How to Run a Haunt

The back of the binder · Westfield Haunt, October 1987

Quiet rooms load their nerves. Loud rooms spend them. The same six rooms in a different order are a different night. Everything the house does is machinery serving that one sentence — and the tape tells you all of it, one tag at a time, on the tile where it happened. This page is the same thing written down: first the building and the people in it, then the rules it runs on.

Part one — The building

What the game has settled about the place. None of it changes a number.

The aux gym

Westfield High’s auxiliary gymnasium, rented for the month of October 1987. Thirteen playable tiles on a three-by-five floor. Patrons come IN at A1, walk A1 to A5, back along row B, and OUT through row C. There is no other route, which is why where a room sits is what a room does. The floor is sheet A-17, drawn R.M., dated September 18, 1978, with a north-wall door that swings into solid wall.

Seven keys, six labeled. Nothing says what the seventh opens.
The scoreboard reads 00:19. The control box is locked.
The thermostat is set to 61. Facilities says don’t touch it. It cannot be touched.
The north door is chained. The chain is not yours. Someone tries it every few nights.
The EXIT sign hums in B-flat. Agnes tunes to it.
Fog pools along the free-throw line and nowhere else. The gym smells of fog juice and pencil shavings, like it’s supposed to.

The people

Halloway, facilities. Hands over the keys, explains the loop in three beats, leaves before dark. He comes back once, after the third night, with three Polaroids and a box of thumbtacks.
Uncle Rick. Holds the $10,000 note at five percent a night. On the 13th he names a number — half of what you owe — due on the 21st. He is not asking. When you pay him off, he will not say thank you.
Kalb Bros. Theatrical & Novelty, Marion, Ohio, est. 1891. Mail order only; orders arrive by morning; the invoice is dated next Tuesday. Gerald circles items in every catalog, and once sent a sympathy card, correctly addressed, when nothing had happened.
The fire marshal. Has held the job since at least 1987. Doc Ferro’s brother-in-law. His attention accumulates with what you build, and at 24 he walks the floor at 8:15.
The Company. Twelve performers, photographed in a novelty booth — one flash, one chair — each portrait with one wrong detail the game never names. Tommy Nunes, sixteen, the only local, showed up on night three. June Okafor asks each group one question before they enter; no patron has ever repeated it. The Understudy is the twelfth chair, and the envelope left for her is lighter in the morning, never gone.
The four audiences. Four church kids. Two drunk dads. The guy filming. A dad and an eight-year-old. The same house runs four times a night with different nerves, different patience, and different things that land. The tape you read is the church kids’ walk; the other doors differ.

The objects

A Practical Anatomy of Fright. Engraved plates by one unnamed anatomist. Volume I, plates I–XVII, the rooms. Volume II, The Organs of Sense, plates XVIII–XXIX. Plate XX’s inset is numbered and empty. Plate XXIII omits the brain. Plate XII has one wrong pupil. Your house is this binder, walked.
The catalog. Eight commodities in a red starburst. Ducting is the dullest thing Kalb sells and the only one Gerald has never annotated. The scent compound: Ilse adds something of her own.
The folder marked OCTOBER. Five ads, one blue ballpoint across all of them. The billboard went up with the wrong number and the calls came anyway.
The break-room wall. Thirty-three Polaroids on the crew’s own SX-70. Roller marks mean a bad night.

The night of October 30, 1987

Six photographs from four cameras, sequenced by their timestamps. What the game commits to: a line formed at 7:40 and did not shorten; a boy went into the crawl nine minutes before his parent photographed an empty duct; the marshal was in the building by 9:30 and photographed a blocked exit; Bobby Delgado walked off the floor at 10:15 and finished his shift; a girl in a pale coat sat in the graveyard room after close; the last frame on the roll was printed anyway. Bobby is on your payroll and looks exactly the same.

The game never says the word ghost. Nothing supernatural ever touches a number. And you are never told you are in danger — only that things are going well.

Part two — How to succeed

The rules the house runs on, with the numbers, as the shipped game computes them.

