Build-a-Haunted Mansion: OPEN TO VISITORS 🎃

[Aerlinn]

Goblins and ghoulies, oogies and boogies, do you have what it takes? Jack Skellington has called upon the citizens and friends of Halloween town to build the spookiest, creepiest, crawliest mansion yet, in a land full of spooky creepy crawlies.

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This will work a bit like a marketplace thread. Ghost hosts can claim a room and apply their ghoulishly garish decorating and design skills to create the Plaza's very own Haunted Mansion. Once a few rooms are set up it will open to victims visitors, who will be dragged can go from room to room and be slowly driven mad by interact with the room and its host.

Available Rooms

The Garden
@Dwimmerlaik, Mr. Scarecrow, and the Boss of Ravens

The Foyer

The Portrait Gallery
Peeves the Poltergeist by @Lirimaer

The Library
Howard Phillips Lovecraft by @Walpurgisnacht (Frost)

The Study
Obi-wan Kenobi's Force ghost by Zero @Yávië (Aerlinn)

The Conservatory
Strangleroot by @Little Bird Lail

The Drawing Room

The Music Room

The Ballroom

The Cellar
@Dwimmerlaik

The Dining Room

The Kitchens
Ghost of Chickens Past by @San (Tarawen)

The Attic

Servant's Quarters


Happy haunting!

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Guidelines
Ghost hosts must be, by some definition, ghosts -- aka a resident of Halloween Town, the ghost of a character from another Kingdom's Halloween theme, or the ghost of a Plaza character.
Likewise, you may incorporate elements and characters from other Halloween kingdoms into your room.
Feel free to create a room/area I didn't list and I'll add it to the OP.
You may work individually or tackle a room (or a set of rooms, like the cellar, dining room, kitchens) as a group.
Be spooky, be terrifying, be silly, be goofy -- whatever floats your boat.
#400080 and Zero are reserved for GM updates.

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THE HAUNTED MANSION IS NOW OPEN TO VISITORS
Guests may explore freely or play the Pumpkin-Go-Seek minigame with Zero!

Zero has been raiding the pumpkin patch! He doesn't mean to be a bad dog, but all those grinning, rind gnashing jack-o'-lanterns are just irresistible. He's hiding his loot around the Haunted Mansion, burying it in abandoned rooms and even conspiring with the resident ghosts. Can you recover the pumpkins and get them back to Jack in time? Or will Halloween Town face a decorating catastrophe?

How It Works
Three jack-o'-lantern will be hidden at a time to be found in any of the listed rooms (currently occupied or not).
RP entering a room and mention searching for a jack-o'-lantern in bold somewhere in your post. A resident ghost will let you know if you've found one.
Once a jack-o'-lantern has been found a new one will appear somewhere else in the mansion, so keep hunting!
It will be possible for a second or third pumpkin to turn up in a room where one has already been found.
The visitor who finds the most jack-o'-lanterns will receive a Certificate of Appreciation from the Halloween Town City Council and shinies if I can find a generous admin.

[Dwim]

Dwimmerlaik
The Garden

"Stop eating Mr. Scarecrow's head!" Dwimmerlaik yelled at the crows who were bouncing around like scavengers. He had convinced his scarecrow friend to come and help with the haunted garden, but now his great big pumpkin head was getting pecked at by the neighbourhood crows.

"Ravens! Keep your crow-cousins in check. We need Mr. Scarecrow intact to help scare our guests."

"Yes, Sir, certainly Sir," replied the Boss of the Ravens.

Since dying and becoming trapped in Halloween Town, Dwimmerlaik had taken up residence at the Haunted Mansion. The other ghouls, spectres, and pranksters had made room for him to haunt there too, and it was quite an enjoyable place to live. It was nearly Halloween, and all the residents of the mansion had decided to renovate and decorate in time to scare a new batch of visitors. Dwimmerlaik had been assigned the job of making the garden as spooky as it could possibly be. It was a very important job too, as the garden was the first thing the visitors would see, so it was essential to make a frightening first impression.

Mr. Scarecrow's damaged pumpkin head was doing a good job of that as he stalked around the rotten vegetable patch, guarding it with a scythe. The big Ravens were now perched together on a dead branch above his head, warding off the hungry crows.

