Halloween is fast approaching, and you’re probably in the thick of your busiest nights of the year. We feel you. Haunt Season is our favorite time of the year, but running your own haunt definitely comes with more gore than glamour.
Commiserate with us on these 13 struggles every haunt owner knows to be true.
1. You want to get excited about Halloween, but you’ve been sleep deprived for two months and really just want to nap for 100 years.
2. The echo of guests screaming in your face haunts your dreams every night.
3. Never actually getting to experience a haunted house because you have to work every single night of the haunt season.
4. You’re not scared of monsters, but you live in fear of a major prop breaking down in the middle of a busy night.
5. Triple-checking your insurance policy on the weekly because of a close-call where a frightened guest freaked out and almost punched one of your scareactors.
6. The simultaneous joy and dread when you have to shut down for 30 minutes to clean up after a guest get so scared they wet themselves.
7. Trying to sort out your t-shirt inventory when your merchandise booth looks like a tornado of goblins rolled through.
8. The horror of checking your watch 10 minutes before closing time and then seeing a two-hour-long line of guests still waiting to get in.
9. That feeling of terror-panic when the WiFi temporarily goes down…
(P.S. have you tried HauntPay’s new offline mode?)
10. …Or one of your actors calls in sick.
11. Dealing with difficult guests who expect a refund/discount/special treatment just because they asked for it.
12. Feeling like you’re being pulled in 1,000 different directions, between the creative aspects of your job that create the scares and the business side that keeps the lights on.
13. You do it because you love it. Despite all the struggles, there’s no other job you’d rather have.
One thing you shouldn’t have to struggle with is your ticketing. HauntPay provides haunt owners with scary simple solutions for ticketing and payments: at the door, online, and in the netherworld. Get started at HauntPay.com.