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While most people know October as the season of scary movies and trick-or-treating, Halloween is a multi-billion dollar holiday that surpasses Easter and St. Patrick's Day. Americans shell out over $100 every year for Halloween, and spend has doubled in two decades. Beyond candy and costumes, haunted houses are an overlooked emerging $300 million industry. that's in a league of its own. There are 1,200 haunted houses in the US, and they're not in the places you'd expect. California, Texas, and Florida are amusement park capitals, yet their second fiddle for spooky attractions. Instead, it's Ohio, a state so generic that it's the go-to test
market for fast food chains that takes the top spot. There are more haunted houses in Ohio than anywhere in the country. Hello and welcome to Bloodview Haunted House here in Broadview Heights. It's called the Factory of Terror. It's about a mile of haunted attraction all under one roof on the haunting road in Canton. This has been going since 1974. So like you said, Morin, 44 years of scares and they just continue. In the world of entertainment, the more space, the bigger the spectacle, and the greater the profits. Land is abundant in the Midwest and commercial real estate
in Ohio is cheaper than that of coastal states. Haunted houses here boast incredible scale reaching up to an entire acre. They're built with sprawling sets, props, and animatronics, and everything comes to life behind armies of actors. The best haunted houses have the most immersive, unique, frightening experiences with production value that exceed even Hollywood horror movies. And the goal is simple, scare people. Haunted houses are seasonal businesses that can only operate during Halloween when people want to be scared. They make money selling tickets. It's an asset inensive retail business where the cost to build is a quarter of a million dollars, which isn't far off from other retail concepts. But the key difference
is that haunted houses have just these four to six weekends in October to make their money back. Once built, these attractions can't be repurposed for anything else, and they have no value 10 out of the 12 months of the year. Yet, the payoff can be tremendous as the best houses can gross over 7 figures during Halloween. With such a tiny window to make money, massive overhead, and no IP protection, haunted houses are truly a highstakes business. The industry is run by bootstrapped independents as few, if any, banks or institutions will invest or lend money to such a risky, capital-intensive seasonal venture. At the same time, Ohio is not a destination. These attractions serve locals, not tourists. To capture market
share, new owners must innovate and be hands-on to survive. And it takes a special type of character to succeed in this industry. In this modern NBA original, we're diving into the spooky business of haunted houses with the owners of Ohio's hottest attractions, Chipoa Lake Slaughter House and Nightmare Cleveland. Wow. Oh, wow. It's Friday in the boonies of Ohio. Here in Chipoa, this small rural village that's one hour away from Cleveland, is Vaughn, who's preparing with his team for the night ahead.
I got it in my eye last week. Like a [__] My god, we'll make it work. While most owners are old-timers whose haunted houses have been around for decades, Vaughn and his son Gavin are new entrance. It all started in 2017 when Chipoa Lake Slaughterhouse first opened. First off, as a kid, I loved them, you know. So, I've been through them. I've been the guy at a young age that would go through and cry and be afraid to do it and then get outside. And, you know, mom would uh say, "If you're ready to go home and I wet my tears and say, "No, I want to go back in." And so, it's just always been a love for it. But I also tell people that uh you come into our house and you won't see horror stuff anywhere. You know,
we're just neat, normal people. With it being such a short season, you know, haunt season is six weekends. A lot of the previous haunt owners have kind of kept them the same. To change a couple of those scenes can be quite a big expense. And if you're not making that money in six weekends, you don't have another opportunity all year to make that money. Ours are very modern versus your older bluecollar worker, which is what most of haunt owners are nowadays. They don't really care about that. The big thing right now that you see is the whole clowns, the zombies, things that generally scare people. We got to give people more. And I think by going completely like to the wall with a
theme is giving people more and it's kind of changing the agenda cuz most haunts are four different houses. Four different haunts, four different themes. We're one consistent theme throughout both of our places. Even though land in Ohio is abundant and affordable, real estate is still tricky for haunted houses. In an ideal world, you want to own the land. You can always sign a standard commercial lease, but then you'd be on the hook to pay rent for the other 11 months of the year. You can do a more short-term lease like what Spirit does with Halloween costumes, where you lease a vacant spot just for those 1 to 2 months. But the drawback is
that you'll be constrained in what you can do, which in turn limits the experience. It's difficult to build a brand when your location is always changing and your execution is forever bottlenecked by space. Thus, it was only after Vaughn secured the property that they could start filling in the blanks. So I have uh grandma and grandpa, grandma and grandpa Carver. His mass silicones are from there. Um and then I have the three brothers uh Buck, Bubba, and Clyde. The BBC and those are family inbredad boys. I'm trying to figure out when to introduce the sister. So I might do that in a year or two. She's always sneaking around
