Hangman’s Decorating Weekend

by Nathan Stout (of AccordingToWhim.com)

Miguel and I met up at Hangman’s on Saturday May 14th for some filming and general talk about the upcoming documentary we are wanting to shoot with the owner/operator.

I usually head into the Fort Worth area each Saturday to visit my mom so I decided to drop in on Hangman’s during one of their ‘decoration’ weekends. The haunted house work goes on throughout the year starting in February with theme brainstorming. After that there are a couple of weekends per month when design then construction and finally decoration happens. Hangman’s is one of the few haunts where the theme (and 85% of the layout) changes each year. All but a few rooms (the most popular) are removed and rebuilt to fit the new theme. This year’s theme is horror in literature. The rooms are going to be themed after scary books (such as The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Jurassic Park, The Shining, etc).

The documentary we are going to be working on will be covering the history of the charity but we hope to use some of this construction footage in there (as well as for other projects for Hangman’s). Miguel and I randomly walked through the house shooting various things and asking some of the workers about the room they were working in.

After we got lost a few times (Miguel got totally turned around in the mirror room) we headed up to the La-De-Da Production office (the company that runs the house) and talked with D’Ann for a while. She is the owner/operator of Hangman’s as well as president of A Wish With Wings, another local charity that gives wishes to ill children. D’Ann has quite an interesting background and has been running haunted houses since the 1970’s. She has also been the president of the first National Association of Haunted Attractions. She has a lot of stories and I think we are going to find ourselves being forced to cut a lot of what we record (for time’s sake).

While we were there we planned when and where to shoot the interview and hopefully it will go off without a hitch. D’Ann also asked me to do some editing for a DVD for A Wish With Wings and she asked both of us if we could do some video work for that organization as well. We agreed.

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