There’s a fun article on CNN today that interviews KathE Walker, owner of several haunts here in Denver, along with some of her employees. There’s an interesting perspective about haunted houses in the current economy, including an obligatory soundbyte from Larry Kirchner of the Haunted House Association.
We haunt fans had discussion earlier in the season about how the economy would impact haunted houses this year, and according to the article, business is still booming. We wonder if all of the local haunt owners feel this way, but we’ve seen long lines at all the haunts we’ve visited the past few weekends.
The biggest weekend of the month is approaching. Which haunts are on your “Must-Visit” list for this weekend, and why? Drop a comment and share your thoughts.
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As a newly created “by the people, for the people” type of site, this is a crucially important week for us.
Enthusiasm for haunted houses reaches its highest point this week. After Saturday night, for 99% of the haunt-going community, that enthusiasm evaporates after Halloween and won’t start to build again until next October.
That means we have four days after today, and the clock is already ticking, to spread the word about this site. We need the momentum to launch us into a successful year next year, and your support will be the determining factor in how we’ll be able to compete with the commercial sites.
Would you do us a huge favor? Tell your friends about Spooky Colorado! If you have a Facebook account, post a link to our site in your status update! If you have email addresses for friends who love Denver haunted houses, shoot them a quick message and invite them to our site. Also, encourage them to click the link above to the Spooky Colorado Forum and to post their thoughts about the haunts they’ve visited, or tell us what haunts they’re planning to visit!
Four days to go! You can help make it so that once again, an independent site is leading the way for haunt fans in Denver. Thanks for spreading the word!
When you type in a Google search, such as “haunted houses in Colorado,” the vast majority of the search engine results you’ll receive are for websites created by (or, as is more often the case, paid to a web designer to be created by) haunted house owners themselves. This article is a “watchdog” article of sorts to explain who’s behind the various websites you may have encountered while looking for information on Denver haunted houses.
As a general rule, there are three types of haunted house websites.
Type 1: ”Cooperative Advertising” Websites. Over the years, various haunted houses in Colorado have worked in cooperation with each other to promote their haunted houses on the internet, even though these haunts are competing against each other for customers. This is usually done to allow these haunted houses to get more for their advertising dollars or web development dollars than they would get if they each paid for their ads and websites separately.
The oldest of these groups is called Rocky Mountain Haunted House Guild, LLC. Most of us in Denver have seen, in years past, the Guild’s full-page, full-color display ad in the Denver Post (and formerly, the Rocky Mountain News). They usually hire a professional to design their graphics and their ad, and it usually features coupons to each of their haunts. Their website is www.scared.com and it lists information on their various haunts. This group, collectively, was able to muscle out a number of smaller haunts who did not have large advertising budgets. For years, many hauntgoers in Denver mistakenly assumed that the Guild’s ad and site, published as the “Rocky Mountain Haunted House Guide,” were publications of a media outlet, not an advertisement, and that it included all of the haunts in the Denver metro area.
Another variation of a cooperative advertising site is Haunted Denver Media, LLC, which operates the website www.haunteddenver.com. According to the Colorado Secretary of State’s website, Haunted Denver is privately owned by Christopher Stafford, the co-owner of Screamworks Entertainment which produces haunted houses such as The 13th Floor and The Asylum. Haunted Denver originally began as a fansite, similar to Spooky Colorado. According to a Wikipedia article about Haunted Denver, the website was purchased by Haunted Denver Media, LLC in 2007. The site features information for selected haunted houses in Denver while excluding others, and also displays advertisements for several haunts, including those produced by the site’s owners, as well as several others (who presumably pay to advertise on the site).
Type 2: Haunt-Owned Websites. These usually promote a single haunted house. An example is The 13th Door, a haunted house whose website, www.13door.com, appears in the top Google results for “denver haunted houses.” Another is the haunted house Frightmare and its website www.denverhauntedhouses.com. These sites each list information for a single haunted attraction, and they are usually owned and maintained by the haunt owners themselves.
Some haunted house production companies who operate multiple haunted house attractions build a single site to feature each of their haunts. One example is the website www.getscared.com, owned by the aforementioned Screamworks Entertainment. The Get Scared website promotes their three haunted houses. Another is www.pf13.net, a website registered (according to public WHOIS data) to Dale Ervin. The site promotes both of his haunted houses, Primitive Fear and 13th Street Manor.
