Growing Destinations
Your go-to source for insightful discussions on destination development. The Growing Destinations podcast delves into the strategies, challenges, and successes that drive community growth. Each episode features in-depth conversations with local and national experts, uncovering universal themes and innovative practices that can be applied to any city or region.
Growing Destinations
A Haunted House That Gives Back in Harmony, Minnesota
In Harmony, Minnesota, a group of dedicated volunteers turn their love for Halloween into something extraordinary: a haunted house that helps fund local arts and music programs. Monster Bash, Inc. isn't your typical haunted attraction; it's a nonprofit organization that channels the thrill of the scare into real support for students and the arts.
Jay Masters, President of Monster Bash, Inc. shares how it all started, what keeps it going, and why this spooky tradition has become such a powerful force for good.
The Growing Destinations Podcast is brought to you by Experience Rochester. Learn more about Minnesota's third largest city, which is home to Mayo Clinic and features wonderful recreational and entertainment opportunities by visiting Experienced Rochester MN.com.
SPEAKER_00:Every year our haunt is different. It's never the same twice. Every year we have a different theme, a different floor plan, the scares are different. I tell people if you come any two years in a row, you will not see anything duplicated from year to year. And that's what keeps people coming back.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome to the Growing Destinations Podcast, where we take a deep dive into destination development and focus on a wide range of topics from tourism and entertainment to economic development and entrepreneurism and much more. I'm your host, Bill Von Bank. Today we're diving into a story that blends creativity, community, and just the right amount of fright. In Harmony, Minnesota, a group of dedicated volunteers turn their love for Halloween into something extraordinary: a haunted house that helps fund local arts and music programs. Monster Bash Inc. isn't your typical haunted attraction. It's a nonprofit organization that channels the thrill of the scare into real support for students and the arts. Joining me today is Jay Masters, president of Monster Bash Inc., to share how it all started, what keeps it going, and why this spooky tradition has become such a powerful force for good. Jay Masters, welcome to the Growing Destinations Podcast. Thank you, Bill. It's great to be here. Well, you've been involved in a really spooky attraction in Harmony, Minnesota that supports a lot of great initiatives. Share the details of how Monster Bash Inc., the nonprofit you lead, as well as the Monster Bash Haunted House, all came together.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's uh an interesting story, I think, to me anyway. Uh, I've always enjoyed Halloween, and I've always had a passion for helping young people to get started. And so I had an idea for doing a haunted house as a fundraiser, and I had it for several years. I approached my local church youth group about doing it, and they didn't seem to think that they had the the wherewithal to make it work. And then I later approached a group of Chamber of Commerce folks in the Harmony area, and they weren't real keen on it. And then I started doing a small haunted house on my back porch for trick-or-treaters. And the first one was pretty simple, but it was it was fun. And then the second year we got a little more elaborate, and my father and I worked on it for about a week to kind of pull it all together and had several scenes and different things that the that the kids could go through. And so I started bringing the band director down. He lived about two doors down from me, and his son and my son were in the same class and played basketball together. And I kept saying, you know, this could be a great fundraiser. This could be a great fundraiser. When did this all take place? Oh gosh, that probably backyard porch. The porch uh I'm guessing that was probably 2010, uh, 2009, 2010, 2011, somewhere in there. And after seeing the second version of the haunted house, he said, you know, Jay, I I just think this is gonna be too much work. And I said, All right, I tell you what, if you can get the kids excited about it, if you can get the parents excited about it, I'll do the legwork. I'll do it all, I'll lay out the floor plans, I'll organize the work days, I'll go and raise money so that we can buy lumber and paint and props and and and get it off the ground. And he said, All right, let's let's try it.
SPEAKER_01:The evolution of this went from your porch then to what?
SPEAKER_00:We started off in the gymnasium of what used to be the old elementary school in Harmony. It's now where City Hall is located. And the city said, sure, you can use this this space. So we we started building, and then we had, of course, have a place to store all this stuff. So we we stored our walls in the the bus shed, which was in in Preston, Minnesota, and then we found someone who said he had a vacant building over by Granger, so in opposite directions. Uh so every time we would set up, we would start in Preston and bring the walls back, load them all up, bring them back. Then we'd empty the trucks and the vans and we'd head for to Granger to pick up props and bring those back, and we'd had people putting up walls while other people were decorating, and we would we would put it all up in about two days.
