The Haunted House

I grew up on dead end street. Not what one expect from the sound of it - we had a big yard, woods, a pond and a brook - almost kind of rural in a way. What we didn't have was a neighborhood of kids, just the two girls across the street and we didn't get along too well with them. They got mad because I punched their poster of Bobby Sherman that they used to kiss.
My brother Pete and I, being only 18 months apart, had a slightly distorted view of reality. We did have 2 neighborhoods on each side of us, so we drifted in and out of them but weren't real members. We were avid fans of the Little Rascals, and since we didn't know what a real neighborhood of kids was like, we thought that the Little Rascals version was real. We thought putting on shows and having wacky adventures was normal. For awhile we even got all the kids to wear hats since all the Little Rascals, and the Bowery Boys as well, all had their signature caps.
One of the drawbacks was being kind of naive about alot of things, but then again, we did alot of stuff that if we lived in a regular neighborhood we likely never would have even thought about doing. Pete and I teamed up with a local kid, Jeremy Roschelle, and started the B&R Carnival (as in Borzotta & Roschelle), an annual one-day event that we did probably five summers. We'd start work in January and months later on the big day make a whopping twenty bucks or so which we usually donated to the Jerry Lewis Telethon - but the B&R Carnivals are for another blog entry. This one is about the Haunted House we did.
We had a detached two-car garage with an attic above it. The idea was to have me as the Crypt Keeper-like host escort 3 or 4 kids at a time through the Haunted House. We took a whole bunch of my mom's bedsheets, as well as towels and a blanket or two, and nailed them to the ceiling creating a winding passageway. God bless her, my mom didn't get angry about the nail holes in her good sheets! I would lead the kids through, and there were several things set up to try and scare the hell out of them. We had one kid chained in the corner in a werewolf mask. Dead kids in bloody make-up and baby-powdered faces coming to life. In the attic were 2 kids who would scream, "No! Don't! I don't want to die!" all the while stomping and dragging chains. We made a dummy with a rope around it and they would drop it doing a faux hanging from the attic while yelling, "NOOOOOOO!"as we walked by the steps.
The best part was the dreaded Acid Pit. I took my mom's big spaghetti sauce pot, filled it with water and green dye, and placed it on a table in front of a sign that said, "BEWARE! Acid Pit!" Next to it was a raw chicken breast on a plate. Before I brought each group of kids in, I shoved an Alka-Seltzer tablet in the chicken breast. I would lead them to the Acid Pit, caution them, and say, "Watch this!" as I gingerly picked up the chicken breast with tongs, dropped it in the "acid" and the alka-seltzer would fizz away creating the illusion of horrible roiling death!