His team was making good progress on the gardens. Dwimmerlaik was currently working on a small graveyard. In front of two gravestones were the arms of two of the Undead, which were poking out from the ground, their hands covered in dirt and their fingers clasping at air. He stepped back from the graveyard to admire his work. Those haunted arms were certainly a clever touch.

Being a poltergeist definitely had its perks. Objects that normally didn't move on their own could easily be made to move. And that led him to his next task, animating the vines around the fences and the great arch at the entrance to the garden. He wanted the vines to reach for people's heads as they entered the mansion grounds.

[Zôrzimril]

Ghost of Chickens Past
The Kitchens

“WOOooooOOOooooooObahGAWK!” went the little ghost. It floated into the mansion gladly; having perished on the treacherous seas, a nice solid building in Halloween Town would be a welcome residence. Once inside, it ruffled its ghostly feathers and strutted its ghostly stuff. “Buh?” it questioned curiously as it surveyed the place. This was quite a big mansion. In life, the Ghost of Chickens Past had largely been confined to a cramped crate on the tottering deck of a ship. Some hairy beast had appeared one day to free it, only to fling it into the sky on a catapult. Ultimately, the chicken had drowned in the salty waters of the Haven of Umbar. This big place (and the afterlife) seemed a more comfortable existence.

The ghostly birb had been given its instructions: decorate to impress! To terrify! To torment! And so it set to work. Inventing, tinkering, contriving... teehee! (Ghost chickens are granted special dispensation to actually move solid objects and build stuff, you know.)

When this most mechanically-minded bird was finished, a conveyor belt lined with huge blobs of dough ran the length of the kitchen. The dough blobs were flattened by a huge, constantly-rolling cylinder before being dropped into man-sized pie tins and filled by some mysterious mechanical art full of mixed veg and gravy. Victims would be hung by their ankles and travel alongside this conveyor belt before being dropped into a pie and sealed inside to bake. For good measure, the little ghost also chopped off the head of another chicken (sorry, friend) and spread its blood all over the walls. A few sad, stray feathers were scattered here and there.

The Ghost of Chickens Past was quite pleased with its handiwork. It rubbed is ghostly wings together and cackled.

“MuahahabahGAWK!”

[The Good Hunter]

Howard Phillips Lovecraft
The Library

He was the worst kind of ghost. He was the ghost of a horror writer. The horror writer. He was H.P. Lovecraft. And despite that prestige, he was doomed to wander the earth watching people butcher the pronunciations of “Cthulhu” and “Nyarlathotep” and “Yog-Sothoth” and turning his stories into horribly mangled movies. What sort of punishment was he enduring? It was unfair. Lovecraft decided he didn’t want to wander anymore, it was too pain to watch his works be butchered and mangled and reduced to gory monsters and half naked women. Women! He barely wrote women in his stories and yet they were always there in films! The gall of the hyena dung besuited apes! It would serve them right if he just disappeared and haunted some random mansion that existed in fiction and the real world and an internet forum (he wasn’t sure how it all lined up but he wasn’t even sure he was real anymore so it was all a basket of mushroom).

He decided on the library because, well where else was a world-famous writer going go? The Dining Room? Please! He was never in the Dining Room in life, why would he be there in death? Perhaps there were some books on occultism here. Surely there would be some advancement in that field since his death. And archeology! And philology! And… and… that settled it. Lovecraft was going to haunt the library.

He ran (or floated, despite being dead for a long time he was still not sure how it all “worked”) up the stairs into the library. Awww! He could practically smell the books. Practically only though, he wasn’t actually sure he could smell anything. Perhaps all he was smelling was the memory of books. Either way, it was fantastic in here. He pulled the first book off the shelf and beamed as he opened it. Then he frowned. Oh no. He’d made a terrible mistake. Twilight. No. No. No. He picked up another and wailed. The Da Vinci Code.

Noooooooooooooo!

[Lirimaer]

The Portrait Gallery
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Peeves, resident poltergeist

It was October. Peeves loved October.

Earlier that morning he'd dived through every Hufflepuff bed, goosing the occupants and freaking out the entire house, who were all now in the corridor, panting and weepy in their nightclothes as he cackled and swept through the floor. He'd reappeared in the Great Hall, where he'd sabotaged the Ravenclaw tables and benches, so that even by the first lesson, the students were still extricating themselves from the melting mass of warped wood.