1. The walk is the whole game

Every room carries two numbers. Dread is what a quiet room loads into a group; startle is what a loud room spends. The spend is worth more the more there was to spend:

charge = 1 + dread/100 × 1.2 effect = startle × crowd × charge × (1 − tolerance/100) a spike of 8 or more spends the dread it landed on

Put the chainsaw at step one and it scores 58. Put it after three quiet rooms and it clears 90, for the same money. Placement beats spending — if you find yourself buying your way to a rating, you are ordering the rooms wrong.

Two brakes make rhythm necessary. Tolerance climbs with every scare and only drains in quiet rooms, pushing you toward filler. Boredom stacks in dead air and is wiped by any real scare, pushing you away from it. A house that is all spike goes numb. A house that is all atmosphere walks out.

2. Every rule announces itself on the tape

There is no hidden math. When a rule fires, the tile says so:

blindsided a sense-to-sense switch, sight into touch, pays ×1.30 · same trick the same channel twice costs ×0.62 · heard it coming a loud room after a quiet one is telegraphed, ×0.75 · eyes adjusting coming out of the Dark everything reads ×1.25 louder and the same-trick penalty is forgiven — once; a second Dark is just more dark · no sea legs the Tilt ignores tolerance, the only rule that opts out of the main brake · ran dry the shelf could not cover the room tonight · running on empty and red-tagged a room running a tier below what you built · walked out a group left, and every tile after it scores nothing.

Quiet rooms charge dread and betray your finale. There is no build that wins both; there is only the order you chose.

3. Families and tiers

Ten families, three tiers. Tier is also rarity: common, uncommon, foil. The rot room stops at two.

Family	Channel	Tier 1	Tier 2	Tier 3
Graveyard	sight	Stones and fog $180	Hand grabs an ankle $660	Actor in the dirt $1,560
Mirrors	sight	Mirror hall $600	Live mirror $1,440	Infinity room $3,450
Rot room	smell	Bad meat $420	The works $1,260	—
Crawl	touch	Low vent $720	Air blasts $1,680	The squeeze $3,600
Clowns	sight	Static and strobe $540	Live clown $1,380	Drop panel $3,300
Butcher	sound	Hanging meat $630	Live butcher $1,500	Through the wall $3,750
The Dark	dark	Blackout curtain $540	The long dark $1,440	No light at all $3,300
The Tilt	balance	The crooked room $600	Vertigo bridge $1,500	The drop floor $3,450
The Cold	temperature	The draft $480	The walk-in $1,380	The freeze $3,240
The Hum	sound	The tone $510	The pipes $1,410	The voice $3,360

Most tier-three rooms want two crew, and the crew ceiling is nine before the drama club. That ceiling, not the price, is what stops an all-showpiece house. The shape that pays: a cheap opening, tier two as the sweet spot, tier three as one or two showpieces placed where the dread is.

4. The slowest room paces the house

capacity = 10,800 s ÷ (slowest dwell × 1.5) × 4 demand = 40 + 12 × reputation + spectacle + campaigns

Demand is who has heard of you. Capacity is who can physically get through in three hours, in groups of four. The verdict on the plan tells you which one is binding: K3 sets the pace — 28s means the freezer is your ceiling; demand is the ceiling, build spectacle means the town has not heard of you yet. When more turn up than fit, just over half of the overflow still gets in down the hallways — and the crush costs word of mouth. A performer who lengthens one room’s dwell throttles the whole building.

5. Stock the shelf, or watch a room go dark

Rooms burn supplies every night, and the check is all-or-nothing per good: if the shelf holds fewer than the whole house needs at the moment you open the doors, every room that burns that good is short. A short room runs a tier down. A short tier-one room has nothing below it and goes dark — Nothing to run it on.

Good	Who burns it	How much, a night	Bulk
Fog juice	graveyards and mirrors	3 gallons a room	1.0 cu ft
Scent vial	rot rooms	2 a room	0.05
Syrup pail	butcher rooms	2 a room	1.2
Latex kit	every crewed room	1 a room	0.4
Servo	tier-three rooms	0.35 a room	0.8
Strobe box	every room	half a box a room, one more for each Dark or Hum	0.3
Acrylic panel	nothing	buy low, sell high	2.5
Ducting	nothing	buy low, sell high	3.0

Bulbs are the house. Run out of strobe boxes and every room drops a tier at once. Storage is the trench coat. The corner of the gym holds 60 cubic feet, free; the rented unit 260 for $600 and $40 a night; the semi trailer 700 for $2,200 and $90 a night. A full floor draws close to 30 a night. Ducting and acrylic run nothing and are the bulkiest things Kalb sells — fill the corner with them and BUY on scent will tell you no room on the shelf. Stock tonight on the market rail buys exactly tonight’s shortfall at tonight’s prices and says what it could not get; the doors button warns you before you open.