hiding trying to That's what grandpa's up to today. Post that. I don't know. thought it'd be kind of fun to do something like that. You know, these things, as crazy as they look, they're anywhere from six to $800, $900 a piece, you know, so quite a bit of money in them. Beyond passion, they had two edges. Outside of October, the pair work in construction. They built just about everything here themselves without having to outsource labor, which kept cost low and their vision sharp. Having knowledge and access to materials and specialists enabled them to go in blind without going broke and unintentionally challenge industry norms on design and budgeting and taking over an abandoned slaughterhouse in the
boonies was a creative gold mine that was too good to not theme their haunted house after. I was looking at a couple other properties way before I found this place. They were just old retail buildings or you know the properties weren't theme oriented I guess you want to say where when I saw this place it's an actual slaughter house. When you start thinking about all the horror movies, they all kind of follow the same thing. Everything was great back in the day and just something turned them and now they're evil and inbred, you know, people are missing in the area and just built the story on that and went with it.
We're big on having the theme make sense for that location. It's like, okay, would it make sense to do something similar to Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the family that eats people and cannibalism and all that? And it does. And I think that really helps drive like that cult following because it gives a feeling. You're not out of place at all. first coming down, finding the property, it was abandoned for 26 years. A fifth of the roof was on the ground in here. You couldn't walk through any part of this building without walking over something. It was trash. It was a construction site, dump site for the previous owner.
It took me about 2 and 1/2 years just to get the property safe and up to code. I came down here and just with the construction equipment gutted the building. I've swept this 34,000 ft building probably three times and vacuumed every square inch of it. completely gutted it and then started bringing everything back in and completely built every scene by hand. I spent some long nights. I have a construction business by day, come down here at night, sleep for a couple hours, work till 2 3 4 in the morning, go home, take a shower, get back to my job, you know, go work on my jobs, come up here, work again, work down the weekends. One rule of thumb is that haunted house owners should take their space and
divide it into as many small 16x6 or 20x20 rooms as possible. Owners design rooms around the scare, and every room has a unique one to keep visitors on their toes. The more rooms there are, the greater the variety of scares, and the longer and more memorable the experience. And the smaller those rooms are, the more claustrophobic things will feel, the more uncomfortable people will be, and the more likely the scare will be successful. [screaming] Because it's impossible to scare a crowd huddled together, haunted houses will always separate people into smaller groups of four to six. Oh, hell no, bro.
They're also critical for budgeting because even though there are more spaces to decorate, each room requires less detail and is in turn easier to redesign. In the haunt industry and in general, you're taught to scare from the rear and push the customer forward. So, you always want to scare from behind or the side behind and push forward. Scare quick and reset. You gotta make sure that you design it that way because if that scare is at the end of the room, every time the next group coming in is going to see that scare and you've ruined it. When you start talking about the original design or most haunts are a 15x5 room. That's because a lot of them once you get in and turn a corner, boom,
they get scared. Whoever's coming in next is still getting ready to turn that corner. They didn't see what happened. They heard a scare and they go, "Oh [__] something's going to happen." but they don't know what happened. Another rule of thumb is that building a haunted house should cost no more than $25 to $30 per square foot. The building of Chipoa Lake Slaughterhouse clocks in at $ 38,000 ft. While the outside walking path sits at a full acre because of how much they were able to physically take on themselves, the cost for Chipoa clocked in at roughly $17.75 a square foot across 2 years of construction. And because they were beginners with stable careers outside of the industry, there was no urgency for
ROI, no strict budgets, no need to compromise on vision, and no understanding of these industry norms. We had no idea what we were doing going into this. I don't know if it was just ignorance and not wanting to adhere to anybody else, but we just kind of figured it out ourselves. Learning what scares people, misdirection, seeing how like lights affect people, and this scene in general. There's a lot of things in the haunt industry that people do now that work. I mean, your traditional haunt, there's a reason everybody does it because it works. Yeah. It really helped going into this not doing that because we were able to add those things eventually with us. That's really what sets us apart. Our scenes are beautiful, but they work.
