Hauntcrafts
A History

Greetings!
Folks around here have been quietly haunting backyards, schools and charity haunted houses for nearly half a century.

I have done special effects for charity-based haunted houses off and on since I was about nine years old. Waaaaay back in 1978 I helped my high school put on a haunted house to raise funds for the choir. We were so successful over the course of five weekends that the school put the choir and band on a week long field trip to perform up and down the state.
So anyway, why the website?

Christmas is the most popular holiday on the planet but for some Halloween is the favorite. It is becoming more of a season than a single day. In the early eighties we noticed that many of the larger retailers had begun to put Halloween decorations out for sale in late August. Halloween clubs and stores began to pop up all over the place. At the neighborhood level, every couple of blocks backyards and garages became haunted houses and creature filled cemeteries. Halloween wasn't just for trick-or-treaters anymore. It was for all of us nerds, geeks, cosplayers, fan-boys, fan-girls and makeup artists too.

There are some haunters on the internet that we've watched blossom into mad geniuses. Allen Hopps and Scott A. Stoll immediately come to mind. I doubt that they've ever heard of me (I am allergic to limelight so I keep an extremely low profile) but they do and teach a lot of the things I've been helping people with for decades. Great minds thinking alike maybe? I dunno. These guys are genuinely great. Creative geniuses. I'd love to fall into that category some day. Please go to their respective websites and learn the lessons they teach. They are very admirable and inspiring young men.

So why did I create Hauntcrafts? Well... It just seemed like a good time to do it. I've been lurking around on the internet for years. I see haunters struggle with things like making skulls, cemetery fences, fire effects and papier-mâché pumpkins. I thought I might be able to help.

One of the most annoying things about making your own haunt is waiting for a papier-mâché prop to dry. Papier-mâché is great but it also sucks. Make an armature, put a layer of flour-soaked paper on it and wait a day. Put another layer on and wait another day. Seven days later and you may finally have a sturdy piece but you still haven't been able to sculpt a single striking feature into your creation. That sucks. Multiply the suckage by x number of props and it sucks even harder.

I remember making papier-mâché sculptures with my grandmother when I was a kid in the late sixties. I spent hours tearing up newspapers and phone books for her while she sculpted doll heads and other things. I didn't really care for the doll heads. I wanted dragons and werewolves and bats and monsters. She'd just say "Oh go on!" in her slight English accent and keep on making girly stuff. So, I just kept tearing paper and watching.

Every once in a while she'd do something amazing. I watched as she made a four foot high angel statue that was absolutely beautiful. In addition to regular papier-mâché; she used a kind of flour based paste mixed with Elmer's glue on cut up pillowcases to cover the larger spans of her armatures. She draped the cloth over the armature into believable folds and wrinkles while it was still wet. Even though they took -forever- to dry, the result was far stronger than regular papier-mâché. They looked great and were amazingly solid. Now that I think about it, this might have been a precursor of "Monster-mud" but she didn't put paint in it at all. Just glue, water and flour over cut up pillowcases. As strong as they were, I was never allowed to touch the finished products. They were always whisked away to be put on display behind glass or on a Christmas tree or wherever. Gramma always said that fragile papier-mâché artwork was to be enjoyed with the eyes. It was not to be touched.
Be that as it may and even without being able to hold the things in my hands, all of the creativity I witnessed stuck in my head.

I watched my sister sculpt figures out of modeling clay which she brought home from high school. I liked working with the clay but it was really heavy and cracked if you didn't dry it just right.
We made ceramic knicknacks for a while and that was quite fun. Unfortunately greenware is much more fragile than both modeling clay and paper so that wasn't my cup of tea either. It seemed like every time I tried to make something out of papier-mâché, it got crushed. I hated that. I've always been hard on equipment and paper is just too darn flimsy when it comes to making useable props. For me anyway.

Then, one night I had an idea. I had a wonderful, awful idea. (Oops. Wrong holiday. Sorry.) It was late on a Saturday night. I was -as usual- making something for someone else. In this case it was bricks out of cardboard and tape for a play my girlfriend and I were in.
I had the tv on PBS because they showed National Geographic episodes and sometimes there were half-naked women on there. (hey it was the early seventies, there were only four tv channels and I was a skinny little 13 year old wimp. I was lucky I had a girlfriend.)
Fortunately I have since outgrown the wimpy part and I don't know anyone who doesn't like half naked women... :) Anyway, the tv was really just background noise. I looked up and saw that the guys on the tv show were making blocks of ice. Some of the ice was pure water and some of it was muddy. Some of it had straw all through it. Okay. That looks interesting. Why would they put straw into a block of ice?

