2005 season

Kingsbury Cemetery was closed at its usual location in 2005. This was mainly due to a lack of available time to set up and take down the haunt. Kingsbury Cemetery takes up a month (or more) of my life every year. Besides this being a very busy year all around, we also welcomed our third child, Karin Marie, into the world in April 2005. With all the family, work and other outside activties this year there was just not time to do justice to the haunt and keep my sanity at the same time. There was no theme story written for this year, and no haunting of the front yard, though I did dress up, set up a few props and a fog machine or two in the front yard, and scare a few unsuspecting trick-or-treaters on Halloween night. Kingsbury Cemetery came back though the following year in 2006 with a new vengance! Plans were already being made in 2005 for the 2006 show and the Background Story and Theme, tenatively titled "Ghost in the Mirror" was almost complete and several new large props were also in the works.

So that I could still get my Halloween "fix" without killing myself. In 2005 Kingsbury Cemetery donated time and the use of many of its best props to the Corning Museum of Glass for its "Ghosts in the Galleries" one night family Halloween event. This is a yearly free event for parents and kids. Hot glass pumpkins and ghosts are made on the hot glass stage, and kids and adults can walk through the haunted museum galleries. Music, costume contests, and free refreshments also. See Corning Museum of Glass and Ghosts in the Galleries for more info.

The Corning Museum of Glass event went very well with over 1600 people attending over 2.5 hours. Although this was intended to be a more "restfull" year for me, the CMoG event took a lot of effort, just over a shorter time span. The Museum sent a moving truck to my house and we nearly filled the truck with props. The kicker was that the Ghosts in the Galleries event was one night and the museum was open for regular business and tours both the day of and the day after the event. The Corning Museum of glass is a very popular tourist attraction. I believe it is the third most visited tourist attraction in New York state besides Niagra Falls and The Empire State building. It was interesting to see the out of town tourists reactions as we wheeled cartloads of skeletons, skulls and caskets into the museum galleries. Not ony did all the props have to be set up in one day but all had to be taken down immedaitely after the event so that the museum could be open for regular business the next day as if nothing had ever happened the night before. That meant loading up the truck after the event and unloading everything back into the garage that night. It took a while before the mess in the garage ever got cleaned up.