Dark Friends Series
Eric Lowther
Eric Lowther attended the Joe Kubert School of cartoon and graphic art in Dover, New Jersey, and planned to be an illustrator when he graduated.
He found it hard to make a steady living doing freelance art/comic book work, so he learned how to earn income retouching digital images. Besides working on Haunted Overload nearly year-round, Eric also does digital work for Garnet Hill, a New Hampshire-based company.
Of his artistic background, Eric says, “it definitely helps with making Haunted Overload as aesthetically pleasing as possible. I want every corner that the patrons turn to have something impressive to look at.”
I think as you read my interview with Eric and see the photos and video clips included here (all the images are from Haunted Overload), you’ll agree that he has more than achieved his goal.
The Interview
I’ve spent hours online researching the most popular haunted attractions in the US, but I’ve never seen one quite like yours. I’ve got to say, even though I’ve never visited your site in person, Haunted Overload is my favorite haunted attraction.
Eric, do you think that it’s accurate to say that yours is a one-of-a-kind haunted attraction?
Oh, without a doubt. Just from comments from other haunters and other people familiar with the industry. They say, “We’ve never seen anything like it,” even though they’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of haunted houses over the last twenty years or so. So just going by that, since I obviously don’t get to go to a lot of haunted houses. It puts a lot of pressure on us too because we have people flying in from across the country just to see this.
One of the most unique features of Haunted Overload is the presence of your gigantic, monstrous sculptures. Which one presented the greatest challenge for you to build?
Each one of these giant sculptures takes a different approach. We used to have 36-foot telephone poles and hoist them up in sections.
The latest 50-foot freestanding pumpkin headed sculpture was built from the ground up and has a building supporting the arm so I have three points of contact with the ground. I needed a 50-foot fireman’s ladder to accomplish this. Large 6 x 6 pressure-treated timbers were sunk into the ground with cement to build the legs.
I usually build scale models of the complicated designs like the dragon, skull, mansion, church, etc.
We are revamping the whole pumpkin alley area now so that sculpture is coming down and will be replaced by three smaller 25-foot pumpkin-headed sculptures for a better flow.
The large monsters and structures have become a staple of Haunted Overload. In the beginning they started because I wanted to make a small space very impressive. The taller the monsters, the more impressive the display became. And then our fans expected bigger and bigger each year. LOL!
The early monsters were extremely time-consuming to put up and take down, so I started making giant sculptures out of wood so that I could leave them up all year round.
The skull is thirty-five feet tall and definitely one of our proudest achievements because it is very unique and one-of-a-kind. I painted it with a mixture of glow-in-the-dark paint and UV reactive paint, so it glows like crazy when we put a black light on it.
(On Haunted Overload’s YouTube channel you can find videos like this one that clearly shows the challenge of building this massive four-story structure!)
I think one of the biggest challenges was the mansion because of the terrain and complexity of the project. We had to make it look like an authentic Victorian mansion from the outside but also detail the inside.
Patrons would be walking through this, so I had to get creative because we are only allowed 160 square feet undercover without a sprinkler.
(Want to see how you build a full-sized haunted mansion and make it look old and creepy? This two-and-a half-minute video shows you just how Eric and his crew did it.)
We have a tree growing right up through one of the rooms, and the ceiling looks like it’s caving in and open to the sky. It took us the entire season working every weekend to get just that one project done.
Everything had to be carried in by hand through the woods. But it turned out fantastic-looking. We are proud of all the teamwork it took to pull it off.
Another unique aspect of Haunted Overload that I especially appreciate is that you offer different types of experiences for your guests. You have the traditional nighttime experience with your live actors and all the sound and lighting, the Main Event nights. But then there’s a daytime walkthrough without the actors so people can see the artistry of the builds. And there’s also something in between, I think. Can you talk a bit about the different levels of scares you offer besides the traditional Main Event nights?
Fright Night Lite is where everything’s all lit up with special effects and sound but you can go through the haunt at your own pace without the actors trying to chase you with chain saws and stuff like that.
We also have a Day Walk event with no actors or special effects. You might think, “Who wants to see a haunt in the daytime when it’s not scary?” But as people have found out about it, more and more people come to do that.
