In 2000, we did our first haunt. It was at Rich's house. About 200 people came through without any publicity. Not bad...

Unfortunately most of the pictures of this haunt were double exposed on the roll and did not come out but we got some.
The back story on the first haunt was that a cave with a long history of mysterious happenings had just been re-discovered and we needed victims, er…, explorers to help us unravel the mystery.

Here's a shot of the front of the haunt just before opening. Not much of a facade, but it was better than nothing.

For this first haunt, we used black plastic for all of the walls stapled to 2x3's and framed with 2x4's. The plastic was tough to work with and the slightest amount of wind would move the walls all over the place. Live and learn.
Just a short way into the cave you came to this gate. At night it looked a lot creepier. We had fog coming down the hallway through the fence and an oscillating red light back lighting it and casting long shadows into the room.
This is actually one of my favorite props. He was a last minute addition and I only had a little monster mud left, so I made a quick wire frame for him and covered him with strips of burlap dipped in monster mud. I took a drywall screw and put it through the base of an extra skull I had, drilled a couple of small holes in the eye sockets and stuck a couple of red LED's I had into the sockets. His claws are made out of newspaper wrapped around coat hangers and spray painted black. His claws are some extra finger bones I had.

The great thing about Claw Guy this year was we rigged up an air hose right below him and hung some strips of black plastic over the nozzle. People would walk by him thinking he was just a static prop and then get hit with this blast of air and the plastic flying at them. It got everyone!
This is my other favorite prop. The Flying Crank Ghost is a great effect. It's not all that hard to build and it looks awesome under black light and a little fog. It just slowly raises and falls and looks like it's floating. Really great. Here's a link to the FCG Home.
Unfortunately, these are about all of the pictures that came out. The rest were double exposed. After all that work, I was bummed. Oh, well. There was always next year!