Prices drift back toward their base each night, with an upward pull after the 14th — everyone in this business buys in the same month. Some nights the month does something to the market:

Event	Nights	What it does
Everything must go	1	all prices ×0.40
The Dayton fire	6	latex ×2.8
Freight service interrupted	3	no trading at all
Rival buyout	4	acrylic sold out
Estate sale	1	servos at a quarter, six to a customer
Fog juice recall	1	your fog wiped to zero
The October squeeze	8	the drift doubles
Wanted to buy	1	he pays four times spot, for six units

6. The money

You start with $14,000 in the drawer and $10,000 on Rick’s book at five percent a night. The gate is the only place a good house is paid for being good:

ticket = $8 + $0.22 × reputation ($9.10 on night one, $30 at 100) wages = $260 a night for every crew member overhead = $900 venue + $200 insurance + $150 × marshal risk + $5 a head + storage rent (+ $180 a night while a billboard stands)

Reputation chases your rating: each night it closes about a third of the gap, faster with a bigger crowd — so a big crowd at a bad house hurts more than a small one — and every group that walks out costs one and a half points. The drama club sends up to six volunteers for theatre credit, but only to a house worth the credit.

Measured over two hundred Octobers each, with the shelf stocked and the floor filled cheaply before anything is raised:

House	Crew	Rating	Net worth, Nov 1
All tier one, no crew	0	43	about $108,000
Two showpieces, eleven cheap	4	48	about $116,000
All tier two	9	53	about $157,000
Tier three where the crew allows	9	55	about $164,000
All tier two, a cast placed carelessly	9	53	about $109,000
The same cast placed well, minus one slow name	9	53	about $159,000

Two things to read off that. Investment pays, and it pays through the ticket. And a cast fielded indiscriminately costs a third of the season — not because performers are dear, but because one of them slows the room she stands in, and the slowest room paces the house.

7. Rick

The note. On the 13th he asks for half the book — at least $2,000, rounded to the hundred — due on the 21st. Pay it and the principal falls, which is the only way the debt ever goes down. Miss it and he takes everything in the drawer, puts the shortfall back on the book at a 1.25 markup, and his rate goes from five percent to seven for the rest of October.
The check. Once a season, if the drawer is below zero and everything you could sell is worth under $5,000, and it is the 22nd or earlier, he puts $5,000 in your hand and $6,250 on the book. His rate does not move for this: he raises it when he is crossed, not when he is protecting his money.
The keys. When the hole is bigger than everything you own — cash, every plate at its refund, the shelf at spot — he takes the keys and the season ends there. Nobody is foreclosed who was never offered the money.

8. The marshal

Risk is a tax nothing removes. Heat is a clock everything moves. Risk is one point per tier-three room, one per two volunteers, one more for Chain and two fewer for Doc Ferro, floored at zero — and every point is $150 a night in permits, the largest line in your overhead. His attention accumulates with risk. At 24 he walks the floor at 8:15: a fine of $250 per point, and every tier-three room red-tagged for the next night — its scare gutted, its dwell and its crew kept, so you pay for a showpiece that frightens nobody. He leaves the counter at 18.

The levers on the clock: Doc Ferro takes three off it a night, from the lot, on the telephone. On the wall, The exit sign takes two, Doc’s call three, The blocked exit five and only turns up once he is close; The north door adds two and Dad takes a swing adds three.

9. The Company

A booked name sells tickets the moment you engage them, whether or not they do anything on the floor: a standard mount adds 15 to demand, gilt 35, signed 55. Each charges a fee every night — $90, $240, $420 — and a signed name does not clear its own fee until about reputation 22. Then the terms.

