The Darkness / Mini Golf / Escape Room Tour 2021

[drfrightner]

TRANSWORLD Haunted House and Escape Room Tour 2020
You purchased a ticket to the Darkness - Lemp and Escape Room tour. Some of you have reached out and asked about refunds. Our response has been to inform everyone who contacted us we're waiting for an official announcement from Transworld about new dates or if the show would be canceled. We have been in constant contact with Transworld throughout this process. We still do not have any official word from them, however we believe they're going to cancel the tradeshow in St Louis for 2020. After speaking with them again on Friday we believe it's extremely doubtful a new show will present itself. We're far more disappointed for the vendors than our tour. Our industry needs the vendor community.

Sorry we couldn't get back to anyone sooner, because all we've been doing for the last 7 days is cancelling escape rooms. We do not have an office staff so this process has been stressful and slow to say the least. We want to thank you for buying tickets to our tour and know our entire team is extremely disappointed and devastated we couldn't host this event. We have spent over or near $400,000 to build new scenes, screams, escape rooms, 5 minute escapes, and so much more. We had the Darkness, St Louis Escape and Lemp fully complete and ready for the tour. I personally was more excited this year than any other to welcome everyone to my hometown and our haunted house. Again we're so sorry this event was postponed and now possibly cancelled.

We're going to reach out to each person by phone starting Monday about refunds. We only as of yesterday finished cancelling all the escape room bookings. Now we can focus on the haunted house tour. We also have the possibility of rolling funds over into Hauntworld Banner ads for 2020, Hauntworld Magazine Subscriptions, Back Issues or selections from our DVD how to library including the all-new How to DVD with a focus on helping haunts increase profits at their haunted houses. Sadly we doubt very seriously we would ever produce another haunted house tour so we won't be asking anyone to roll funds to a 2021 tour. As of today we're officially not producing anymore haunted house tours ever again. The stress on our staff, cost, and now this devastating situation was just too much. We have enjoyed over the years inspiring haunt and escape owners alike being the most rewarding experience ever. Again thank you from the bottom of my heart for always supporting our tours it has meant everything to me personally!!!!

For those who want a straight refund those will all be issued this coming week.

If you don't hear from us by all means email us directly. Lastly we want to express our sorrow for all the haunted house vendors who dedicated their life savings to get to St Louis only to have the show cancelled. We are here to support those vendors with ongoing efforts to promote their products in anyway possible. We encourage everyone to do the same. We also hope everyone stays safe thru this trying times, and we wish all of you an amazing Halloween season.

Again thank you for everything over the years! Stay Safe!
Sincerely,
Larry Kirchner

[drfrightner]

The event is cancelled for 2020. Please call Patti at 314 629 3940 she is handling all the refunds.

I did want to again thank you for all the support over the years but now I'm totally burnt out. I will not be producing anymore haunted house tours nor will I will be doing any more seminars, how to dvd's sharing photos and pictures, nothing. When the show returns in 2021 to St Louis, I'm not even going to attend the show itself. I'm more or less done with the whole thing.

We will however build our 6th escape room 'Dracula' and will offer a tour of our escape rooms and open them but we will not showcase our haunted house to the industry ever again.

We will start building Dracula this summer and have it ready by October 2020. We'll share our promo videos when its done! I'll still be hanging around here on this forums, but I've resigned from all haunted facebook groups. I will not be on facebook sharing information or talking about haunted houses ever again.

If someone wants to reach me you can here! Thanks again for supporting the tour.

The tour next year will be $300.00 per person across two nights, limited to the first 125 people per night. We will explain how we built our escape rooms, do an interactive seminar, explain every detail. More or less help you get into the escape room business. This is the tour we're going to do in 2021 and will feature Dracula.

[drfrightner]

This talking Gargoyle is going on top of the new Darkness Haunted House Escape Room.
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[drfrightner]

You probably thought we're done with our OZ escape room you'd be wrong. Adding these winged beasts tomorrow they will hang above your head!


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[drfrightner]

Update on Darkness Haunted House Tour 2021

Yes 2021. After multiple people called me and asked me to do another tour we're considering it. People said it would be important for the show's return after everything that has happened.

People said hey you don't even have to renovate anything just open. So after thinking about it this is what I've come up with here...

Honestly I don't want to do any more haunt tours I've done 12 of them. I've poured more into these haunts tours, I've shared, I created videos during the tours, I've used these tours to help the industry. What did I get out of it? That is what I keep asking myself. When the chips were down how did some people act ... some people acted really badly. It was disheartening to me I can only tell you... most of the people or I should say all of the people who tried to create a controversy for me on facebook didn't even buy a ticket. Imagine that... F@CK those morons they're just jealous! LOL

Probably the post that i saw that ripped home the most was some moron on facebook saying 'I never go to his tour, I just wait for him to post the videos/photos'. WOW what a deadbeat!

