Halloween has been my favorite holiday for as long as I can remember. Sure, it may have started with a preoccupation with acquiring candy, but in more recent years, my love of the holiday has taken a different form. Tim Edwards and I spend a good chunk of each year putting together an elaborate haunted house for a YMCA and Red Cross fundraiser. This yearly tradition includes budgeting, planning, constructing, staffing, managing and overseeing the event which runs during the last two weekends in October. In the last seven seasons of our labor of love, our attraction, has grown to be a larger, more intricate and more popular event every year.
          Sadly, as all good things must come to an end, our production was cancelled this past year because our preliminary blueprints (which didn’t detail our fire prevention measures) were presented to the fire department visiting the YMCA on a random safety inspection. If my friend or I had been present for or informed about this examination, we might’ve shown the fire department our safety precautions and events might have unfolded differently, but since the YMCA proffered only a rough sketch of our plans we were out of a building location. With any luck Tim and I will find a new location in the years after college, and resurrect haunted house as a privately run charitable organization.
-~Len Ruszel~-