A couple of weekends ago I attended the Midwest Haunters Con in Columbus, OH. It was okay. The opening Friday night offered a party at a nearby downtown bar called the Frog Bear and Wild Boar Bar. I suspect the title was a sneaky soberity test. Anyway, the haunters had about a third of the bar to display horror stuff. The Last Ride guys were there. They kept busy offering people rides in their coffin/burial simulation.

The tradeshow area had a lot of the same stuff that was offered at HauntCon in Milwaukee. There was one wicked cool display that featured an ax crazy woman behind a steel door. She would approach the door in patented jittery fashion and attack the door with the ax. The door would show dents, then the lights would flitter out. When they came back, the door would be unmarred, then a figure would appear at the far end of the hallway through the door window.

Saturday night was the costume ball. Some great costumes. Unfortunately for me, several of the partyers got into their haunt personas and stayed in character the whole evening. There are a couple of primary haunt personas. One is "slow, stupid;" think zombie. The other is "loud, crazy;" think the Firefly family from House of 1,000 corpses. There were several loud, crazy groups running around in the lobby area where I was. Normally I don't mind, but I was out of sorts that weekend. It seemed that whenever I'd move to a quiet(er) spot would come over goofing with each other. A especially active group consisted of three medical maniacs; a doctor, nurse and patient chased each other at high speed and high volume. The nurse was quite memorable. She ran in a mincing gait and laughed nearly non-stop. When she did stop she'd talk in a high pitched voice and jiggle. Sorry, the jiggling was less Elvira and more J-Horror. Her performance was spot on. But it went on and on.

At least we weren't booked with a church ladies group this time. Instead there was a major video gaming tournament running parallel to the hauntcon. So occasionally groups of teenagers would show up to play with or flex at the monsters. The teens came up second best in the exchanges I saw. Don't mess with people who make a living at messing with people. That was entertaining though.