I’ve become a renewed fan of LEGO blocks, thanks to my son’s birth. I never had an extensive childhood experience with LEGO, so the birth of my son opened a great opportunity. Recently, because of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I have been put on furlough from my job. So I have had a lot more free time at home. Every year for Halloween, I like to decorate the front of my house with an elaborate display for the trick-or-treaters. It started when I was younger and living with my parents. I began making it more and more elaborate and even going as far as adding animatronics and continued decorating my parents house even after I moved into my condo. When I became married and we moved into our new house, I began looking for themes/ideas for the front of our home for the annual holidays. I also learned of the town’s Decorating Contest. So I really focused on either building or acquiring decorations for a specific theme. It has been a hobby of mine that has developed for several years.
When the COVID-19 Pandemic hit and the extra time on my hands from the lockdown, I thought about doing something smaller and more personal. I didn't want to invest in the small porcelain towns because I was worried about storage and the possibility of breaking so I looked in a different direction.
That’s when I found out about Lego blocks systems has an entire line of Spooky sets(Hidden Side, Monster Fighters, etc). I did more searching and found out that Lego has been producing special release sets for the Halloween Holiday. I started searching for ideas for what I could do with just my son’s Lego sets. Originally, I didn’t want to build something too elaborate since my son did still play with his sets. One of the sets we had for him happened to have some online instructions for a ghost. So I started small and using the extra bricks that he wasn’t using I built my first ghost.
When I was done, I did an online search for instructions on how to build a Jack-O-Lantern, to go with the ghost. I found lots of instructions, but most of them required bricks that we didn’t have. So I had to come up with something that worked with what I had. After about a week of playing around with different bricks, I finally came upon a way to build the Jack-O-Lantern.
I then took it another step further and did an online search for a 2nd ghost and tombstone instructions. The more I worked on it, the more thoughts and ideas I started having. The tombstones were quite simple to do and we had the extra bricks, but because I had created the one ghost, there was a limit on what was available for the second. Like the Jack-O-Lantern, I had to improvise and think of what ghosts could look like. I came up with a design that was close to what I was thinking and I was able to build 3 tombstones.
So I had a small display that looked decent for my first attempt. But when I was done, I had this feeling that I could do more. Now my Birthday just happens to fall in October and I had been thinking about what small things I could get for myself because my family always sends me a little something for me to get gifts, which I always appreciated. So I decided to invest in two Lego sets and a few Lego minifigures.
Once I started building, the ideas of what I could do just kept coming to me. It was like I was painting a picture in my head; only it was a version of a real-life Haunted Hayride, which is a seasonal attraction active in the Autumn season. I realized I was designing a new Haunt like I did when I thought about how I decorated my house, only on a smaller scale. The creative thoughts that came to me on what to do with my house, were now giving me ideas for this miniature Halloween Haunt. So I decided, "What the heck!" I invested in one more set and then went directly to LEGO’s website and started ordering bricks.
This proved challenging because there was an issue with the website's brick picking section. I ended up having to call customer service and had to special order the bricks and pieces I was looking for. Now I’m still waiting for the bricks to arrive, but already what I have is really impressive. I feel like this is not only something cool that I created, but that it is something that could actually be built in real-life, with the proper budget. The great thing was because my wife and I had invested in so many brick sets for my son, there were plenty of extra bricks for me to use. So I took the sets I purchased and expanded them to work together with my son’s bricks.
I know some would say it’s silly for a grown man to be playing with what is essentially a children's toy, but as we have seen in popular culture; A Lego Movie 1&2, Fox’s LEGO Masters, there are many Adult professionals who have enjoyed using the LEGO brick systems to create something unique and special build displays, that allow them to share a world apart from our own. This was mine. I really enjoyed creating this story. With the shipment of the additional bricks having arrived and with some special minifigures from Amazon, I have had some great creative ideas. I plan to have 3-4 sections to this build and it will be a Fun Park category design. Right now with the Hayride, I have the first attraction in the park. The next will be to add a Fair part of the park, with concession stands, rides, and games for guests. The next section will have more, but I'm still not sure if I want a haunted house. I haven’t decided if it will be a One-story Ranch or a Two-Story home. The last section is a big "IF". The idea is for the hayride to move in a complete circle around the park. So it will travel through each section before arriving back. I'm definitely going to be tearing it down and rebuilding it, so it's up to the standard as some of the builds I have seen on TV and online. It's going to be a lot bigger than I had originally thought. I hope to keep working on this build for years and adding on to it as the year's pass. It's going to be something that gets pushed aside when Covid-19 ends, but it will still be there when I have time available. Besides, there's always next Halloween for new ideas.
As to the center 'kiddy' part of all 4 sections, I have added additional "inflatable" characters as well as added a scene inspired by the classic Shakespear scene from 'Macbeth'. The idea was to try to include the many different Brick Head characters and to have them as 'Inflated' attractions so they are both spooky and fun for kids, while for the teenagers and adults, the other parts of the park are for them. So it really has a "Whole Family" kind of fun.
What I really like is how this is coming together. It has really forced me to stop and think about how it all needs to fit together. I keep running into issues and have to reanalyze how they should look and fit together. I've always like it when a problem comes up. It allows me to make changes and see if there is room for improvement, which it has.
I'll update again when I have the gray surface area covered and start putting the finishing touches on the build.
This has been a labor of love and creative thinking since September of 2020, that is 2 years of; building, tearing down, re-building, planning, following the plan, watching the plan go off the rails, abandoning the plan, starting a new plan, buying the necessary pieces, searching for the parts and bits that I needed and finding the minifigures to compliment the themes. My wife was under the impression that this was NEVER going to be finished, but thanks to the final pieces being available to be purchased I was able to finish the project.
I will admit that there was a LOT more I wanted to do with this project, but it just wasn't feasible to fit everything I wanted into the space. The roller coaster was the real labor as each time I worked on it, something didn't work right. Plus some of the designs just didn't make sense or it would require me to sacrifice a part of the scene I loved in order for it to fit. I finally gave in to the idea that this coaster would have to be a design that would have to wait for automation before it really comes together. Many of the parts for this will have to be animated before I am really satisfied with the look and feel of it.
The real treat has been seeing my son's face and his reaction to the build as I have been working on it.
The Haunted Hayride Haunt Story:
In a small farming community, a farmer purchases a new hay farm. One day as he is gathering the crop, he discovers that an old graveyard was hidden in the multi-acre farmland. After making the proper authorities aware of the situation and the graves and site exhumed, the resulting news attention created by the discovery, made the farmer decide he wanted to attract the same attention again. Working off the media that was started from the event, the farmer creates a Hayride through his hayfield for the general public to enjoy at a reasonable fee. He decorates a small section with scary or Halloween-themed displays. Over the years the farmer has expanded the event and hired actors and more decorations to which, in addition to what the farmer makes on his hay production, allows for the event to be self-sustained, making the Haunted Hayride a great financial investment. The farmer started out by replicating the graveyard. First with some normal tombstones and then more elaborate tomb displays. Then the farmer added the ghosts and monsters. As time went by, the farmer wanted to make the hayride enjoyable for all ages, so he made it both scary and fun.