And then we have our Glow Stick Night when the lights are very dim and the patrons only have glow sticks to see by. We do a different soundtrack where it’s like frogs and crickets in the woods, a natural type of sound.
It’s a very different experience for the actors because they can see the patrons, but the patrons can’t really see them. It’s pretty funny, because while the patrons are thinking the glow sticks are showing their way, the sticks are really kinda blinding them—they can only see a few feet in front of them, but the actors, who get to roam around more, can see the patrons very easily.
Having these different kinds of events helps me to offer different prices, because I don’t have to have as many actors or run as much equipment all the time. I might only need 40 to 45 actors on Glow Stick or Black Out Night.
Covid-19 has been horrible in so many ways, including a devastating effect on many businesses. How did the pandemic affect you and Haunted Overload?
We definitely had to put in a lot of new protocols and jump through a lot of hoops, but our one saving grace is that we are an outside trail in the woods with a lot of open space, so the risk of transmission is so much lower than being inside a building. 2020 went great. We widened the cue line and spent a lot of money on making it a lot longer so we could spread people out.
We reduced our capacity at night, but what is interesting is that the day haunt nearly quadrupled in attendance. Instead of doing our usual three hundred during the day, we were having well over a thousand.
There was nothing else open in the day, no fairs or anything like that. We’re the only haunt that I know of that’s open during the day. But it’s kind of a double-edged sword, ’cause you’ve got to make everything look great even in the light.
It’s so hard to start up again if you lose a year. And all the shelters, like the animal shelter that we support, that’s a consideration, because if we shut down, that’s a giant hit to them also. But since people came out, we were able to give the shelter a great donation and also be in a good position to open this year.
What inspired you to create this magnificent haunt?
I have loved Halloween ever since I was a little kid. When we were around 12 years old, when we got too old to go trick-or-treating, a friend and I decided to put on a little haunted house in the basement to scare the trick-or-treaters and their parents. We always loved the Jaycees haunted houses growing up, so we wanted to do something similar. Once we got that first scare from the trick-or-treaters and some of their parents, I was hooked on scaring people.
So after that, I would put on small haunted houses anywhere I could––parents’ houses, friends’ houses, neighbors, grandparents. Over the years they grew bigger and more elaborate. At one point I was living in a condo and didn’t have anywhere to do it so I ended up selling all my props and had a two-year hiatus. In 1999 when I bought my own house I decided I would start off very small with a few decorations.
Then in 2001, I wanted to have a massive Halloween party and build a 20-foot scarecrow. That was the beginnings of the giant monsters and over-the-top props you see today.
I had a very small front yard, so in order to make something impressive, I had to build up instead of out.
The party and the scarecrow were a huge hit, so the next few years I wanted to go taller and taller with the monsters. I would get construction companies to come to sink telephone poles in my front yard and construct these monsters in pieces and hoist them up with block and tackle.
Eventually I made a fundraiser out of the event for the animal shelter. In 2006 the event grew way too big for the neighborhood, so I knew I had to either quit or attempt to make a business out of it.
In 2014 the ABC network included Haunted Overload as one of its featured haunted attractions in its Great Halloween Fright Fight competition, and you won. I’m sure the cash prize was helpful to your budget, but did appearing on this TV show have other benefits for your attraction?
When we were approached by ABC to participate in the show we knew it would be a major challenge. We were already into our build season and this was out of the blue and we knew it would add an extreme amount of extra work to our season.
With a $50,000 prize on the line, I knew that it could help the animal shelter a great deal, so we decided to do it and if we won we would donate the entire $50,000 to the animal shelter. That gave us the motivation to keep going and work as hard as possible all summer in order to film by the end of August.
It worked out great because we were able to donate the $50,000 grand prize to the shelter. They were in the process of trying to build a much-needed new one at the time so it gave them good momentum for the fundraising campaign.
It was a great experience but the only downside was we got pretty burnt out working so hard for the show that we had to kind of regroup for our regular normal Halloween season.
