The Vysther's Halloween Haunt Journal: 2025

2025 is going to go down - for us, anyway - as a year of medical headaches, but with a certain conclusion to them, too - my wife's kidney stone issues were FINALLY resolved in November, *after* she had to endure hernia repair surgery - oh yeah, it was one of those years!

I must say, our set up went by without a hitch this season– very gradual, but very, very smooth, plus we learned a few new tricks on mounting/stabilizing, so our headaches were minimal - not to mention the weather cooperated beautifully this season, which is always a plus....

A major headache was a certain nine year old who, in addition to making an enormous nuisance of himself, decided he was going to actively vandalize our props/characters - we did NOT take this lightly!

(The idea of a kid riding hobbyhorse and a $300 dragon like it's something at a grocery store? Uh uh, not cool!)

Thank goodness the management and owners of Oakwood apartments were on our side and took swift action before this unruly brat destroyed something valuable.

On a genuinely positive note, this season marked our 20th display here at Oakwood, and we are ETERNALLY grateful at their indulgence and support...our display would NOT be what it is with out it!

Is it just me, or did the major retailers *really* lay some major eggs this year?

My wife and I are particular – perhaps a bit too much some might say – in regards to what suits our tastes for our haunt, buy, jeez-louize!

The quality of most of what was released this season was sub-par, to put it mildly – and a good percentage of it was rehash with over-inflated price tags and lots of technical problems.

We bought an LED Giant Spider and Wyvern from Home Depot, but that was it – very few looked even remotely interesting, and I must say, even though this year marked JAWS 50^th anniversary, a giant shark as a Halloween prop?

Ah, no thank you.

...and the comments I read on various home haunter groups were less than flattering, shall we say?

Hopefully 2026 will bring some fresh ideas at more reasonable prices – did anyone notice all the discount sales about a week into October? Lots of prices slashed literally in half. Says volumes.

Speaking of prices, are Haunted Attractions getting just a wee bit pricey themselves?

We used to be able to take in several a night, now it's more like a couple per season - I realize inflation and all that, but some of these are just RIDICULOUS.

I think what soured us a bit was the fact of the asking prices, and ten the haunt themselves are rather lackluster, especially in a few cases - no, I won't name names, sorry!

I will say that we saw some *AMAZING* home haunts this year - the FrightMaps app is a Godsend - https://www.frightmaps.com/ - we saw so many amazing displays - a lot of which are reflected here - that it truly made our season wonderful, despite everything....I've included an extended section of photos in that area

So what's up for 2026? Heh. WHO KNOWS!

I will say that we're going to go more grass-roots and build a lot of our own stuff - all the home haunts we saw really inspired us, and we're definitely going to be "borrowing" *ahem* a few ideas...aside from that? Time will tell, it always does...