Smell a missing element in Halloween displays and Haunts?

Today was the perfect Fall day… A sunny afternoon full of colourful leaves, crisp air & the overwhelming smells of Autumn. Walking home, we saw the many beginnings of local haunts under construction. And as I was beginning to get the full kid-feeling of Hallowe’en, I realized it was as much due to the smells as it was to the displays being set-up. And this got me thinking…

Smell is considered by many, to be the strongest of the senses for memory recall & association. I’ve used this in horror museum displays to great effect in the past, never thinking to bring this element to a Hallowe’en haunt before!

By example, I had done work on one display for the London Dungeon, “Sawney Beane” (the cannibal-highwayman & his family), and found it was missed often by tourists. The solution was to place a small light fixture & warmer tray for scented oils. We’d found a company who made exotic (to say the least) scents & ordered several, and Sawney’s display promptly received the smell of cooking bacon! This caused two reactions. The first was that people followed the smells straight to the display, and the second… the clear horror that their noses had betrayed them! The scene had become that much more shocking than before. It followed that “Branding” got a lovely BBQ aroma, “The Great Fire” got woodsmoke and “Plague” got an effective rotting garbage smell.

It’s late to do in this year’s haunt but I’m already thinking of how we could incorporate this idea into future haunts. Scents of candy apples & fresh-turned earth are giving me several avenues of thought for next year… And, yes. I’m already sourcing the company who supplied those oils years ago. Perhaps this will become one more tool in the complete haunter’s kit.

9thmonk is a guest blogger here on Grimvisions you can follow him on Twitter here 9thmonk@twitter