My vision back then was I just loved looking down the long 900 and some feet driveway and seeing partial building and the main entrance to this place. I thought, God, how cool would it be to just park up here and have my customers walk down and start to get in their mind for that 3minut walk and what the heck's going to happen to them? And as you come up, you start to see little guard houses and cattle gates. And then you're taken off the path down what would be where they drove the animals in. Hello. Hi, buddy. Sister, let me have your hand. I want your hand. Some of the music that I have here is older 50s music where it's caught in time. You know, this is when this place was really alive back in the day. back
in the day when they enter the building, they enter a diner which is where grandma and grandpa are in there and it's bloody and there's meat everywhere and it sets the tone. [groaning] Grandma, [screaming] we have gas. Grandma, grandma's that way. Grandma, [groaning and screaming] they're coming. Total immersion is the whole concept. Every detail in this place is intentional. And I think to truly take somebody out of the real world, you need to make sure that 1% that a lot of people don't focus on is paid attention
to. Between the costumeuming, the sound design, even just the logoing, and the painting, it all makes sense for the time period. Because if we had black fabric hanging up in a room, subliminally, it takes you out. You're like, "Okay, well, I remember I'm at a theme park or I'm at a whatever." But by making it look like, hey, you're walking into this, it just it really takes you out of the real world. Every audio clip that we do, we have a newscast here, which is a guy from the 50s that's talking on an anchor and we put an audio over them. So, it made sense. The TVs, even the costumes, all of them are vintage red cap that we use that would have been used back in the day. Every sign, every light, every image, every
logo is custom. We designed it down here for this place and solely for this place. It's a It's super immersive. You come in and you feel taken out of the world. You feel like you're in a movie. Beyond budget and design, the last big reason why the industry advocates for small rooms is pricing. Small rooms can be divided and grouped under different themes and narratives. That way, instead of betting everything on a single concept, like zombies or aliens, owners can derisk by offering a variety of themed experiences under one roof. Under this approach, they can charge higher ticket prices and customers feel like they're getting more bang for their buck even if their experience is shorter.
This industry adage never crossed Gavin and Van's minds. to convince people in Cleveland to drive over an hour to the middle of nowhere. They didn't see any options but to go big. They went all out to make Chipoa Lake Slaughterhouse the ultimate horror destination and with one single theme. A lot of the haunts in this area are old haunts. They've been around for a long time. For a while there, we were on a zombie phase, Walking Dead. So, all of a sudden, like we got to get zombies in our haunted house. Again, I don't think they're doing anything wrong. I just wanted to do something different. You got to remember, you have to touch on people's fears, too. You may not be afraid of a
butcher, but a clown may scare the crap out of you. So, let's put a clown in there so at least you get scared. Okay? And then someone's not scared of clowns, but they're scared of butchers. So, the butcher in there scared somebody else. Now, you've touched on a lot of fears that people have. You can do a clown house and you don't have to follow a story line or do anything. It's just, hey, it's clowns and it's scary. But, I think that's honestly it. They only stick to those themes because it's easy. Um, it doesn't take much effort. No matter how good the decorations and props are, they're still just stationary objects. Actors are essential to executing scares and it takes a village for haunted houses to succeed.