Occasionally there are hybrids of haunt-owned sites, such as the site www.hauntedratings.com. Public nameserver information for this site as well as archived versions of the site’s WHOIS data list the owner of Haunted Ratings as Stephen Walker, a haunt owner whose attractions include The 13th Door, Curse of Slaughterhouse Gulch, and The Butcher. In years past, this site has featured ads only for the site owner’s attractions, but with the bonus of including informational listings for all Denver-area haunted attractions, in a similar style to that formerly utilized by Haunted Denver. This year, Haunted Ratings features ads for all of the haunts that participate in the Rocky Mountain Haunted House Guild, so perhaps it would now make more sense to classify Haunted Ratings as a “Type 1″ site — a cooperative advertising website.
Type 3: “Dummy” Websites. This final type of website represents a disturbing new trend amongst Denver haunted house owners. In an effort to compete for search engine results, some haunt website owners have started saturating the internet with “dummy sites” designed to bolster the search engine rankings for their other sites. A dummy site is saturated with keywords but usually lacking in content. It may utilize some custom design work, or even a few hastily-written articles or blog posts, to give the appearance of being a legitimate site, but it usually only takes about 30 seconds of reading to realize that the site is not intended to be informational, but rather just to be indexed by search engines and then steer traffic elsewhere.
An example of a site like this is www.hauntedcolorado.com. It contains incomplete content copied from Haunted Denver, laden with clickable keywords, to fool a search engine into perceiving it as having a higher value to visitors. While the public WHOIS information for Haunted Colorado is listed as private, it contains only links to other websites owned by Screamworks Entertainment. Also, the site itself states that it is developed by Chad Savage’s Sinister Visions, the web design firm hired by Screamworks to develop all of their other sites. While neither of these facts are proof that Screamworks is behind the development of these dummy sites, we can’t think who else might design a dummy site that links solely to the other websites owned by Screamworks. A similar dummy site exists at www.halloweendenver.com.
It’s certainly an interesting exercise in search engine manipulation, but ultimately this scheme does Denver hauntgoers a huge disservice by making them sift through site after site of useless, link-laden dummy articles in their quest to find actual information about Denver haunted houses.
It’s time for Type 4 to return to the scene. As far as we know, there are no other websites right now that are operated fansite-style, free of interference from haunt owners, besides this one, Spooky Colorado. (If there are others, let us know — we’ll verify their independence and then link to them!) As we have mentioned recently, this site is not affiliated with any haunted house, owned by any haunted house, or maintained by any haunted house. We are strictly an independent information and opinion source written BY haunted house fans FOR haunted house fans.
Keep spreading the word. In the words of Good Times, “we’re gonna be big!”
Tags: 13th Street Manor, Chad Savage, Christopher Stafford, Colorado, Colorado Secretary of State, Curse of Slaughterhouse Gulch, Dale Ervin, Denver, Denver Haunted Houses, Denver Post, Dummy Websites, Frightmare, Getscared.com, Good Times, Google, Hanted Colorado, Haunted Denver, Haunted Denver Media, Haunted House, Haunted Houses, Haunted Houses in Colorado, Haunted Ratings, PF13, Primitive Fear, Rocky Mountain Haunted House Guide, Rocky Mountain Haunted House Guild, Rocky Mountain News, Scared.com, Screamworks, Screamworks Entertainment, Sinister Visions, Stephen Walker, The 13th Door, The 13th Floor, The Asylum, The Butcher, Wikipedia
If you posted a comment here and noticed that it didn’t show up right away, there’s nothing wrong with your computer. We have it set so that the first time you enter a new Name and Email Address, the system requires a moderator to approve the comment before it will appear on the article. This is to make sure you’re a real person commenting, not some bot posting an advertisement. After we’ve approved your first comment, every time you post a new comment using that same Name and Email Address, it will show up immediately without needing moderator approval.
Just wanted to clear that up for anyone wondering why their comment didn’t appear right away.
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You asked for it, you got it. The Spooky Colorado Forum for Denver haunted house fans can now be found at:
http://spookycolorado.forumer.com
Enjoy.
