Picture of a gutted pig en route to a Seattle haunted house

I spent yesterday packing for a trip and trying to optimize a website for search engines. Michael Chaille was busy designing dying pigs for haunted houses.

He sells a lot of dying pigs.

I’m a Halloween nut.  I have a warehouse full of medical school skeletons (fake! Don’t even think that, freak!) and my haunted house usually gets pretty decent Hallween traffic. I weaseled my way into the good (merely tolerant?) graces of Michael Chaille, CEO of Ghostride Productions, a Seattle haunted house supplier. This is one of my treasured pictures, taken last year while I helped Ghostride pack for a Halloween haunted house trade show.

For reasons I am still trying to divine, a big chunk of Ghostride’s business is in high quality simulated animal carcasses in varying states of distress. Some of them are eerily perfect renditions (sorry) of  sides of beef you’d see in a meat locker. Some, like the picture, are pigs. Theological note to self: could you include these in a Muslim or orthodox Jewish haunt? This one is static, but he sells plenty of animatronic pigs too.

Anyone who’s seen The Godfather or Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a visceral feel for the impact of a quadruped’s bloody corpse as a device for Halloween houses of horror. But… turkeys? Yes. Ghostride does a brisk business in fake dead turkeys. And chickens. And roosters. Skunks. And… squirrels.

I guess you have to be there. In fact, if any haunted house folk can tell me why they need fake dead squirrels to complete the perfect evening of Halloween terror, let me know. But sakes alive, no matter how happily employed you are, tell me your job doesn’t suck a little when you think about how some haunted house guy in the Seattle area makes a living scaring people.

Picture of Ghostride Productions corpse. They are a Seattle haunted house supplier

Seattle haunted house proprietor and Ghostride Productions head Michael Chaille probably thought I was exaggerating when I told him that March 10, 2008 was one of the best days of my life. I wasn’t. It was not a great time in my life. I had lost my life savings in a startup and dropped by Ghostride Productions because I’m a Halloween nut. Chatting with a hardheaded businessman whose job is “making monsters” is one of the great joys of my life. And if you’re in the haunted house business, you know Ghostride. Their products aren’t cheap, because Michael simply refused to do anything that won’t hold up for many seasons in a haunted house. If you plan to buy a scare from Ghostride, you know it will last for years to come.

On March 10, 2008 I sauntered in as they were getting ready for a trade show.  They were packing up animatronics, their ever-popular animal carcass line, and any number of zombies and corpses. I pitched in and helped with the packing for a couple hours. I almost certainly impeded their progress, but was quietly having an absolute ball while people said things like “If we take out the turkeys and one of the pigs and detach the zombie’s arms, we can save a crate.”

Michael doesn’t know I’ve had these shots on my iPhone for the last year and that I whip them out almost as often as the pictures of my kids. So here you go: the first unauthorized pictures from the Seattle House of Horrors, the newest of the WA haunted houses.

–Tom Campbell