From the Bunker — Weird Frequencies
Here’s a behind-the-scenes secret about The Haunted Heartland: one of our three panelists spent most of the night not sitting at the panel table. That’s because Dan Swinson had a haunted house to run.
Dan is Boo Crew’s second-in-command, and Saturday night at Boo Crew is not a night anybody stands still. While Rob, Adam, and Tyler hosted, Dan was out in the dark doing the hundred jobs a haunt night demands — and the show developed a running joke about it. Early on, Rob introduced him to the crowd with a promise: Dan would be stopping by. When Dan’s chair sat empty, Rob covered like a pro. Dan, he explained, is a ghost.
He wasn’t wrong, exactly. Dan kept appearing the way everything at Boo Crew appears — suddenly, and close by.
And Dan wasn’t the only Boo Crew presence haunting our broadcast. One of the haunt’s characters, Silas, took a professional interest in our show. When Tyler got up to grab his coat, Silas took his seat. Later in the night, Tyler turned around on camera and discovered Silas in his chair again — then gone the next time he looked. Somewhere around the two-hour mark, a Boo Crew actor snuck up on the table during the goodbyes and scared the panel half to death on live audio. Two hours of ghost stories hadn’t done it. One actor with good timing did.
This is the part people at home can’t see: Boo Crew is a machine. Actors, sets, a haunted trail through the woods, a crew that has been scaring Central Illinois for years — Rob told the crowd it’s ranked among the very best haunts in the state — and on our night, it sold out. Dan and the Boo Crew team handed us their home turf, helped us stage a live broadcast inside it, and still ran a full night of scares around us like we’d always been there.
So if Dan’s panel chair looks empty in some of the wide shots, now you know why. He was out running the haunted house we were sitting in. When Rob finally got him to the table at the end of the night to take a bow, he’d earned it about five times over.
Boo Crew Haunted House is in Mechanicsburg, Illinois. If you go — and you should — tell them the Weird Frequencies table sent you. And watch your chair.