We went tonight to City of the Dead. Great stuff! This haunt has a ton of heart and soul. It’s amazing, because every monster gives 110%, and it must be difficult to maintain a performance like that with the number of people they’re cranking through. The attention to detail in these sets is beyond impressive. You can tell that these people are haunting because they love it, and their passion for scares shines brilliantly through.
One word of caution: the lines to this haunt last night were extremely long (and rightly so; it’s a great show). VIP admission costs an extra five bucks, and even the VIP line started to queue up while we were there. But that extra five dollars might make the difference between spending thirty minutes in line versus three hours in line, so unless you’re okay with spending an entire evening, it might be worth bringing the extra cash.
Also, this haunt has the added bonus of being able to serve beer at their location. We loved the “Dead or Alive” game we got to play while waiting in line that allowed us a shot at winning a free beer. If you’re not lucky enough to win, they have a “Road Kill Grill” where you can buy beer, food, and other goodies. There are also photo opportunities and various souvenirs for sale.
Spooky Colorado would like to extend a special thank-you to the Randy McLellan and all the Haunted Concepts team for taking time to share with us the vision behind their haunt after we’d had a chance to see their show. We’re all looking forward to seeing what these guys do in the years to come. The other haunted houses are going to be facing some major competition when word gets out about just how good a haunt City of the Dead actually is!
MSN.com featured a story on their front page today called “Best Haunted Houses: 13 of America’s Scariest Spots.”
The list includes some very well-known haunts, ones that are nationally renowned as some of the best in the industry, including Thrillvania in Terrell, Texas, The Beast in Kansas City, Missouri, and Terror Behind the Walls in Philadelphia.
Also included in the list? Denver’s very own The 13th Door. We’re really glad to see a local haunt getting some very positive mainstream press. The other haunts in this list are big haunts to be featured alongside, and it marks a significant achievement for this haunt. Way to go, The 13th Door!
We’re pretty amazed at the response we’ve been getting to this site considering we’ve barely launched and certainly not actively promoted Spooky Colorado. And as you can tell, it’s an ongoing work in progress. But you all seem to be in agreement that a site like this, an independent information and review source for Denver haunted houses, is long overdue. Thanks so much for the encouragement.
As to the issue that’s come up several times so far about launching a new forum, it’s in the process of being set up right now. We’re trying to come up with something that’s reasonably secure as we anticipate it will be subject to attack from those who don’t like people speaking their minds. But as an independent group, we don’t have a budget to sink into it, either, so we’re trying to find a good tradeoff between function and cost-effectiveness.
Meanwhile, though, the idea of people trying to stifle conversations, whether in forums or elsewhere, raises an interesting question. How many of you have been subject to some sort of censorship in recent years over the course of your participation in various haunt-related websites? What did that censorship look like? We’re not really looking to finger-point or name names, but we suspect that maybe there’s been quite a bit of behind-the-scenes post editing, admonishing, deleting, rewording, and so on. This includes various forum sites and also the sites that allow user reviews and ratings. Maybe getting some of that out in the open will help the hauntgoing community move forward in a positive direction.
What are your thoughts as far as free speech is concerned? Should people be allowed to say whatever they want online and then suffer the consequences? Is some sort of “policing” necessary to keep people from turning a civilized forum into an all-out brawl?
Would love to hear your thoughts. Add your comment to this post and tell us what you think. Have you been subjected to censorship? Were the reasons explained to you? Do you feel like it was justified? What’s the best way to go about keeping a site (any site) where users are allowed to post comments from being degraded to the point that it loses its value?
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So even though we just started this little site a week ago, we’ve seen some sharp spikes in traffic these past two days. That’s so cool. If you’re reading this site, thank you! It’s encouraging to know that Denver haunted house fans are interested in once again having an independent haunted house information site that’s unaffiliated with a haunt.
We have to admit being curious, though, about how people are finding us! Our site statistics tell us that most of our traffic is “direct-type,” meaning that people are actually typing SpookyColorado.com into the address bar. That’s interesting because we haven’t done any promotion (yet). We would love to know how you discovered Spooky Colorado.
If this site looks like a potentially valuable resource for you, would you do us a huge favor? Drop us a comment on this post and tell us how you found us. Thanks again for reading! We appreciate you!
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