Name	Mount · scope	What they do	The terms
Dolores Vane	signed · room	Doubles the room’s dread, zeroes its startle.	Only a room with a startle under 10. She does not move. That is the act.
Marty Fisk	gilt · room	+40% startle in a tier-three room.	Four nights running, then he needs one off.
The Kessler Sisters	signed · room	Doubles dread. The reflection is a second person.	Mirrors only. Two crew, and they will not be split up.
Bobby “Chain” Delgado	standard · house	Cancels heard it coming across the whole house.	One point of marshal risk.
Ruth Amado	gilt · room	Adds the touch channel to any room. Billing 70 — the biggest draw on the roster.	Her room runs 35% slower, and the slowest room paces the house.
Wendell Pike	standard · room	Cuts the room’s dwell by 45%. He never needs to reset.	Sight rooms only.
Sister Agnes Rook	gilt · house	+50% on the church kids.	−20% on the drunk dads.
Tommy Nunes, 16	standard · room	Costs nothing. He’d pay you.	No room he works has ever had a grab incident.
Ilse Brandt	standard · room	The smell carries one tile further down the walk.	Rot rooms only. The jar is never opened in front of anyone.
“Doc” Ferro	gilt · house	Slows the marshal’s attention by three a night. Never the permit.	Not a doctor. Not on the payroll: he is in the lot, on the telephone.
June Okafor	signed · queue	Groups enter at 25 dread instead of zero.	She asks each group one question. No patron has ever repeated it.
The Understudy	standard · room	Becomes whoever is placed before them in the walk.	The twelfth chair.

10. The crew wears down

Every staffed room performs at 0.55 + 0.45 × condition/80 — one number for the whole crew, set by what you built and who you advertised to. Strain comes from tier points on the floor, freeze rooms, Ilse’s jar, the drunk-dad share of your door, and a house running at its ceiling; the crew recovers in proportion to how far down they are, so a house settles where 100 − strain/0.40 puts it and stays there.

House	Strain a night	Settles at	Performs at
All tier one	8	77	0.98
Tier two, nine crew	13	66	0.92
Tier three, original plates	19	44	0.80
Tier three, Volume II	28	25	0.69

That last row is the brake on the showpiece house: it grinds its crew and gives back five rating points for it. Between groups the crew has a night of its own — thirty-three shift cards, seven in the rotation you shape, one drawn each night, and the drawn card is what happened back there. Halloway leaves you the first three.

11. Campaign

Advertising shifts who comes, not only how many. One radio spot swings the door toward the drunk dads, and if your house was not built for them your rating falls with a fuller room.

Channel	Cost	Lead	Runs	Demand	Who it brings
Photocopied flyer	$120	2 nights	4	+55	church kids, dad and the eight-year-old
Classic rock radio	$600	1	3	+90	drunk dads
Newspaper listing	$350	2	7	+70	dad and the eight-year-old, church kids
Cable access spot	$1,400	3	1	+260	the guy filming, drunk dads
Billboard, state route	$2,600	5	to the 31st	+120	dad and the eight-year-old

An ad bought tonight starts lead nights from now: you are buying a week you are not built for yet. Buy the same channel again within five nights and it runs at half power, and the print visibly degrades. Past the point where it could still run before the 31st the button reads too late and takes nothing. The billboard is one at a time and costs $180 a night while it stands.

12. The month, in order

Night 2 — a crate on the mat, addressed to OCCUPANT, AUX GYM. The market opens.
Night 3 — a woman named June is in the queue with her paperwork already done. The Company.
Night 4 — Halloway’s three Polaroids and a box of thumbtacks. The shift board, room on it for seven.
Night 5 — a proof from the printer, a cart label, a stack of flyers. The campaign.
Night 13 — Rick names a number.
Night 21 — it is due.
November 1 — cash less debt is the score. Two endings on the sign of it, and a third that can arrive early.

13. The file number

Every ending card prints one. Type it into the office and that exact October runs again — the same prices, the same events, the same nights the marshal walks — or hand it to a friend and see what they leave with. A season run from a file number posts nothing to the board; October Net Worth on Game Center is for Octobers played straight, and it is reachable from the office and from the ending card whenever you are signed in. Nothing is ever sent if you are not.

Doors at seven. Four dollars. Bring the church kids.