Greetings. Here’s a peek behind the scenes of “Lacey’s Scary Graveyard.” If you clicked in the link in the last sentence, you got to see a short film of the graveyard as it appeared in 2017. A friend of mine filmed it and I think he did a great job putting it together. Filming a Halloween Haunt in the daytime is necessary but seeing the “real thing” at night is SO much better. When filming a Halloween Haunt at night, it is difficult to capture the ambiance and the blending of light effects. Daytime filming gives better detail, but nighttime viewing gives you the experience.

Fog in a Halloween haunt is not essential but when the weather is calm it is good to have “ground hugging” fog around the grave sites. It adds so much to the experience.

Halloween fog machines are simple devices, but they are prone to failure. I’ve not had many that last over a couple of years. Also, the fog that spews from these devices are not inherently “ground hugging.” They must be augmented with “fog chiller” devices that use ice. There are many, many YouTube videos that show how to construct fog chillers. Some use beer coolers and some use trash cans but all of them require the addition of ice. I’ve tried many. I’ve tried the kind that coils a good length of 4″ tubing in a trash can filled with ice where the output of the fog machine is fed into the tube, into the trash can, and out. I’ve also built and used fog chillers where the output of the fog machine is fed into a beer cooler through a hole and the chilled fog exits another hole. In the second version the fog comes into direct contact with the ice.

Up to this point, my most successful chiller was a simple tube with small holes drilled in the sides. The tube was filled with ice, capped at the end, and the fog from the machine was fed into the other end. This worked great if the fog machine generated fog and there was ice in the tube. The ice didn’t last long and it was messy.

In 2017, I saw a YouTube video that described a water only fogger that used a fountain mister. The fog was continuous, didn’t require special juice, and used a lot less power than the regular fog machines. In practice, it did produce ground hugging fog but not a lot of it and it seemed to dissipate quickly. I used it but I wasn’t completely satisfied.

This year, I found a YouTube video that combined the two types of foggers, a “Robert’s Fogger.” It looked interesting and did all the things that I needed a fogger to do. Unfortunately, I had invested some effort in making the water only fogger that used a computer fan to blow water mist out of a plastic container. My initial thought was to get a “Y” PVC pipe and combine the outputs of a fog machine with my mist fogger. My plan was to pipe the two streams into the original pipe with the small holes drilled in the sides. If it worked as I had hoped I wouldn’t need ice and I’d still get the ground hugging fog for my graveyard. In the process of testing the hypothesis the computer fan on the mist fogger container failed. So, I removed the 4″ computer fan and inserted a 4″ hose and fed the output of the fog machine into the input. It worked just like Robert’s Fogger did in the video. As bonus, I was doing all my testing on a table so that the output of the mister container was roughly 3 feet below on the ground. In between fog machine pulses, the mist maker continued to deliver fog to the output due to a siphon effect.

I’m looking forward to testing this out this year. I’m hoping that Halloween fog is something that I don’t have to worry about.