supplement our incomes and we wanted to do it with our family. What started off as a single trip to a haunted house quickly spiraled into dozens―it was almost as if I had forgotten the magic of being scared (and scaring people!) and I missed it.Īfter a few months of exploring local haunted houses, Keith and I thought it would be fun to open up our own haunted house with the help of my son Rob and his wife, Heidi and Keith’s wife, Cindy.
#FEAR FACTORY FREE#
This was during the housing crisis and the interior design business was slow, so we had a lot of free time. Sometime in 2008 my son-in-law, Keith started calling and inviting me out to explore local haunted houses. Image appears courtesy of Fear Factory Building a career on scaresĪnd I was right. It was a much-needed change of pace compared to what I had been doing every fall prior but I had a feeling that I’d soon find my way back into the industry. Each year we continued it seemed like we were putting in more work to make the haunts more unique and elaborate.īy this point, I knew that I was seriously burnt out on haunting so I decided to retire from the March of Dimes before the Halloween of ‘88 and spent that fall remodeling a tiny cabin in the woods. Instead of it taking only a few weeks to pull off these haunted houses every year, I was soon putting in months of work at a time and recruiting my family members to help me. I worked with the March of Dimes as a side project for the next few years until 1988 when I began to rethink things due to the sheer time commitment involved. I was bummed at the time but it ended up working out for the best when Bruce Hanks, the president of the Salt Lake March of Dimes, contacted me to be the chairman of the March of Dimes Haunted Houses the following year. Due to these new rules, my envisioned haunt wasn’t possible and I decided to step back from the project. I probably would have been content building haunts for my church every Halloween but one year, they changed the rules around wearing masks due to safety reasons. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it’s amazing how much of my interior design expertise is needed to create these haunted houses. I had so much fun putting that first haunted house together that I put together a few more haunted houses for the young men’s program over the next few years at the Smith’s farmhouse in Murray, The Old Mill, and more while working as a founder/interior designer for my company, Custom Interior Design Gallery, during the day. I relented and somehow we pulled it together for one more night, charging. In fact, it was so successful that the members of the young men’s group begged me to hold the attraction open another night for all of their classmates. Despite the fact that it was my first “official” haunted house, it ended up being an incredible success. The idea was well received so I secured an old world war radio and arms plant for the haunt and set to work creating a story, designing a set, etc. One of my first tasks was to oversee the Halloween party and I immediately suggested that we create our own haunted house―I wanted to give someone else the same experience I’d had with my neighbor as a child. While Halloween was always my favorite holiday, my career in the industry first started as a hobby when I was 22 and made leader of my church’s young men’s program. I absolutely loved it―I couldn’t believe this woman had created such a thrilling ruse sure to spook us every holiday―and it was something that stuck with me forever. Her dedication was seriously unbelievable and she always came dressed in the strangest, scariest, most-horrible looking costumes I’d ever seen.įor the longest time, we didn’t know who this lady really was, until one day when our neighbor across the street broke down and confessed that it had been her the whole time. As we settled into our new house, we soon met an older lady who came to our door dressed to the nines every Halloween. I‘ve always loved Halloween, but my love for all things spooky really sunk in when my family moved out to East Millcreek sometime in the 1950s. Click here to read past articles in the series. The Founder Series is a weekly column by and about Utah founders and how they got to where they are today.