One Final Time at Containment Haunted House in Lithia Spring GA

Joey McCollough: My name is Joe McCullough. I'm the general manager and one of the owners of containment Haunted House. So, this weekend is our last opening night for this location. We've been here since 2016, and the time has come to where we are needing to pick up and move to a new location, due to just land situations and everything. So, we are having one last hurrah, and doing it one more time here before we pick up and start tearing down. So, I haven't released anything about the new location yet, and the reason is because I actually have some choices of where we're going, whether it be a building or whether it be a land situation like this. In the next week or so I'll be settling out some details. I mean, as far as we have the permissions to be at either one, we're talking to the jurisdictions, and it's really just up to us to figure out, what do we want to do. Do we want to go back to land and try to preserve the atmosphere we have? Or do we want to go into a building and try to build a whole new different atmosphere? 

Elsie: Will you be opening for this holiday season, the 2023 Halloween season?

Joey McCollough: Absolutely. The doors for Containment Haunted House will be open for the Halloween season in 2023.

Speaker Knowing what you know now, after indicative hunting here, are there any specific things that you've designed for in the new location?

Joey McCollough: Yeah, you know, with this thing, it's been a very learning curve on what I was used to working with haunted houses. I always worked with stuff that was indoors, traditional maize. The containers were a challenge at first until we started to know how to embrace them and work with them a little bit better. Some of the things are like knowing that containers set up individual scenes, pretty much, versus a lot of the mazes you go through, you've seen the individual scenes, but it kind of all blends together. One of the things that we want to preserve, whether it's in the container still or moving into a building, is that we have that theme in each room that portrays and carries along with the storyline of the whole show. That's one of the things we've definitely learned about. Throughput, the flow of the customers, and everything, we're trying to make sure that we're not cascading and we're causing conga line situations, we're trying to preserve that show element as much as possible in the group flow and everything. The last thing anybody wants is to end up just being one long conga line through a haunted house, and you don't get the full immersion that way.

Elsie: What do you think will be the biggest challenge for you moving forward?

Joey McCollough: The biggest challenge facing us ahead of right now is just the packing it up and actually getting it trucked out and moved to the new location. Design-wise and everything, for all of our options, we've been working on that for a little while now. We knew that there was a potential that we were going to have to move, so we were already taking the proactive steps on the front end and waiting until that time where we knew or heard a definite. So, design work-wise, we already have those laid out. So, now it's just the manual labor part of packing everything up, and getting everything moved. Then just kind of reassembling everything and trying to do something new and creative with it versus what we've had here.