I don't like using animatronics. I have nothing against them. I think the people that build them do a wonderful job. That's creative. That's artistry, but I don't see the realism in them. It takes you out of the immersion. And when you hear air hissing, and then you can see like a scissor, which is what they're all rigged into coming out and like popping back and forth, you're like, "Okay, well that's an animatronic." Yeah. We just It's cool. I didn't want to do that at first. You know, we really rely on our actors heavily and we rely on our scenes and our artistry. That is the big thing is actors are the key ingredient. Ultimately, you could
have the prettiest scene, the best, just everything. But if the actor doesn't do what they're supposed to do, it ruins it. So, we're really big on training our actors and getting them where they need to be so it makes sense. Your person in front of the line isn't going to be scared. They're they wouldn't be standing in front if they were scared. So, we teach our actors, hey, you always hit the second or third person in the group and you push them forward. You never stand in front of them. So that maximizes throughput. It'll be a long night ahead for everyone, including Gavin, who will remain behind the scenes managing the attraction, guests, staff, and actors all together through walkie-talkies.
It's a massive orchestra of 50 people working across an entire acre of land every night. While all the actors and staff are paid, they like Gavin, run off a passion. Hiring actors is one undertaking and managing them is another. Last Saturday night was a busy night. That's going to be normal going out. So that's why it's imperative, as I said, every night to get your scare, get back. I've watched a few of you. You are doing it correctly. Thank you for that. It's perfect. The scares work. I'm watching lines come in. You guys are popping. You're getting back in. You're popping and people are getting scared.
I've even seen people with these young guys up front here, you know, pointing at, "Well, that's the real one." And they look away and then the guys pop and they get scared. Like, you just said he was real. It's the coolest thing to watch. So, it works. Just do it. Okay. The numbers are where I want them. You guys are doing a great job. The amount of actors we have this year is perfect. The show's on. It's It's on. So, thanks again. Everything you guys do, keep doing what you're doing. Don't do anything more. Anymore just changes it. It throws everything out of whack. All right. Get your business in the bathroom. Have a safe night. I'll be around. I'm in
costume tonight. Be safe. Are what we're doing in there. Okay. Just Yeah. You guys are doing great. Don't don't worry about that. You guys are out in the open, so you can't pop back. It's not as easy. Maybe Dan, but when you start getting lines in there and having to start this off, that's a whole different thing. You know what I mean? Yeah. What? Yeah, you get it. That was like the one thing like every time you said I'm like, uh, I really can't hop back. No, you're good, dude. And I appreciate you saying something to me, but you know, I mean, again, I say to everybody, common sense, you know what I mean?
It cost $750,000 to build out Chipoa Lake Slaughterhouse across 2 years. There's no mortgage or rent as they had purchased the land and building as is. Of the $750,000 in construction costs, $350,000 of that was spent on cleaning up the lot and renovating the abandoned building back up to code with sprinklers, alarms, electricity, roofing, and parking. And the rest all went to costumes and props. The old saying, I grew up with that one man's junk and another man's treasure. And that's completely true in the haunt industry to do the design that we have here and the amount of items and props that we bring in here is so much that it would just cost that much more if you were buying all these items from an
artist that makes them and design them. So driving down the road and all of a sudden you see a couple of old couches or beds or cabinets or whatever we need for the haunt or we could use a scene, you stop and you grab it. You know what I mean? If it's out if it's for free, you know, God bless up here Craigslist. God bless, you know, Facebook Marketplace. I've traveled all over the state picking up stuff for the building here. It's important in order to be able to afford to build something like this that you can find items out there that are already distressed, already aged. It's just it's that more real.
It's expensive to outfit a 40,000t place. So, this would look good to fill a corner and even if it's a broken chair. Yeah, it's important to fill the space. You know, if you come in and you got some key props that are important, but what are you filling in the rest of it with? And then you let the customer's mind fill in the blanks after that. You're not in a room very long. Person comes in and walks through it. They're in and out in seconds. But there's so much in there it'll probably take them half hour to look at everything in the room. Where you guys hiding?