SPEAKER_01:And when it became something more than a hobby for you or something fun from your back porch into something big, what what was the turning point year for that?
SPEAKER_00:I I think it was probably the f the the the first year that that we started Monster Bash because we raised good about about eleven thousand dollars in the first year, and we were all blown away because we were charging like like five dollars a person to go through. And did you form the nonprofit right away? We did not. We continued to operate for about five years uh with just a group of volunteers and parents. We would meet with parents uh in May uh and say, okay, this is what we're gonna do for the haunted house, this is what the theme is, this is what the rooms look like, and then families would volunteer to take rooms to decorate. We would provide everything. They just had to go in and provide the manpower to put it all together. And it was after about the fifth year, it just so happened that I was losing the space where we were storing all of our props. The guy had sold the building and we were in in dire straits. I actually thought, okay, we've probably done our last haunted house at that point. And someone from the community came to me and said, Jay, you know, you guys are doing a great thing there. I know there's a building in town that's for sale. It's going to go up for auction. I think you guys should buy it and and move your haunted house there. And I said, Well, we don't have any money because every nickel and or dime that we made, we gave right back to the kids. We didn't have a bank account, we didn't have a treasurer, we had none of that. And he said, Well, you know what? I think the people in the community would support you in in purchase of the building. And so he gave us$5,000. We went to an auction and we bought the building that we are currently housed in uh for$55,000. And we proceeded to do a big capital campaign to try to raise enough money to pay it off. We got a loan from the EDA because we were bringing a lot of people into town, which were the businesses were very happy about, and then we ended up paying off the building. In the meantime, that the uh Chamber of Commerce in town said, Hey, you know what, you're bringing all these great people to town, but it's it's after hours. Would you be in support of us putting on a haunted harmony festival every year? And I said, Absolutely. And so that has taken off as well. So there's a whole festival that kind of revolves around the haunted house uh in Harmony, brings people to town. They have free Halloween movie uh at the theater, they've got uh trunk retreat, costume contests, the businesses all decorate up. Niagara Cave, I understand they they were, I think they are still going to be doing some lantern-lit tours of the cave by uh advanced reservation. And so there's a lot of things that have kind of built from us putting on this little haunted house.
SPEAKER_01:Little intensity and density around what you've started. Absolutely. Absolutely very thematic. Yes, it's become a part of the community. What did it take to formalize Monster Bash as a 501c3? I know there's paperwork and there's uh IRS designation, things like that, correct? Correct.
SPEAKER_00:I was I was very fortunate. I went to the attorney in town and was asking them if they would consider making a donation to our capital campaign and got to talking with the attorney and he said I understand that you're interested in becoming a 501c3. And I said, Yes. And I said, I don't know really how to do that. I know it's rather arduous, but but yes, we would like to become a 501c3. And he said, I tell you what, that'll be my donation. He did the paperwork. He did the paperwork, he got information from me, he submitted it to the state, and one day I got information in the mail that said, Congratulations, you're a 501c3. So we were recognized by the federal government. And we're also a tax-exempt entity in the state of Minnesota. So if we're purchasing props or paint or things like that, we fortunately don't have to pay sales tax, which is nice. Big deal. Yeah, I'd make that that it allows us to put more money into the haunt and and give money more back, more money back to the to the kids every year. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01:What made you choose the arts, especially music and theater, as the focus of your fundraising efforts?