How he'd laughed as the Ravenclaw points hourglass kept unfilling as more and more teachers docked points for lateness.

The Slytherin contingent were rather undelighted to find that their mail had been burned to cinders, and that was also upsetting the staff, so Peeves had taken it upon himself to hide.

Currently he was in amongst the portraits, and because he'd scared off the Fat Lady, no Gryffindors were getting back into their tower for a while. The unsettled mayhem was bloody delightful! Peeves gave himself hiccoughs (how, he didn't even breathe?) and swooped through the moving staircases all round him like a bat, revelling in the shouting and anger coming from a thousand angry denizens of the gallery.

[Aerlinn]

Spirits, travelers, wanderers from afar! Your attention, if you please...

THE HAUNTED MANSION IS NOW OPEN TO VISITORS
Guests may explore freely or play the Pumpkin-Go-Seek minigame with Zero!

Zero has been raiding the pumpkin patch! He doesn't mean to be a bad dog, but all those grinning, rind gnashing jack-o'-lanterns are just irresistible. He's hiding his loot around the Haunted Mansion, burying it in abandoned rooms and even conspiring with the resident ghosts. Can you recover the pumpkins and get them back to Jack in time? Or will Halloween Town face a decorating catastrophe?

How It Works
Three jack-o'-lantern will be hidden at a time to be found in any of the listed rooms (currently occupied or not).
RP entering a room and mention searching for a jack-o'-lantern in bold somewhere in your post. A resident ghost (or your friendly ghostly TR) will let you know if you've found one.
Once a jack-o'-lantern has been found a new one will appear somewhere else in the mansion, so keep hunting!
It will be possible for a second or third pumpkin to turn up in a room where one has already been found.
The visitor who finds the most jack-o'-lanterns will receive a Certificate of Appreciation from the Halloween Town City Council and shinies if I can find a generous admin.
I recommend tagging people who's room you visit.

@San @Lirimaer @Dwimmerlaik @Hermes Trismegistus Ghost Hosts--thank you for all your work and creativity in setting up your rooms! Please terrorize interact with visitors as you see fit. In regards to the minigame, I'll contact you via Discord (I think everyone is on there, right?) if a jack-o'-lantern is hidden in your room. Please let any visitors who come searching your room know that they found it. You're also welcome to claim a second room if you wish, or visit with the other ghosts while we're waiting. I'll try and get a room set up myself here shortly, and then will be popping in and out of the unclaimed rooms with various characters as needed.

ALL -- Rooms are still available for Ghost Host characters if you're feeling spooky!

[Lirimaer]

Peeves, resident Poltergeist
The Portrait Gallery ---> to the Library @Hermes Trismegistus

One of the best things about the gallery being on so many floors was that the doors went pretty much everywhere directly.

Peeves, discontent with so many of his portraits pootling off to their other portraits to get away from him, snuck into the Library. The Librarian seemed to be having a fun time, or wait ... haha, it was a ghost! And it seemed to be suffering from some sort of conniption. He floated closer, oh ho, the Popular Fiction section! No wonder he was screaming. He must be a Distinguished Literary Artiste of some persuasion.

Peeves scooped up a ton of thin, heavily dog-eared books all bearing the same little rose design and began spinning them at the ghost like sad little frisbees, while quoting the titles in Deep Voiceover. "Last summer in Paradise," he intoned, sending the scantily clad cover awhirling down, right through the ghost's body. "Grace before Meat," he cackled, "What's that about?" his translucent shoulders heaving as he read the blurb, and his pile of books spilling from their orderly pile, some dropping onto the floor. "How could you, Jennifer?" he asked shrilly, sending the entitled tome through the air at a fast clip. "Maybe it was a Dark Obsession," he mumbled, tossing it over his shoulder, "or a Passionate Obsession, oh no, wait, A Torrid Obsession!" That one whizzed through the ghost's head, rudely. He could only hope that the romance wrote itself on the aggravated ghost's brain as it passed through him ... but uh oh, did he have its attention now?

