Haunt Interview With Author Lynne Mitchell Of How To Haunt Your House

So we recently reached out to the haunt industry to get in touch with haunt owner’s, operators and anyone with a connection to the haunt industry and have had good feedback so far. Today we are posting the answers and questions to our first haunt interview with Lynne Mitchell one of the authors of How To Haunt Your House
. They run The Mitchell Cemetery and we asked them a couple quick questions about their haunt. I highly recommend their book for its graphic intensive content and their website is amazing too so take a minute after you read the interview and head over to their site at

What was your biggest challenge in starting your haunted house and how did you overcome it?

Our biggest challenge in creating our home haunt was that we are only two people and we had never done anything like this before. Since we are both artists, we felt confident jumping right in and experimenting till we found the look we were after. In order to get it all done with just the two of us, we had to space out our decorating strategy. The inside of our house was done in August. The outside was done in September and all the final details were added right before the big event on October 31.

If you had one piece of advice to give to someone starting out what would it be?

Advice we would give to new home haunters would be to do a little pre-planning. Sketch out how you want to fill your space. Make note of what props need power. How will you run your power cords? How will your audience go through the space? Where will the largest props go? Where will you put your “wow” pieces? You don’t want to blow the fuses right before the big event…it happened to us once. We have since put more thought into how much power we were using and where.

What do you consider to be the most important aspect of running a haunted house and why?

The most important aspect of running a haunted house is the end result and the experiences the audience has. Creating a home haunt is a ton of work. If we didn’t LOVE what we did, what would be the point? We are creating memories for both kids and adults who get to feel like kids again. It lets people test their nerves. If they can survive the screams, the frights, the things which might chase them through the dark maze…If they can stand before the face of the dead and walk away…then they can certainly get through a day at the office.

What do you think is the key to running a successful haunted house?

The key to running a successful haunted house is—patience. Things are going to break. Things are not going to go as planned. The electronic prop you spent a month on, might stop working right before the big event. Just go with it. People won’t know what they are missing. They will only see everything else. Your electronic prop just became a static prop. Go with it. Home haunting should be fun to do, fun to experience and passed along to the next generations of home haunters.

Gives a little insight to things to consider when starting out and that was our goal in these interviews was to get feedback for the beginner out there looking to start a home haunt or a professional haunt. Keep an eye out for future haunt interviews and we hope to follow up with many of our interviewee’s to get them on the line for our podcasts in the future. So if you are willing to help out our growing industry and answer a few questions if your in the business already then please drop us a line and let us interrogate you on your haunt business.

Check Out Other Haunt Interviews
Haunt Interview With Kelly Allen Of Raycliff Manor
Haunt Interview With Dan From Decimation Haunted House