Actors make $80 a night and work about 7 hours, putting their earnings slightly above Ohio minimum wage. There's additional operating costs like ticketing staff, security, and law enforcement. All of which are critical as the crowds can range from several hundred to a few thousand over the span of a single night. Chipoa Lake Slaughterhouse is regarded by locals as the top five in the state and grosses on average $351,000 over the course of the Halloween season despite being only open on Fridays and Saturdays totaling 13 days in a single year. Chipoa Lake Slaughterhouse grosses on average $54,000 every weekend. After deducting marketing and other expenses, the operating income for Chipoa Lake Slaughterhouse comes to $270,000 for an
attraction level operating margin of over 70%, which is even more impressive when we consider just how far the location is from any major metropolitan. There's really not much to do in the boonies, and the desolation of Chipoa as a town only adds to the experience. Look at these guys. Regulars. How do we let you out the first time? You guys didn't. You threw me in a van. You did? Good job. Chipoa Lake Slaughterhouse is a passion project as much as it is a business. Yet, there's diminishing returns to design and the inconvenience of the location and their prioritization of experience has constrained their
earnings. If you walk out of here scared or smiling and you were entertained, I did my job. I did everything I wanted to accomplish by building this place, you know, and I love that. I've been getting chills talking about that. I love it. I love it. that excites me, you know what I mean? So, good job. Good job, guys. Thanks for coming out. Scare the [__] out of you. Thanks for coming out, buddy. Thank you, sir. Thank you. You guys be safe going home. We will. Thanks again, girls. Byebye. After proving that they could go toe-to-toe with the incumbents, they set their vision to building an even better
haunted house with greater commercial potential. One hour till nightmare Cleveland becomes operational. Everybody got their hair done and their teeth done because we're going to wrap that up. Good. Oh, you're done. You got your teeth done? Let me see your teeth. Their newest is Nightmare Cleveland, which is just a 15inute drive from the city center. While Chipawa was a case of building the plane while flying, Nightmare Cleveland was meant to be the opposite. Lean, mature, fast, high ROI, and low risk with multiple themes and strict budgets. But as horror enthusiasts first and businessmen second, Van and Gavin could not resist going all out once more.
It was supposed to pretty much reconcile the debt from here. Obviously, we limit the show like crazy because we want people to have a good time. So, Nightmare was like, "Okay, what can we do so we can just push as many people through as we can?" we don't care and it'll be like look we're going to make you know $2 million and whatever it's a cash cow and then we can recoup and then we can do this separately like hey this makes the money but this is the passion project and then we start doing nightmare and then between all the scenic designers and everybody we had we're like okay is this what we want to do is this isn't fun this isn't true to what we're trying to do but the original design for
that place was do the clowns do the aliens do noatu and zombies and just the [__] that people like to see that they want to see um and We couldn't do it. It just didn't happen from day one when we put the walls up. And in each room, the amount of trim that's in there, most people just paint a black line. We have four different pieces of trim in each room. Just that attention to detail is what Yeah. The joke up there is if the let's just say if we ever close the haunt up, I probably could rent it out as a laboratory. That's beautiful. I really could. The equipment that's up there is real from hospitals that they've had to retire. But I think that's who we are.
Dad, you got to do this. You got to do that. Blah. I'm like, "Son, just hold on." You know, we just let's stick with this what I believe. I love it. I feel it. You know, I think this is going to be different. And he I think he as he got older, he understood what I was saying. And I think we got lucky by being passionate about it. Cuz most people go into like, okay, well, the numbers are good. It makes money. How can we do this in an economical way and get the most return? I think us going into this with the whole like, okay, well, how can we just be better than everybody else and actually do something different? Maybe the money will come. And I think fortunately for us it did.
Um we got lucky kind of on that like pipe dream of okay, it's getting better. Let's put it that way. It's getting better. But it just works. Uh tonight is going to be a busy night. [screaming and cheering] It's October. Everybody's coming to see you, baby. You are freaking incredible. Thank you for everything you do. At this time, grab your waters and start heading to your seat for the night. 6:55. We got to scare the crap out of Micah, BABY.