He eyed the ghost warily before sending the next few titles in a barrage intended to keep his own exit free of restraint. "Enjoy a little Doctor in the house? Want a little Sultan on the Side? Wanna Ride with a Rancher? Prefer to hunker down with The Rebel Bride or The Reluctant Governess? Oh I know your fave - A Man to Tame!" and with a screech that echoed through the bookstands, he swept around the room like a tornado, intending to depart in a hurry.

[Aerlinn]

Obi-wan Kenobi
The Study

The boy, the general, the old wizard in the desert--had someone been watching, the Force ghost of Obi-wan Kenobi would have appeared to change a little at each glance. But it was the old man, mostly, who shook out his long brown robe and settled as best he could into the deep leather chair behind the study's centerpiece desk. It didn't provide the same comfort as it might have his physical body, but one couldn't have everything.

He proceeded fixed himself a cup of tea he couldn't drink, manipulating cup and pot with the Force even has he made the appropriate gestures with his hands, put logs on a fire he couldn't feel, and--with great satisfaction--Force shoved aside the Very Important Looking papers that were stacked on the desk and had absolutely nothing to do with him.

It wasn't such a bad place he had stumbled across, he mused to himself. Sure, some of the residents were a bit strange, and he was doing his best to pretend he hadn't heard anything suspicious coming from the kitchen, but it would do for a while. The Jedi's eyes drifted shut and he tilted his head back with a sigh. This really was a comfortable chair...

Had someone been watching, they might have thought the scene to be entirely harmless; yet it would have paid to remember that this was an old man who knew the ghosts of worlds.

[Lail]

Strangleroot, sentient tree ghost
The Conservatory

The glass walls of the Conservatory are swathed in a fog so dense none can see in or out. The air inside is heavy with moisture, hot and suffocating. This place may have been rich and full of life once. Beautiful and thriving. But all that is now forgotten. Now it is dark and dank, rich with the smell of decay.

Though it is an unwelcoming and miserable place, some life still hangs on. Vines slither upward from the floor to the ceiling. Their large thorns threaten to pierce the hide or skin of any who come too close. Mushrooms grow in dark corners; all colours and sizes, all likely poisonous, prepared to bring death to the one who dares to pluck cap from stem. A row of carnivorous plants tower almost as tall as the humans who once tended this place. They await their next meal with patience.

In the center of the Conservatory is a tree. The bark is black, rotted, dead. Naked branches hang and droop downwards, brushing the floor like gnarled fingers. This tree is the shell Strangleroot inhabited before he died. Before he was trapped inside this glass house and neglected for years and years as his life slipped away, leaf by leaf and branch by branch.

Strangleroot does not like visitors. Especially warm-blooded ones. The living remind him of what he was once and he will try to choke the life out of any who dare to enter his domain. Under his watch, the plants who still eke out a life here obey his every will. For now, all is still and silent within his glass prison...his spirit waits, ready to wrap limb and root around any who open the door and disturb his afterlife.

(OOC: if anyone wants to play a creepy crawly conservatory plant/critter please do!)

[Dwim]

Dwimmerlaik
The Garden

Animating the vines hadn't been too exhausting. In fact, it had not been exhausting at all as the issue of losing energy wasn't really a concern for a ghost. But there were things that were tedious for a ghost, like watering the weeds. Yes, the weeds had been watered copiously, for how could it be a haunted garden without an abundance of scratchy, thorny, strangling, overgrown weeds around the place. It was not a job Dwimmerlaik enjoyed, but his helpers were unable to carry out the task for him. The Ravens were incapable of operating a watering can, and Mr Scarecrow with his big old damaged head was busy mindlessly walking around in circles in the rotten vegetable patch. Although the scarecrow had swung his scythe a few times, unsuccessfully trying to stop Zero from stealing his pumpkins for some kind of game. Zero's antics had not pleased the crows too much either, who were flying around like mad, crying out in displeasure at one of their favourite types of food being taken away from them.

The cries of the crows were becoming a bit much, and the work in the garden was mostly complete, so Dwimmerlaik decided to have another look at the cellar.


The Cellar

Aaaah, the cellar... that dank smell of dampness and the chill in the still air. It hit him quickly as he floated through the walls and down to the lowest level below the mansion. Dwimmerlaik found himself quite at home down there. In life, he would have been quick to crack open one of the bottles and enjoy the pleasures of alcohol. But in death, it served no purpose to him. Alcohol was good for numbing the pains and problems of an earthly existence. In death, he had no worries left to numb.