One of the guys hit the pure water block of ice with a sledge hammer. It literally shattered. He then hit the muddy one and it shattered too albeit a lot less dramatically than the first. Finally, he hit the block containing the embedded straw. No joke the sledge bounced off. Really. It chipped the ice a little bit here and there but after three full-on strikes with the sledge the ice-block was still pretty much completely intact. They said that bricks had been made this way too. Putting a fiber inside the binder made the resulting shape exceedingly strong.

Wait a minute. Could I make these silly little paper bricks strong in the same way? What materials should I use?

My imagination kicked in. The idea of reinforced papier-mâché was just like what I was watching. Sort of. Only you were using paper instead of straw and flour paste instead of water or mud. My bricks were hollow. Theirs weren't. The ratio of binder to fiber was backwards too. What if there was more paste than paper? I still wanted hollow bricks but I wanted them to be able to stand up to some “less than gentle” use. Maybe I could use some of the binder as structure in addition to the paper shell. Wouldn't that be strong -and- resilient? I thought about chopping up my cardboard boxes, but I only had a couple of them left. Styrofoam was all the rage for packaging at that time and recycled paper products were not yet even a thing so no help there. I didn't think about chopping up old newspapers to make my own pulp. Dang. I was a paperboy and had a garage full of old newspapers at my disposal too. Couldn't see the forest for the trees I guess. Oh well. At any rate, I finished making my bricks and kept the papier-mâché brick idea in the back of my head as I went on about figuring out life. (Still working on that life thing...)

A few years after we finished that play, one of my friends (Dave Baker GRHS) showed me a papier-mâché jack-O-lantern he had made for Halloween. It had actual facial features, not just the normal cut-outs. He had started out with the regular old “papier-mâché over a balloon” trick. What was impressive was that he had taken the ideas about straw-filled paper bricks and ran with it. He made a very thick papier-mâché paste out of egg containers that he had chopped up in a blender. He mixed it with water, flour and Elmer's glue. Dave had sculpted a face out of the resulting muck right there on the papier-mâché ball. It wasn't pretty. The surface was very coarse, but it was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. We started comparing notes. I began experimenting with recycled paper and glue and found that it works very well but the texture is coarse and it can dry with cracks if you don't chop the paper into pulp finely enough. Still, the props were okay when viewed from a distance (Ten foot rule, in the dark.) As a result of our experimentation, a lot of the props for our local Special Olympics haunted house were made that way.

For fun, I messed with papier-mâché off and on over the next few years but life happened and I was very busy. I became a programmer, got married and started a family. Hobbies had to take a back seat.
Well, the kids are now old enough to want to make things for themselves and I am pretty much retired so... back to the hobbies.
A few years ago I began to find many recipes online for paper clay. Someone had done it! Someone had taken the time to think out the process for combining recycled paper and mâché paste to make a kind of clay. I dug out my old notes and saw that for the most part, the ideas are quite similar. The main difference being the use of ready made drywall compound and cellulose insulation instead of using only white glue and grinding up your own recycled paper containers. I think Scott Stoll might have been among the first to combine joint compound with papier-mâché. Huge kudos to Mr. Stoll for his creativity.

So once again, why the website? Because regular papier-mâché still sucks. It crushes easily, delaminates and can collapse under its own weight if it isn't thick enough. Papier-mâché takes too long to dry between coats and many people just don't want to wait day after day while their basic form dries. I thought about that and decided it would be a great convenience for people to be able to get a ready made armature that they can start sculpting on the day it arrives in the mail. To that end I started Hauntcrafts.
I can lay up a pulpkin shell (that's what I call them) in about an hour and ship it out in two to three days. Depending on the humidity of course. It does take a little while to dry. Hauntcrafts Pulpkin Shells are ready to sculpt as soon as you open the shipping container. That's a lot better than waiting a week for thin and inconsistent layers of papier-mâché to dry. Our paper products are made out of my own version of the cellulose based “Paper-Clay” which we call “Creature Compound.” When cured the shell walls are around 1/4 inch thick and they don't delaminate. Pulpkin Shells and Dragon Eggs are quite rigid and resilient. They won't collapse under their own weight. After being sealed with spar varnish, Hauntcrafts cellulose products are fairly moisture resistant.
We ship the product whole or in halves. When shipped in halves it is MUCH less expensive. You just glue the pieces together yourself and start sculpting an hour or so later.

My "Business" is about a hundred and fifty square feet of crafting supplies in my garage at the moment. Might grow, might not. In any case I can offer people a starting point for creating some very cool halloween props and maybe save them a little time as well.
There are other things available here that may help get your haunt going too. Please, take a minute to look around the site and see what we have to offer. If Hauntcrafts can help you along your moonlit path and make a couple of bucks at the same time than it's a win win. If you purchase something from us, please leave a product review. We are happy to hear from you! Word of mouth is the best advertising there is, so please do tell a friend where you got your pulpkin blanks. Win win win. :)

Happy Haunting!