VAN and Gavin are leasing and paying rent all year round just to be closer to Cleveland. But in contrast to Chipoa, there wasn't anything to inherit, which gave them a blank canvas for design. We're under a furniture store, but we're in the back and it's this old brick building. It's decrepit. It's disgusting. It's like, okay, would a laboratory make sense there? And it did. When you're going in here, you get so many ideas like, "Oh, this room could be this or this." And there's 50 things you can do. Doing the mood boards really helped because it kept us in line with what we wanted to do from a vision standpoint. Every new room we've done,
if you went in, we would have pictures just stapled to the wall of, hey, this is what this room is. Stay within line from a color standpoint, an actor standpoint, a scare standpoint, just everything. But yeah, the big thing is just watching movies. I love movies. I love playing games. Everybody that works for us and helps design for us, it's the same thing. Dead Space was huge. Atomic Heart was huge. Bioshock was huge. A lot of our character names came from that. A lot of our costume design came from that. Call of Duty Zombies, the new one that was huge was Kalisto Protocol. A lot of the
scenes from that game were in the haunt. Again, nothing too on the money to where it's like, okay, this is a direct copy. But there's a lot of influences from a design standpoint. And the nice thing about the laboratory theme is we could kind of slightly change it if we wanted and we can create new monsters or new experiments that have gone wrong, which is what it's about. So that's what we took, you know, learning down here and applying it to the next one. While the total construction cost for Tripoa Lake Slaughterhouse came to $750,000 across 2 years, Nightmare Cleveland cost $1.1 million across 22 months. On a square foot basis, Nightmare cost $32 compared to Chipoa's $17, even though both venues are comparable in size. Yet, the scope
and timing of construction for the two attractions were wildly different. As development of Nightmare Cleveland took place during COVID, whereas Chipoa had finished long before, the price of lumber and other raw materials had tripled during the pandemic, which further inflated costs. $600,000 of the $1.1 million was spent on plywood alone, which was needed to build the walls for nightmare. In contrast, Chipoa didn't need walls as they simply use the structure of the abandoned slaughterhouse. Yet, being closer to the city brought new challenges like parking and queuing. At nightmare, we can put through 1500 people an hour just with the way it's set up. We run 25 30 seconds between groups. So, after the first three rooms, you're going to catch
up to a group in front of you and that ruins the show for everybody. Um, so we integrated this new thing that we actually learned down in Columbus and they're called ropers where it's we have two dedicated actors in each house, house A and house B. They run through and they throw a rope at a group and people love it. They interact. They grab the rope and like, "Oh, this is fun. This is part of the show." But that's us getting them through and trying to speed them up and they maintain flow throughout. If you guys see us coming through with this, we're called ropers. Your ropers tonight are me, Tabby, and Terry. What
we are looking for are conga lines. What we're going to do is break up that congaline. Take that and come WITH ME. WE GOT TO GET YOU OUT [screaming] OF HERE. LET'S GO. SO, if you see us frantically running through your room with a group of customers, still do your thing, but we're probably going to have them step it up a little bit so that you guys can focus on the group behind us. But because Vaughn and Gavin are competing on experience above all else, the themes are completely different across both attractions and the scares are designed to the space rather than copied and pasted across venues. [screaming] It probably wasn't the best idea to do two completely separate haunts from the get- go.
Well, when we did Nightmare, the whole idea with that was scalability. When we designed this, we want to do something that we could do somewhere else. Like, hey, do we want to go to another city, somewhere that maybe has more people or has more income. So, Nightmare was huge on again the scale side of things. Can we take this and how can we and we have a lot of systems in place that we don't have down here. [screaming] The other thing too is from Cleveland, we're about 3540 minutes. To have another one like this up there would only compete with myself. Would I take a Chipo Lake slaughterhouse or a slaughter house and put it in another state?
