This was the first time in my life I was experiencing a loss that took me out. I’m sure the fact that I hadn’t experienced a significant loss was a part of the reason it became so abnormally acute. I was supposed to be a machine. Nothing could stop me . . . until something did. The spiral kept going for almost three years and kept getting worse. I started riding a motorcycle, subconsciously probably hoping I would die. I would think about ending my life twenty-four times a day, but I was so worried about how my mother would cope. I had just seen her go through the death of her best friend, and it was awful. She couldn’t come to terms with it. What would she go through if her only kid, whom she lived for, took her own life. I was also worried about my three dogs at home whom Alyson and I adopted together, two when they were babies and one when she was super old. What if nobody found them for days, and what if they went to a shelter until someone could come and get them? I couldn’t stand those thoughts. Somehow, accidentally killing myself on a motorcycle felt more tolerable for those who loved me.
On October 7, 2013, I crashed my motorcycle.
I ended up in the hospital, with screws and pins in my hand and arm, a scarred left leg and knee, and three reconstruction surgeries later, I have about 80 percent use of my left hand.
And because I really wanted to see what I was made of, this happened in early October, which means I had to get through the entire Halloween season with the LA Haunted Hayride, a major attraction open for eighteen nights. This accident happened a couple weeks after the filming of Shark Tank. When that episode aired a couple of Friday nights later, I was at the LA Haunted Hayride watching our email blow up, unable to move my left arm, walk on my left leg, and trying to manage the pain of the injuries while I ran a thirty-acre attraction serving sixty thousand people at the time.
I was numb.
I had grown up with happiness everywhere around me. I had a blessed life of an amazing mom, fun childhood, excellent education, early career success, soul-mate love, wealth. And now it was my turn to fall . . . to hit rock bottom. The girl who got way too excited when she took a bite of something that tasted delicious or got to binge watch her favorite shows on vacation in hotels—her spirit had broken.
I started to suffer from depression for the first time in my life at thirty-six years of age, and after a nearly fatal dose of alcohol and drugs almost took me out, I realized I needed to try to get myself on track. Nothing had killed me yet, so I figured it just wasn’t my time.
Having the realization that I was not only okay with dying, but wanted it, really spooked me. I had such a hard time understanding how I had become this person. But the truth is, I’d needed to become this person. I’d needed something to blow me up to make me pay attention. I think everyone on the planet has to go through their own version of this, because nobody is perfect.
I can honestly say that this pain forced me into an absurd level of reflection that precipitated into a lot of work . . . personal work. Personal work means different things to different people, but for me it was about being cracked open and made to look at where my ego and abandonment issues were navigating me. It was the terrifying moment I saw my father in me, an oppressive, combative, and overly opinionated man to whom I wanted no similarity. We have the choice through enormous pain and discomfort to either wait it out and let “time ease the pain” or to dig into it. Walk into that pain and deconstruct it; understand it to make damn sure we don’t repeat history.
Too many people—or shall we say the 90 percent—let time go by as their solution to healing rather than digging in. Typically, the result is another failed relationship, another lost job, another moment of settling for mediocrity or less.
The work is hard, but a lifetime unsatisfied is unbearable.
As I sit here six years after that first hard fall with Ghost Ship, yet again I am on the heels of what has been another very difficult launch of a new attraction.
However, during the six years in between, we’ve had the most exciting and exponential growth imaginable. Had the fear of another failure made us tentative, reluctant, or just downright stopped us, we’d have missed it all.
We’d have missed the launch of the Great Horror Campout in 2013 that instantly became a smash-hit cult sensation, which went on to expand into nine more cities in its second year and is now going into its fourth year with hundreds of copycats springing up all over the country. We would have missed our brand-new Great Horror Movie Night series that started in 2015, which too has become a giant hit. And we would have missed the expansion of our flagship attraction to the East Coast, New York Haunted Hayride, in October 2015.
It can definitely be argued that bringing the Hayride to the opposite side of the country in New York City was a failure. In some ways, it was worse than Ghost Ship because it lost a lot of money. But in many ways it was so much better, because none of the mistakes we made were the same ones made on Ghost Ship. I’m sure some of you think I’m being overly “Kool-Aid” drunk or elitist, like . . . is a whole new batch of mistakes really better?
Yes, I do think it is. If you’re in the outfield and get hit in the face by a pop fly, you learn to put your glove in front of your face. If you don’t, you keep getting your face split open until you leave the sport. So, thank God, we are living true to our philosophy of examining the data of our failures, making the adjustments, and trying again. It’s working. We don’t want to leave the sport. When you stop falling, you stop growing.
