I got interested in creating Halloween displays a couple of years ago when my wife was out of town the week before Halloween and I was at home babysitting. I was daydreaming while the kids were in school one day and I came up with the idea of using a computer to control a Halloween sound and light show. I worked away on the hardware and software for a few days, made a few props and set it all up in the front yard. It was a huge hit !

The first year (1997) I had some sound effects (Witches, Ghosts, Thunder etc) which played more or less at random, sometimes flashing lights on a prop in sync with the sound. I used an old Sound Blaster card and a DOS sound API called DIGPAK. The lighting effects were controlled thru the parallel port and and some OPTO-22 modules I happened to have. These are nice for controlling AC and DC devices and they are optically isolated for safety. The best effect was the lightning and thunder - the lightning was an old desk lamp with a 100 watt bulb in it that the computer flashed on and off in sync with the thunder sound.

I soon discovered there was a whole community of people on the web doing similar things. I got some great ideas from looking at what others have done and 1998 was even better. I built a “Trash Can Trauma” which is a head that pops out of a garbage can - that freaked a few folks out ! I used a hand operated wine filter pump for the compressed air, a bicycle pump for the air cylinder to raise the head, and computer driven solenoids to fire it off. I added an X-10 computer interface to the setup which allowed me to trigger sounds and props via wireless remote control. I learned thru experience that a human can do a much better job of triggering a prop than a computer with some kind of sensor e.g. IR motion detector. You can wait till the victim is in exactly the right spot and looking the right way to get the best effect - ie somebody soils their pants !

In 1999 I made the head jump up from behind a gravestone (gotta keep ‘em guessing !) and I built the famous “Flying Crank Ghost”. My FCG has a ghoulish skull head, red led eyes and he glows under UV lighting. I put the ghost inside the house in the front window to conceal the mechanism plus the motor was a bit noisy. This also allowed me to direct a fan on the from of the ghost which gave it an eerie flying effect. The FCG was a real show stopper - it literally stopped traffic in front of the house !

My main two projects in 2000 were an animated skull head which took a long time to build and an animated witch stirring a cauldron which was very quick and easy. I think most people were more impressed by the witch. I also animated a small plastic skeleton with a flying crank ghost mechanism and put it in another window. I added more/better sound effects by using a second computer with a Sound Blaster Live card in it. The SB Live is a dynamite sound card and it has some very useful features for “haunting” - it can alter your voice in real time, add various effects like reverb and echo, and it has four speaker surround sound capability. The quality of the sound was dramatically improved this year, although I kept my old cheesy SB 16 DOS computer too because I didn’t feel like rewriting the software. Maybe in 2001...

I’m working on documenting the more interesting and unique projects. Projects like the Flying Crank Ghost are well documented elsewhere so I’m not going to redo that. Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of my haunts until 2000 but I have a digital camera now so my intent is to document what I do from now on. Click on the links on the left for more details.