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by Keith Miller
 The end-of-year holiday season is usually thought of as a time of sharing, whether giving kids candy at Halloween, exchanging gifts at Christmas, or ringing in the new year with friends and family. Unfortunately, some parks and attractions have discovered that for a few, the holiday season means taking things that don’t belong to them, thereby dampening the festivities for everyone else.
Many attractions want to decorate elaborately for the holidays, but doing so means placing expensive garnishments, props, and equipment where they can be damaged or stolen. Although all of the attractions that spoke to Funworld for this story say the vast majority of their guests are honorable and don’t engage in such acts, they note a few wayward souls create some real headaches.
“If it’s not locked down, nailed down, or put out of reach, it may very well disappear,” says Harry Haynes, co-owner of Madd Fun, a family entertainment center (FEC) in Brooklyn, New York (www.maddfun.com). “Pricier decorations for Halloween are a real problem and will walk right out the door.”
Thievery Knows No Bounds
Chris Baxter owns Reaper’s Realm (www.reapersrealm.canadianwebs.com), a haunted attraction near Bickford, Ontario, Canada. In operation for 11 years, it’s made up of two haunted houses and a haunted forest ride; it employs around 150 workers during the Halloween season, when the attraction gets 15,000 to 20,000 guests on weekends.
“About the second or third year we were open, we had people come after we closed for the night, broke in, and stole a bunch of animatronics,” says Baxter.
Such losses are really tough on smaller operations like Madd Fun and Reaper’s Realm, but they are no less costly in actual dollars to large facilities like Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California (www.knotts.com). During the Christmas season, one of the park’s decorations is a large poinsettia tree comprised of individually potted poinsettias stacked in the shape of a Christmas tree. Unfortunately, this beautiful eye-catcher caught the attention of a few sticky-fingered guests in 2009.
 “Some people were just helping themselves to the potted plants,” says spokesperson Jennifer Blazey, “and so this created holes in the tree. It was outside the park in our marketplace area, which really shouldn’t make a difference, but I guess it does.” Blazey says Knott’s also has to be watchful at the end of the park’s “Knott’s Scary Farm Halloween Haunt” event, “especially if we’re retiring a maze and people want to take something.”
Even a facility like the Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC) in Laie, Oahu, Hawaii (www.polynesia.com), isn’t immune to pilfering. Each fall since 2008 the PCC has held a wildly popular Halloween event called “Haunted Lagoon” that attracts tens of thousands of guests. The attraction has numerous decorations, props, and animatronics, some of which are quite expensive.
William Mahoni, product development specialist for the PCC, says some of those items have disappeared: “I don’t like to use the word ‘stolen,’ but items ranging between $50 and $1,000 each have been ‘borrowed.’ It’s not just the guests—we had 1,200 workers this past year, and it’s tough to keep track of them all. For example, we had 70 wet suits used by workers and 63 were returned.”
Vandalism a Problem, Too
A few attractions, like Madd Fun, have also dealt with vandalized decorations. Haynes says he’s had holiday decorations damaged or dismantled, some because of religious conflicts, and that doesn’t sit well.
“The first time that happened, my employees were so appalled that it could have gotten out of hand,” he says. “Here you have staff that sees something they regard as holy to them being demoralized and damaged. I have to have staff meetings with employees to boost their morale after incidents like that.”
Baxter has also experienced vandalism at Reaper’s Realm. “Sometimes people just try to wreck stuff as they go through the haunted houses,” he says.
Preventative Action
All of these attractions have taken steps to prevent further vandalism, offering up some ingenious tips and tricks to foil any possible humbuggery.
 Knott’s employs one of the most common solutions: nail or glue down decorations, barricade them, or put them out of the reach of guests. “A lot of our mazes are quite detailed for Halloween, and we’ve found that if it can walk away, it will walk away,” says Blazey. “We place some of our elaborate displays out of people’s reach.” This past Christmas, Knott’s built a white picket fence around the poinsettia tree to prevent direct guest access.
Another remedy is to use very large or heavy decorations and props. “You just have to go with larger items sometimes,” says Haynes. “They are more expensive, but they won’t walk out the door.” Mahoni agrees with this strategy: “Our animatronics are quite huge—they’d literally need a forklift to get them! And we do use a forklift to move them to a secure place at night.”
This brings up another method of preventing theft and vandalism: secure storage after hours. It’s a time-consuming hassle for attractions, but a necessary one. “For the past three months I’ve been securing a [storage] area with double fences, locked, and with cameras,” Mahoni says. “In the next few weeks we’ll have a situation where we’ll have everything (decorations, animatronics, and props) secured in one location, and the company has been willing to allow me to get what’s necessary to secure this area.”
 One of the more clever solutions is employed by Reaper’s Realm. There is no electrical power in much of its haunted forest, so the attraction has to use generators and compressors. Baxter says he’s installed camera traps—the battery-powered, motion-activated cameras often used in wildlife photography—to capture images of anyone trying to steal or damage the equipment.
Madd Fun uses hidden cameras—some as small as a ballpoint pen—hidden in exit signs, clocks, or emergency lights. Haynes says the cameras can be an eye-opener for attractions, revealing that the people doing the pilfering are sometimes employees.
At the PCC, Mahoni addresses this by making the workers accountable: “Some of our masks are $300 or $400, so we have to keep close track of who’s responsible for each one. We have 15 to 20 captains who are responsible for all of the items in their area. I ask them to periodically inventory what they have, and that hopefully gives them ownership.”
Knott’s surreptitiously deploys employees during “Knott’s Scary Farm” to act as watchdogs. “The things we worry about most is when we use antiques or vintage items,” says Blazey. “We used an old stagecoach in a maze last year and we stationed someone by it dressed in black, and he kept an eye on it.”
Despite these precautions theft and vandalism by just a few people can have a chilling effect on the joy that attractions bring their guests. “Sometimes we don’t want to get anything really nice because someone might take it,” Baxter says. “There are a lot of cool things we’d like to buy, but we just don’t because it’s not worth having it stolen.”
Contact News Editor Keith Miller at kmiller@IAAPA.org.
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