Sure, it would have been wonderful for the New York Haunted Hayride to have been a grand slam right out of the gates, but it wasn’t, and I am not afraid to get up and try it again for a third year with our new information because the second year got better and it will continue to get better. We have seen that it works firsthand. We can expand upon the equity we have already built to create a successful attraction in New York City, or we can hang up a “closed” sign and go back to the West Coast. That is the only way New York Haunted Hayride fails. We only fail if we ensure defeat by packing it up and taking it home.
New lessons will certainly come from this one that we will take to other markets on the East Coast and beyond, which will get us closer and closer to launching hayrides flawlessly. The growth is by definition exponential when you learn to correct and begin to look at failing much differently.
The things that go wrong are almost always aspects that can be turned around. The New York Haunted Hayride’s number-one hurdle was that we picked a bad location. The accessibility of it was deceiving because it looks very easy for customers to get there, but it’s not, because most people in NYC don’t drive. Additionally, the culture in NYC keeps people in their respective boroughs with very little compelling them to go anywhere if it’s not just a subway ride away. The location needed to change. That’s fixable. Another problem we experienced that first year was the weather: we were having terrible hurricane-like winds and rain that left us swimming through the hayride instead of riding behind a tractor. That wasn’t fixable. However, we can build our structures to be bomber proof so the winds don’t break them in half and cause us triage work each day just to keep chasing our tails, which was another problem we experienced. If we could learn and remedy 80 percent of the issues, it’s probably worth another shot.
My opinion of myself today is so much better than it’s ever been in my life. The personal progress I’ve made from being blown apart into a million pieces and having to figure out how to put them back together in a healthier way has helped all the categories of my life. I don’t align my value in the world with my career clout or income anymore. And that has been a hard demon to exorcise. My friendships are stronger; my career feels better and is more prosperous; my romantic relationships are so much more communicative; and I’m just happy . . . and I have even fallen deeply in love again.
It’s important to let go of guilt and regret. I don’t have regrets because it is all part of my story. I am equipped with the tools that I didn’t have a few years ago to ensure the decisions and actions of the future will take me where I want to go. The tools are expensive, but not having them is more expensive, and it has to be real. Personal growth is hard . . . to me, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, so it has to be encountered with belief and passion to really work.
There are those who read the books, go to therapy, meditate, reflect, and swear to God they have conquered the mountain but then show with their actions that not much has changed. There is no mountain . . . no finish line. It is a constant practice, and one that requires faith in the process and in your ability to bring your mind and vulnerability to a high degree of awareness or consciousness.
This is by all means the place your most extraordinary life lives. Give it the time and attention it needs, and I swear to you with every ounce of belief that fits into my five-foot-eight-inch, hundred-and-thirty-five-pound body that in return you will discover success, wealth, love, and the truest meaning of taking your best ride.
Alyson and I have since found a new place as best friends, and it seems like that’s where we have probably belonged for some time. The love and respect that we have for each other has made us okay. We’ve both gained a person who we know will be here always, which is more valuable than what we were as a struggling couple just trying to stay together. The ego and fear were kicked and vulnerability embraced, which enabled our story to have no end and, on the contrary, continue on better than it was.
I often say that I look at my career as a giant real-life game of monopoly. How much of the board can I control? How big of an impact can I have in my world? Don’t get me wrong, as Halloween attractions started to flood the Los Angeles market, I had a serious “oh shit” moment. It was just a moment, but a moment that pushed me to realize I had to build revolutionary blueprints for live entertainment. This realization is what brought me to the philosophy that would become our mission and formula for everything we created. It’s a philosophy that requires all Ten Thirty One live attractions to be the first of their kind in their respective markets. It’s a philosophy that requires all attractions to take place in an environment that is innately haunting in its demeanor before we even put our touches into the space. And it’s a philosophy that keeps our attractions refreshed every single year, meaning no two years will ever be the same.
This very philosophy birthed the first-ever Haunted Hayrides in the biggest markets of this country, the first and only haunted attraction that takes place on a ship that does actually set sail into the dark, open ocean at night, the first and to date only twelve-hour overnight horror camping experience in the country, and the first outdoor interactive horror-movie-night series in Los Angeles.