Absolutely. Ultimately, designing these things is fun because you're like, "Okay, well, if we want to do a clown like I'm not against I would love to do I really would someday." It scares people so it works. But haunted houses can't survive on the principle of build it and they will come, even for those with a reputation as strong as Vans and Gavins. Marketing alone makes up 20% of each attraction's annual operating expenses. Marketing is not just there to keep them top of mind for locals, but instead to secure advanced sales as much as possible. Our big thing now has been scarcity marketing. Having our nights be ultra limited, which they are down here at
Nightmare, not so much, but driving that of, hey, we're 85% sold out. You need to get a ticket. It drives people. It gives that cognitive dissonance of like, "Okay, well, I put in this effort. I signed up for this pre-sale. I might as well buy it because I went through all this effort." And it works. We have the three billboards that are up. Snapchat, Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. All these things are they're important. Unlike amusement parks or movie theaters who sell food, beverage, and merchandise to generate meaningful ancillary revenue, haunted houses have no such opportunities. Once a visitor has made
their way through, there's nothing to stick around for. Owners have invested so much already into atmosphere and scares that there's no appetite and capital left to be wasted on weak cross sales. As a result, ticket sales are the lifeblood for haunted houses. When you sell and how much you sell matters just as much as the cost of the ticket. The more tickets you can sell in advance, the more money you get to collect upfront, rain or shine, and the more tiers you offer, the more flexibility you have in pricing despite offering the same core product. You're trying to get people to come to something that you created that costs so much money they'll never know. And like, how do you find
that happy medium on what to charge so that everybody can enjoy it? The people that are just getting by, the people that are making it. If you keep raising these prices higher and higher, you're just going to drive so many people out of the entertainment market that want to come to a haunted house. 30 bucks a person for 30 minutes. I think that's a lot of money, but we can't go any lower. I am a firm believer of just keeping them as comfortable of a price as we can for so many people to enjoy it. Yeah, I would love to be charging $45, $50, but I just don't think that's real to when I'm going out trying to scare a mom and
she brought three of her kids, you know, and just to get them out of the house and have fun. I can't do it. And I know other haunts are feeling the same way. They don't want somebody else that came in as a big new haunt and they're going to be $45, $50 and they're like, "God, we don't want to raise our price up to there." You know, that's People want to pay it though. Again, there's haunts that charge 50, 60 bucks just to get for the same length. People pay it. Yeah. But we just it's not true to what first off where we came from, how I grew up, but mom, you and everybody, it's staying true to the communities that we're in. It's Ohio.
It's not like you're out in New York or if you're in LA, the average income is higher. Yeah, we could charge it and people would probably pay it, but it doesn't make sense. You want as many people to come through and see your effort that you put in and enjoy it. Nightmare Cleveland has a staff of 75 and operates from Thursday to Sunday. Actor payroll is nearly double and the year- round rent for Nightmare alone is equivalent to the entire year of operating expenses for Chipoa. The greater overhead and prime location cuts into profits as Nightmare's attraction level operating margin sits at a little over 50%. Yet, the proximity to Cleveland is well worth the cost as Nightmare grosses on average nearly
three times that of Chipoa with sales of 1,82,15 during Halloween. Chippoa is open for only 13 days in a single year, grossing on average $24,000 a day, whereas Nightmare is open for 24 days in a year, grossing on average $45,000 in a single day. Van is surprisingly not tribal or protective about what he and his son have built. The money's good, but he's also worn all the hats over the years to know firsthand that there's nothing easy about the haunted house business and that gatekeeping is feudal. I don't have a problem with open opening a haunted house across the street. I really don't. That doesn't bother me. My father always taught me that you just do the best job you can and that's all you
can ask, you know, for yourself. People will enjoy it. They're going to come, you know, you be fair. And I've stuck with that and it's paying off. If someone wants to copy this, I guess they really like what I did, right? We've There's a lot of haunts that have tried to copy some stuff down here, too. I don't know. Yeah. No, it's I just But that's just me. That's my old way of thinking. I don't think you would see the passion and the design and the way it runs. Our actors down here are amazing. I love every single each and every one of them. They're the ones that make this run. Without them, this is nothing. It would just be a museum. So, to come in and copy the theme and the