But it was all worth it. We were able to donate enough to their campaign to get the cat playroom named after Haunted Overload with a sign in the window. It’s a pretty cool feeling and one of our proudest accomplishments so far.
How many actors do you typically have working in order to operate each night?
We have about 80 actors and another 20 for parking and stuff like that for our Main Event nights. I still consider us a small to medium-sized haunt as far as attendance goes.
Our biggest nights are probably around 2,100 people, but we sell our tickets kinda like a play, with timed ticketing (patrons reserve their tickets for a specific time slot in advance), once we’re sold out, we’re sold out. We don’t just open the flood gates and have general admission with like 5,000 people trying to get in at once. Timed ticketing helps in keeping the line down.
We’ve reached our comfort level where we’re open just enough nights with the right-sized crowds so we can make a healthy donation to the shelter and cover our expenses and not burn everybody out.
Who are these people who work so hard to get Haunted Overload ready for visitors? Are all of your workers volunteers?
Yeah. I get people who go through the attraction and then contact me saying, “I want to work this next year,” and I’ll tell them to come on and get their feet wet this year and see what it’s all about.
So I get new people who will come in mid-season and take over for others who get sick or worn out, ’cause it’s hard work! And they’ll end up staying for many years. I’ve got people who’ve been with me since like 1993!
You become a family, right?
Most definitely.
Haunted Overload is quite an accomplishment in so many ways. Of what are you the proudest?
It’s how we’ve been able to put together this group of people, volunteers only, to make this work. I mean, I enjoy it so much. I’m running around all night with a chainsaw, too, because I enjoy scaring people so much. It’s this adrenaline rush that all these actors worked for; they like to see how the scenes all come together and then work in the scenes that they helped build all season.
It’s really a cool feeling to be able to start with a blank scene, and then see it, over the course of many months, come together more and more and more.
And then opening night when people are screaming in that scene that you helped make and you’re getting that adrenaline rush and giving them that adrenaline rush––it’s just a really special thing that’s hard to duplicate anywhere else.
What new and exciting terrors might we see for the 2021 season?
It’s really hard to describe what all we’ve got going on that’s new, but it’s really incredible. One thing is we’ve invested in this new sound system; I’ve got this big train tunnel that we’re putting huge sub-woofers in. I can’t wait to hear how that sounds, how it will be rumbling when you’re in the train tunnel.
And there’s a huge new scene called the Devil’s Den––I like to name all my scenes––it’s painted all black with all these crazy angles and coffins with like thirty detailed skeletons, and with lots of white ghost bodies that we’ve made.
We’ve got a walk-through graveyard that’s gonna be all new––and a witch village. I changed the trail an incredible amount.
It seems like I bite off more than we can chew but it always seems to get done somehow.
Whatever we don’t get done we just pick up on the next year. ‘Cause it’s not like we’re only gonna do this for a year and have to show everything right now.
We’ll be doing this for a while, so we keep changing and evolving.
The amount of work that goes into creating and maintaining such an operation would be exhausting. What keeps you doing it year after year?
It’s definitely been my passion since I was a little kid. It’s easier to do when it’s something you really love. I just love scaring people and I have an artistic background so this is a major artistic outlet for me. I like to do things that nobody’s ever seen before, like that gigantic four-story skull. I like to do things that would be incredibly hard to copy. So it’s the challenge of trying to do better every year. I love to hear the comments from people like, “Oh, I don’t see how they can possibly top this year and then hear them say, “Holy crap, they DID top themselves.”
We do make it hard on ourselves because we set the bar so high. It’s gotten so big and the haunt gets destroyed in the winter with the storms and branches falling down on everything. As soon as the snow melts, we work on it every weekend all the way into opening in October, and then we’re still running around like crazy.
It’s worth it in the end when you get the reviews and you’ve got people’s smiling faces. Or when they recount memories on our Facebook page from a visit years ago. It’s incredibly satisfying to know that we’re doing something that’s kind of blazing our own trail in the industry. We like doing something very unique and feel very lucky to be able to do this.
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If you wish to know more about this magnificent haunted attraction, including how to buy tickets for the different events offered, you can find everything you’d like to know on the Haunted Overload website.