SPEAKER_00:The band director at the time was a good friend of mine. Like I say, our our our uh sons played basketball together. In fact, when they were seniors, they were captains of the basketball team. And so we had traveled around to basketball tournaments and things quite a bit in the summer. He lived two doors down, and he came to me and said, you know, um we're gonna be performing down at Disney World and and it's gonna cost about$2,000 a kid. We need to come up with a way to to help these families be able to afford this. Uh Fillmore County, where we're located, has one of the lowest per capita incomes in the state of Minnesota. And so that kind of pushed me to say, okay, then then we really need to do this. We really need to make this happen. And uh so we did. And uh any student or parent or anyone that's involved, for every hour they work, they get a credit. And they can put that credit towards any student that they want within the the arts programs. And then every two years the band and choir take one of these performance trips, like the one that they were gonna take to Disney that year. And so at the end of each season, we determine how much money we've made. We take out what we need as an organization to survive. I mean, we still have to pay taxes, we still have to have insurances, we have startup money for next year, et cetera, et cetera, utility costs, etc. And so we take out what we think we're gonna need, and then we take what's left and we divide that, you know, by the credits that people turn in. So all of that money, every every year we have a uh a dollar and cent rate, if you will, that every hour of someone's work uh they earn. And that can go into that student's account. I've had students who have come to me and said, you know, I couldn't have gone on this last trip had it not been for Monster Bash. And some of the families have who have been heavily involved have gone on these trips and never had to pay a dime out of their own pocket. Out of their own pockets.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. As you mobilize this and turned it into something big, how did or how do you measure success, both from dollars raised or community involvement or just keeping the lights on? I mean, do you do you look at we need to raise so much money, or do you look at you you talked about helping kids, how many kids you can support?
SPEAKER_00:How do you measure success? I think we measure it in in a number of ways, Bill. I think obviously, you know, we're we're there as a fundraiser. We're we're trying to raise money. That's that's always our our our number one thought, I guess. What can we do to be more profitable? What can we do to put on a good show so that the word will spread and we'll we'll attract more people? So that is is a big factor. How much can we give back each year? I mean, is a direct result of how much we take in, obviously. And I think uh we've measured success by uh how well we've been received in the community. For instance, we just added on a$200,000 addition to our building.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my gosh. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And so we started a three-year capital campaign and we asked people to make a pledge for three years, private individuals, businesses, foundations, nonprofits. And we're almost at the end of this year, we'll be at the end of year two, and we've collected, you know, almost two-thirds of the money that we've raised. Even though we're still about ten to fifteen thousand dollars short of what we're gonna need to pay everything off. We do have some loans, of course, but uh we'll use the money that we take in from the pledges to pay off loans, and then we may, if we can't raise more money, have to uh put forth more more capital into it ourselves. And we're already the largest donor to the capital campaign. We we put in about twelve thousand dollars each year.
SPEAKER_01:You're president of Monster Bash Inc. You do have a day job too. So this is volunteer. What does your day-to-day or season-to-season involvement look like for this initiative?
SPEAKER_00:I've told many people that it for me personally, it's almost a second full-time job. Usually by this time of year, we already have a theme for next year, and I'm already planning how that's going to come together, what we're gonna do. Because every year our haunt is different. It's never the same twice. Every year we have a different theme, a different floor plan. The scares are different. I tell people if you come any two years in a row, you will not see anything duplicated from year to year. And that's what keeps people coming back. It's always new, it's always fresh. It's a lot of work, dude. But it is a lot of work. And so I'm always working, looking at, okay, what can we do to incorporate new scares? What are some neat themes we can do? Um, how can we decorate the walls? The one comment we get from a lot of people is they can't believe after they go through is how elaborate everything is. We're not just dark hallways and dark rooms where people jump out of the corner and scare you. Um, for instance, we had an old West ghost town theme a few years back. We called it Spectre Gulch. We had a saloon, we had a sheriff's office, we had a bank, we had uh an old mine shaft that they had to to get through, as well as other uh spaces that would be in an old West town. And they looked like the rooms that they were supposed to be. If we have a uh haunt and there's supposed to be a room that looks like a kitchen, it looks like a kitchen. Uh we have if we have pots and bands, we have cupboards on the walls, we it's very elaborately decorated. Our costumes, uh, we've gotten to where they are tremendous year in and year out. We've started utilizing animatronics to supplement our live actors. Uh every year we'll have anywhere from 32 to 36 live actors every single night in the haunt. Wow. And those actors are our high school students, they are parents, and and we have actors training. We we we coach them up every year. We talk to them about generally how do you scare people. You don't have to yell and scream, you don't have to say anything. Sometimes just by getting rather close to someone, it can unnerve them and make them make them a little uncomfortable. But then we take them into the individual rooms where they will be performing and we coach them up as to things that we want them to say, things we don't want them to say. For instance, we don't want people to go into three different rooms and have somebody yell the same thing at the get out, or you know, what you're not supposed to be, or whatever. So we give them specific lines that they're supposed to use so that they're not diminishing a scare in another room or another place that the that our guests will be going through.