idea or something similar, I don't think they could do it as well as we did. People go out to haunted houses. They don't just go to one for the season. If they can afford it, they'll go to multiples when I took Gavin and his buddies, his friends when he was younger. We used to go hit all the haunts. I would hit one every week. And I love them, you know. So, the more in the area, the better as far as I'm concerned. And a lot of people we talk to feel the same way. I'll sit at the end and talk to people. Hey, where's the next nearest one? You know, it's 9:30. We want to go to another one. Hey, go to this. I'll I'll I'll rattle off the five nearest ones. If you get a chance, Chip Lake's pretty good. I love it here, but Chip is
Okay. Try it. Thanks. get a chance. Have a good night, y'all. Ohio has 131 haunted houses, and we've opened two of them, and it was never a thought of, oh, well, hey, there's one 15 minutes down the road. Has never affected us. Nightmare. There's I mean, there's probably four haunts within a 10-minute radius of that place. And I think people are scared of competition ultimately cuz you're taking money out of their pockets. They're doing it for the money without the passion. Yeah. So, they get scared when somebody comes and it's like, "Hey, this is a good product. I don't know if we're the best or whatever that standard is, but it's a new product and it's good." So, it's
we're going to take things away from them. And I think they get scared. Yeah. And if they've been around or been in the industry a long time and they haven't made any improvements or they're kind of stuck in their ways, just bitter. Yeah. They're And then all of a sudden a new guy comes in, they're like, "I don't want to change." While the people of Ohio can't get enough, not everyone is a fan of Gavin and Vaughn. Some of the competition have gone out of their way to disrupt their progression. The first one was when we're building the walls. Somebody called the building department and they were saying, "Hey, they're using nonfiretreated wood. You need to get up there and inspect the place and you got to shut them down."
And this was a week or two before we opened. And then we had another runin with somebody calling the building department again for this, saying that our actors were inappropriately touching one of their kids um false claiming on this and calling the building department. Um just really trying to drive them in, which is a huge thing. Our first year here, we had a lot of one stars from other haunts because they were worried. They'd be like, "Okay, well, hey, tell your actors They'd send one stars to here to drop our rating because ratings are big. The high some of the highest rated haunts right now. I think we got a 46 and a four five.
You're proud of that. Yeah. In Ohio. That's a big part of the gatekeepy, too, is there a lot of clicks in the haunt industry on behind the scenes that I don't think we realized until a couple years ago. Politics, all these things. Yeah. That's a shame that the haunt owner a few of them allow that. It's not, you know, part of my conversation is, you know, we don't talk about other haunts whether you like them or don't like them. It's, you know, this is an entertainment. We're in together. enjoy it. You know, we're not here to make enemies and talk bad about anybody else. Social media can be a weapon. We all know that. While most haunted house owners only ever operate one or two venues
throughout their lifetime, Gavin's ambition is to scale beyond Ohio. It would be unprecedented, but then again, so was Chipoa Lake Slaughterhouse and Nightmare Cleveland. It wouldn't be the first time he and his dad have challenged the status quo. And like many great businessmen, the currency that keeps the two of them going is ultimately the passion more so than the money. The goal is to go to markets with more people that spend more money. Um, growing up in Dallas, I noticed that compared to Cleveland, there's probably three times the amount of people that will spend three times the amount of money.
There's not a lot of haunts. There's not a lot of competition. Dallas is huge. Phoenix is huge. Nashville, Seattle. I mean, even in California, there's a lot of haunts out there, but there's nobody doing what we do. I was never huge on horror or haunts in general as much as he was. I was always big on business and like okay like what can we do and where can we take this and where will it end up and nightmare again even 5 years ago before it was even a thought was what can we eventually do. So it was really important when we designed that place to make sure that it could be copy and paste. Now, with the layout of that, the blueprint of that, there's some rooms we could change or do this or
that, but we could do it in any other 32,000 foot space and then some. Oh my god. Got to have a little scare for the camera girl.
