As scary as a… turkey carcass?
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.