That ONE comment made me say okay you just ruined it ... it was that one single comment that made me go nope never again. SCREW THIS!

But now that I've calmed down a bit, and realize these are some seriously deranged people making the comments, I asked myself if I even want to do haunt tours anymore. The answer honestly is NO!

It has NOTHING to do with all the really DUMB PEOPLE on facebook TOTAL LOSERS like Shane Dabbs can kiss my ass! I'm not a keyboard tough guy, I'll say that to his face! Anyone who knows me knows that.

Anyway with ALL THAT BEING SAID...

I know the haunted house community is praying the show can continue, vendors survive the situation, and well haunted house owners can open and do good enough to make a show worth having. A bunch of who knows!

So if their is a show in 2021, with all the unknowns if I personally survive this nightmare, then here is what we will do for the benefit of the show itself. See below:

1) We will open The Darkness and our Escape Rooms for a TOUR with NO ACTORS! Running the haunt with actors is half the stress for me, so I'm cutting that out totally. This will be limited to the first 600 people.

What you would see is the following: The Darkness - Terror VIsions - New Party Room - St Louis Escape including the new Dracula and Oz Escapes. All the new scenes from 2020 and we're going to build ONE new BIG Scene for 2021. We will share no photos, videos, of the progress the people who come to the tour will see it.

Creepyworld: We're going to try and open Creepyworld including the Hayride with NO ACTORS! It will be limited to 600 guests... we'll try and have EVERYTHING set up just NO ACTORS!

The only tour with ACTORS will be Lemp if we open it.

You might ask why no actors... that part of the process is stressful for me and I just don't want to do it. Secondly Creepyworld without 100 actors the attraction looks like we have no actors. You never know how many will show up so I'm not going to count on that just walking tour nothing more or less.

We want to support the vendors, Transworld and the industry.

We're serious this time about trying to figure out a way to CLOSE CREEPYWORLD so we can OPEN IT FOR YOU!

We want Transworld to be successful in 2021 so we'll do everything we can!

Larry

[drfrightner]

I'm going to have some HUGE NEWS soon!

[drfrightner]

BREAKING NEWS: LOL I have to use that line because that is the line the fake news media throws around for just about everything these days. Anyway, I want to make it clear that we'll have some form a tour in 2021 because we'd have our new Wizard escape room, we'll have Dracula by then, and behind our escape rooms we're building a massive new interactive attraction. All of that will be BRAND NEW! We're also planning on at least one new scene in The Darkness a big one. Lastly, and mostly because I'm trying my best to keep EVERYONE employed thru this nightmare, even without new projects, I have my painters re-doing several new scenes inside Terror Visions. I don't need new scenes but we're doing them because I want to keep my painters working. We're going to re-theme like 3 or 4 rooms NOW so that will be new. We're also re-doing our party room/museum, that would have just prior to Transworld but that was halted because of the Virus. So how is that going to be new... well for one prior to next Transworld I'm replacing the carpet with a custom printed glow in the dark Darkness carpet, we're adding major league video arcades and more. We're also going to try and do Creepyworld as a walk thru with NO ACTORS! The Darkness tour will also be without ANY actors. It would just be a tour to see the attractions nothing more. Just keeping you in the loop!

The Darkness tour will probably be around $100 bucks and be limited to 500 people. Creepyworld would probably be around $100 and be limited to 600 people.

Creepyworld would probably be Friday night and Darkness Saturday night.

We might also do a special private tour of The Darkness and escapes with seminars on Thursday limited to 100 people.

Larry

[drfrightner]

Couple things... I've changed the title of this thread. So right now I can't honestly say if we'll do any tour at all, do Darkness and Creepyworld or nothing.
Why? I just change my mind every other day. Honestly I don't want to do anymore tours I'm kind of over it. A really bad taste was left in my mouth from a handful of morons.

Some people just don't realize how hard you work, how much money you invest into this only for a couple total jerkoffs to try and spoil the whole thing. But you know I'm a big boy and don't really care what they think one way or the other.

But when doing the tours isn't really fun anymore then its probalby time to stop. I do not do this for money I lose money on every single tour.

With all that being said I'm no longer promising to do a tour or not do a tour... I'm going to wait and see how Halloween goes first.

This might sound strange but if Halloween is REALLY REALLY GOOD then I'll do another tour because then you have some play money to do even more changes. If Halloween is really really bad then I won't do anything.
Why? I'm just different than everyone else... I don't do this for money I do these tour for the fun of it the challenge to do something different. If your passion isn't there you just dont' do it.

So we shall see in October.

Now I'm explanding this thread with us building our brand new Dracula escape rooms. We're going to try and build this in record time. As you can see in the first photo the 100k plus Dracula is in the building finally after sitting in mothballs for 5 years.

The other picture shows us starting the mini golf attraction we're going to build. We're building both at the same time.

Keep following this thread for more photos! But this is the start so its from NOTHING to SOMETHING to BOTH attractions opening within 3 months.

Follow along!