To keep the content changing every year requires an intensive creative process that never ends. All of the above attractions have provoked copycat attempts, so we need to stay a mile ahead at all times—to find new technologies, skill sets, or new ways to use sound, light, movement, and more.
“Learn to evolve or cease to exist” repeats in my head every day.
I started to see the power of sound in patrons’ reactions to our startling effects and its synergistic relevance to the feeling of largeness. At the LA Haunted Hayride, we had been repurposing a full-scale burnt-down church each year. It was a beautiful set, but we just weren’t getting the bang out of it that a scene with such grandeur and beautiful aesthetic should elicit. So I started to play with the idea of choreographed group movement to soundscaping. The theme was called “The Congregation” the year we finally nailed down the activation of this massive burnt church that had been lackluster for three years. I can still remember the moment I saw the visual in my head. I was sitting with Alyson in our home office late at night and, as it came to me, I started spitting out the idea faster than I could develop it in my head, which was often what would happen when something fabulous entered my consciousness. I had a vision of forty red-robed demons being subjugated by a horned devil priest who was also regally robed—set to sound in the most targeted way. Each movement by the twenty-five-foot rising priest and his red-robed, glowing-eyed congregation would be in unison to a bump in the soundtrack, until the final, grand sound cue would unleash the congregation onto the patrons as the glowing-eyed demons chanted in chorus while clicking sticks to commandeer the wagon, leaving the hay riders with a satanic chant that they just couldn’t get out of their heads. This is complete immersion into our world.
To compete with the rising number of attractions coming into LA and the rest of the country, this immersive style of dropping our guests into a world was becoming more and more important. The spectator-sport type of live attractions was becoming the dinosaur. The one thing we do that I think is so unique and critical to our formula of staying ahead and reinventing ourselves each year is to bodily transport our guests into a world. Even theme parks around the country that go to a Halloween theme for the season will send you into gorgeously produced mazes and shows, but when you come out and have to walk five or ten minutes just to get to the next maze or Halloween attraction, you pass cartoons and giant themed rides that have nothing to do with Halloween: pastel-colored Dippin’ Dots carts or SpongeBob popsicles. You are taken out of the world while you walk to the next environment. It’s impossible to really submerge your audience into your narrative that way.
In all of our attractions, from the moment your car enters our permitted area, you are in our world. You can see the orange glow of the haunted hayrides leaking out of the treetops from the freeways. You can smell the hay in the air or watch the parade of campers with coolers and sleeping bags under their arms walking to check in at the Great Horror Campout. And we never ever take you out of that experience until you are in your car driving home. And even then, we often leave our guests with parting gifts of disturbia.
As we’re talking about finding new ways to keep evolving in your space, it’s important to find inspiration literally everywhere. In 2014, one of our creative directors had been doing our usual endless amounts of research and development, and stumbled upon an acrobatic skill called “sway poling” that was being used in Australia and other countries, but not in the United States, and certainly not in live horror attractions. It was such a creepy and odd-looking type of movement. The problem was that there were no such skilled acrobats in the United States because we didn’t sway pole here. And that was exactly why we needed them. We imported the troupe from Australia to spend several weeks in our warehouse to train a domestic group of acrobats in the skill of sway poles. We choreographed a world-class soundscaped sway pole vignette that blew the minds of everyone who attended the LA Haunted Hayride. In fact, once the Hayride wrapped, the sway pole buzz lasted and even got bigger. And low and behold, as the brand-new Mad Max movie was released over a year later, there they were . . . a major spectacle in one of the biggest action films of the year, if not decade. I was so proud that we showed the world sway poles before anyone else. And not necessarily because we did it first, but because it reinforces that we are doing great work. It reminds me that we are walking our talk, evolving and revolutionizing our space and the entertainment space more broadly. And yeah, I do love that we did it first!
Creating my company was like having a child. It’s that level of commitment to create something for which you have enormous expectations. Why do it any other way? I want Ten Thirty One to win. I want Ten Thirty One to stand for something that the world recognizes as the leader, the visionary of a space that’s really important to people. I don’t want to produce spectator sports.
I will bring you into a world. And you may only be with me for two or three hours or even less. But I will push your head underwater into an experience that will deliver a narrative that does not stop until you have long left my reach. I will attack every sensory component that your brain can register through touch points, through spatial or strategic engagement, and through simple God-awful heart-attack-inducing fear. While you’re with me, you won’t be thinking about the shitty day at work you just had or the dreaded early morning workout the next day. The only thing on your mind will be wondering what the hell is coming around that next corner to ruin you.