None of the other ghosts of the mansion had claimed the cellar yet, so he decided it was his job to prepare some scares there for the visitors too. He'd recruited some of the skeletons from the dungeon basement to help. "In there," he said spookily and with authority to the reanimated bones. Two of the skeletons obeyed and marched their way down the stone stairs to the cellar, while the third crawled down there a little more slowly. Something had happened to that one's spine during its death.

"In," he ordered again, pointing them towards two open barrels. They creeped into the barrels quickly, two skeletons in one, and the crippled one in the other. "Now, when the visitors come in, I'd like you to jump up out of your barrels and give them an awful fright." The skeletons nodded, their teeth chattering together. Dwimmerlaik replaced the lids lightly over their heads.

"Meanwhile, I'll be working on another little trick."

He focused his poltergeist energy on the door and swung it shut so it could not be opened outward again by a human. Yes, that worked well. He swung it open again and painted "Cellar Door" in blood on its exterior. There was only one way the visitors were getting out of the cellar, and that was by playing a little game. He'd placed three goblets on an antique table in the middle of the room. They all appeared to have wine in them, but one was filled with blood, another with nauseatingly rotten grape juice, and the other was filled with a strange wine known to cause severe hallucinations. The only way that door would open again was if a visitor drank one of those goblets. Dwimmerlaik laughed with glee. This game would be fun to watch.

[Aerlinn]

Obi-wan Kenobi
Following Zero to the garden @Dwimmerlaik

A small white bundle burst into the study, dropped something twice the size of its own head from its jaws, and began a furious storm of yapping. "Arroof! Raaaf! Wooo--ooo----arrrooooof! Yaaaap! Waroooooo!"

Obi-wan Kenobi cracked open one semi-translucent eyelid to stare at it. It did several loop-de-loops at his feet then dove towards the door. When it looked back to find the Jedi still in his chair its round black eyes widened, its ears drooped, and its nose--what was that orange thing?--trembled. Obi-wan closed his eyes in brief denial and shortly found the sleeve of his robe being determinedly tugged on by a long, pointed snout. "You can't possibly count even as a pathetic life form," he grumbled, but he went.

The...he searched his memory and could come up with absolutely nothing in his experience that had looked at all like this possibly sentient floating towel...thing glided quickly down several twisting flights of stairs and long corridors before they emerged outside. A bit gloomy, Obi-wan thought critically, taking in the copious weeds and dead branches. Vines were twitching in a threatening sort of way.

The little white thing floated off to hide itself--poorly, granted--behind a hedge. Its eyes were narrowed at the circling scarecrow. A single orange gourd remained in the vegetable patch, bulging and enormous, far too big to be carried by such a small creature. Obi-wan remembered the object that had been dropped on the study floor, took a second look at the thing's odd nose, and understood.

"Oh, come on now, this is just petty theft. So uncivilized," the Jedi muttered, but he crouched down to join Zero behind the hedge and a tiny smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. His hair was rather less white than it had been. "We just need a distraction, you see?" he said. "And you watch out for the scythe. Somehow the physics between scarecrow weapons and ghostly blanket critters wasn't part of my education.

[Zôrzimril]

Ghost of Chickens Past
The Kitchens, The Dining Room

The little ghost waddle-floated here. Then it waddle-floated there. It oiled the machinery of its huge pie-making contraption and pressed the pie dough into several more tins. Even in the afterlife, it couldn’t hurt to be prepared.

With the tip of one wing, it pushed the big red button which made the whole apparatus start and stop. Everything seemed to be in order. “MuahahaGAWK!” it cackled once more. Then it pressed the button again. No use running the machine if no one was around to bake into a pie. Still, the ovens needed preheating and the knives needed sharpening, so it flapped off to prepare for a magnificent bake.

A short while later, the Ghost of Chickens Past wandered into the Dining Room with a stack of plates, some forks, and some well-sharpened knives. Of course, it would be its pleasure to divide up any groups who wandered into the kitchens, cooking up some to serve to the rest of the party on fine china out here. Hehehehe!