Either way for next years Transworld we'll have our escape rooms and mini golf / arcade open to the show. BTW the reason for showing the BEAM is it was rustiy last week and this week its red. The ceiling was dirty and now its grey... one step at a time.

Larry


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[drfrightner]

Check out the Darkness Game Room!
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[drfrightner]

Check out the video on our horror party room corporate parties.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf7DdB84nCg

[drfrightner]

Here is an update about a TOUR 2021. I'm going to talk to Transworld once the season is over about them getting involved. Even though a TON and I mean a TON of work was done between 2019 and 2020 I still wouldn't ever do a tour unless I did something new for 2021. I will only do something new for 2021 IF the season does okay! So we'll see.

But here is what has been done since 2019 (or what will be done)

1) Terror Visions has now been renovated or completely changed by about 25% since 2019. We did work to it prior to Transworld but just recently totally redid three more scenes. That means we blacked them out and re-themed.

2) Built the all-new Darkness Horror Arcade

3) Added the following new scenes to Darkness: Witch Kingdom - Spider Cave - Snake Cove - Yeti Cave - New Black Maze - and Ghost Room (upstairs)

4) Built Wonderful Wizard of Oz escape Room

5) Built Dracula escape room

6) Built or building an interactive mini golf called Silly Putter

7) Our Escape Rooms has a new arcade with retro arcades, pinball and will soon have a bar.


ALL THIS YOU HAVE NOT SEEN!

We're starting to build the mini golf THIS WEEK!

Here is what I'm thinking for a tour just fyi...

1) Friday - Behind the Scenes Tour (Mini Golf - Escapes - Haunted House) with pictures and video
2) Saturday - Tour of The Darkness (less than 15 actors who would activate props)

Here some pictures of the mini golf we're building

Larry
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[Patti Ludwinski]

I got a tour a couple days ago of the new Dracula and Mini Golf looking amazing. Can't wait to see everyone back in St Louis, I know Larry is excited to show everyone how we're transforming the entire attraction. I miss everyone! Patti

[drfrightner]

Here is an update for you... I talked to Transworld a little bit about this subject. We might considering doing live seminar type tours during the day while Transworld tradeshow is operating. So smaller groups where we tour you thru everything we've done and explain how we've done it. So in other words mini live demo seminars during the day. I am NOT doing any more seminars at Transworld. So this would be a way for me to do something to help haunt owners. I can do this because I'm not planning on having a booth in 2021 for HPI but rather just Hauntworld and Fearticket which Patti can handle. So I'm kind of free to do something like that. I can be at The Darkness during the entire tradeshow every day of the show... and give private tours. Something we're considering.

If this sounds like something you'd be interested in you can contact me directly and let me know what you think.

We'll probably do some kind of a tour but it will be very limited. I'm thinking of doing a seminar for haunts/escapes with dinner, and a live tour thru our escapes, golf and haunt.

As for doing a tour of the haunt with live actors who knows.

Since Transworld last event in St Louis we've probably spent about $800k on upgrades to the facility, which includes the following: Two new Escapes (OZ and Dracula) - Mini Golf - Retro Arcade - Horror Arcade at Darkness - 16 new scenes in Darkness - Several all new scenes in Terror Visions. This doesn't even include that we might re-theme another escape prior to TW and any updates we might make to Darkness prior to TW.

This truly would be the biggest tour ever because no one would have seen the attraction in two renovation cycles.

[Sean Coleman]

Here is an update for you... I talked to Transworld a little bit about this subject. We might considering doing live seminar type tours during the day while Transworld tradeshow is operating. So smaller groups where we tour you thru everything we've done and explain how we've done it. So in other words mini live demo seminars during the day. I am NOT doing any more seminars at Transworld. So this would be a way for me to do something to help haunt owners. I can do this because I'm not planning on having a booth in 2021 for HPI but rather just Hauntworld and Fearticket which Patti can handle. So I'm kind of free to do something like that. I can be at The Darkness during the entire tradeshow every day of the show... and give private tours. Something we're considering.

If this sounds like something you'd be interested in you can contact me directly and let me know what you think.

...

Larry, this is a great idea. Even if you don't end up doing this I'd be interested in this sort of consulting. The only thing is, I also want to go to the show. How would the scheduling work out to not overlap too much?

[drfrightner]

I still don't know what I'm going to do or if I'm going to do ANYTHING!

I'm honestly feeling more lazy than ever! LOL

I will only tell you this we're planning on adding new scenes and have already purchased new props for both Darkness and Creepyworld.

We're going to build a haunted pumpkin patch in Darkness and a very hard to explain new scene upstairs at Darkness.

But here is the deal... we installed a TON of new scenes in 2020 that no one saw. We built a mini golf. We built two new Escape Rooms. We totally redid our Monster Museum / Arcade.

We're also about to order custom carpet for our Monster Museum Arcade. That is coming soon with custom carpet with Darkness designs.