SPEAKER_01:From a planning process, how early do you start from ideation to build out?
SPEAKER_00:In a perfect scenario, like I say, we will we will be working two years ahead. We will have our haunt that we're working on now. We'll already know what the theme will be for the for the coming year. This year, because of the capital campaign and the building of the uh of the new structure, uh, we fell a little bit behind on that. But after right after the haunt's over this year, we're gonna come up with two themes, one that will be for next year and then one would be the following year. And then once we get a theme, we work on a logo so that we can put together our posters uh and our t-shirts. Every year we sell new t-shirts with the logo on them. And so then we can start working on our marketing, get the end get the word out. So it's it's an ongoing process all year long.
SPEAKER_01:In addition to the actors, how many total people are involved in in putting this on?
SPEAKER_00:I would say in the course of a j of a year, it would be anywhere from eighty to one hundred. That might have some have minor parts, but yet it they're involved. We without their involvement, we you know wouldn't wouldn't be what we are. We've been named the number one Halloween attraction in the state of Minnesota for the last seven years in a row by Minnesota Hauntedhouses.com. They track not only haunted houses, they track haunted forests, they track apple orchards, hay rides, um, any type of uh of a Halloween or haunted attraction, they monitor, and we were named number one overall attraction, not just the number one haunted house, but the number one overall attraction for the last seven years in a row. I should say our last seven haunts in a row because during COVID we didn't have a haunt.
SPEAKER_01:Beyond the fun of creating scares, what personally drives you to keep doing this year after year?
SPEAKER_00:I I think it's it's helping kids. I I like to give kids a chance. Everybody should be able to participate fully in in all the activities that are offered at a school district, regardless of what their family's income is. And so I like helping families, I like helping kids. I mean, it's not that I'm you know just exclusive to the arts. I years ago I started the youth football program down there too. So I just I like to help kids. And so that's kind of what has has kind of kept me energized and involved because we get new kids through all the time.
SPEAKER_01:Do you have a vision for the future for Monster Bash Haunted House?
SPEAKER_00:Well, obviously we're going to be expanding next year because we'll be able to utilize the new space that we have. We also just this year purchased the land next to us, and uh it's basically a two uh two lots. Um down the corner was the old um township hall. We've talked to one of our legislators, Greg Davids, about the possibility of putting together a proposal to build a regional center for the arts adjacent to our building where we could do plays and we could do concerts and we could have art exhibits, we could rent space out for large gatherings, class reunions, potentially, you know, maybe even wedding receptions, and have a place upstairs for nonprofits in the area to have meeting space, whether it's uh Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, FFA, uh Lions Club, whatever it might be, where they could have a space where they could have a dedicated space that they knew that they could use year-round and have their meetings and in a comfortable setting that wouldn't cost them anything. We've done 12 haunts. This is our 13th this year. So far, we've given back$184,321.50. Pushing$200K, that's pretty good. Yes, after this year, we will we will definitely be over$200,000. And within another year or two, I will be able to say we've given back a quarter of a million.
SPEAKER_01:Jay, how can people learn more about Monster Bash Haunted House?
SPEAKER_00:They could go to our website, and that is Monsterbash Haunted House.org. ORG because we're a nonprofit, so we're an org. And just remember to have the two H's at the end of H and before and in Haunted House, because we have uh had people say, Well, I couldn't find it because they only put one H in there. It's Monsterbash Haunted House dot org.
SPEAKER_01:J Masters, what a great story. Creativity, community, and a little Halloween spirit all working together to support the arts. Thanks for sharing how Monster Bash has grown into such a meaningful local tradition. And thank you for being our guest on the Growing Destinations Podcast.
SPEAKER_00:It's been my pleasure, Bill. Thank you very much for having me.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for tuning in to the Growing Destinations Podcast. And don't forget to subscribe. This podcast is brought to you by Experience Rochester. Find out more about Rochester, Minnesota, and its growing arts and culture scene, its international culinary flavors, and award winning craft beer by visiting Experience Rochestermn.com.
