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The Undead Pirate Haunted House Room

Given my proclivity for creating things based on movies I like, it couldn't be too long before I decided to create a haunted house room base on Disney's movie Pirates of the Caribbean.

Another influence was a discussion with a friend on-line at pyracy.com about how Disney should come out with a life-sized undead Jack the Monkey figure. It occurred to me that I could make one that would at least be a good facsimile - just in case Disney never followed through with my brilliant concept. Top it all off with the fact that the Wyandotte Jaycees had asked me to do a movie-themed haunt this year and you get the undead pirates haunt.

Jack the Monkey is actually the only true link to the movie, the other undead pirates were just my concept. In fact, Jack was originally my only idea. It was going to be him swinging down by his tail like he did in the movie. There, he swung down beneath some steps - an idea I immediately discarded as being too complex to shove in a little space in the haunted house.

I figured I'd just hang same raggedly black material to hide the monkey-swinging hardware and call it good. then I would set up some sort of distraction either on the left or right hand side of the room and put a little space next to it for the haunt worker to hide in and jump out of. (Most HH rooms seem to work best with a worker in them somewhere.) I was going to make an opening window for the worker.

So that was the basic original concept, much of which was included in the final room as you can see from this Autocad drawing from the 2006 haunted house floor plans.

Note the red lines are emergency route objects, the green are constructed walls and the white lines are special walls. The purple line shows the route that the patrons take to get through the room. This is the final drawing based on my original concept.

As I thought about the whole thing, I decided to include a prisoner in the "Some sort of Display" room. A prisoner hardly fit the whole "deck of the Black Pearl" concept I had started with, so out that went. Then I thought it would be cool to do a drunken pirate, so he went into the corner by the monkey. He didn't fit the prisoner concept, so I considered making him a drunken jailer with the keys to the cell on the wall, but never bought the keys. Oh, well. If you want logic, you go to a museum. The monkey just stayed where he was - since he was central to the design. Below you can see the various props. Note that each is linked to a separate page showing how they were constructed, so you can just click on the photos for extensive details of that.

Prisoner

Pirate Light

Monkey

Drunken Pirate

This is a view of the haunt standing in the back entryway of the room. As you can see, the monkey is straight ahead. If the room were operating, he would be tucked up back behind those curtains (or "sails") waiting for you to approach before swinging down.

To the far left are the prison bars I made out of split 2"x4"s. (I so love my table saw.) You can just see the prisoner's coat and a bit of the skeleton bones inside on the very far left of the scene. Note the door behind the monkey. There is another one in the back of the prisoner cage (see first of three photos above). The doors are to give people something to worry about. They don't actually open.

On the right is a right hand view of the haunt. Again, the monkey appears sort of central to the haunt. You can see the handle on the door better here.

The doors are constructed from leftover fence wood that someone donated to the Jaycees several years ago. It looked very "ship-like" to me, so I seized upon it as the perfect medium for ship doors.

Way over to the right in this photo you can see some more cage bars. This was actually going to be a regular wall until it occurred to me that it could be used to add to the motif if I ran a couple of small cross beams to it. Viola! I have another set of prison bars. Prisons and pirates - they just seem to go together. Note that you can just see the drunken pirate behind a 2" x 4" in the center of the picture.

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