Hippo - News and Culture Weekly

As one winner of Disney’s Dream Job contest, Timothy Dunne is headed to Disneyland Resort this June to take on the role of Haunted Mansion Butler for one day. Dunne is currently preparing for his third year of Fright Fest, a double haunted house on Simon Street in Nashua. Since it’s open less than 20 days a year, the rest of his time is spent on his contracting business (and feeding the spiders and centipedes in the Tarantula House part of Fright Fest). He’s visited Disney parks in Florida, California and Paris innumerable times, both with his parents and with his own children in more recent years. He, his wife and other family and employees of Fright Fest shot his 45-second audition video entirely within the haunted house, re-shooting several times to make sure they got it perfect. You can view the video, along with those of 24 other winners in various categories, at www.careerbuilder.com/disneydreamjobs.

Q: How’d you get your start?
Disney’s Haunted Mansion is what got me into this. All this is inspired because of Disney’s Haunted Mansion. When I was a little kid in 1976, my parents took me to Walt Disney World in Florida, and ever since that day, I’ve been infatuated with that haunted house there. That’s what got me started. It literally turned into all this for me.

Did you start setting up things like this?
When I was a little kid? Yeah. I used to do it with sheets and stuff like that in our basement, set up little mini haunted houses.

Did you have haunted houses when you got homes of your own?
No, but I had a huge collection of horror props and masks. I bought my first mask when I was on that trip, my first Halloween mask. It was a Tor Johnson mask, which is like the most famous Halloween mask made by Don Post. I started a collection of those, and today I’ve got like 600 different very collectible Halloween masks. ... Some of them are worth a lot of money now.

Do any of them make the rounds in here at all?
A couple do. I rotate some in. I’m always looking on eBay, whenever I can find the good, rare ones. I’m always looking and I throw a bid on it. If I get it, I do; I buy them cheap. The ones I have extras and duplicates of, yeah, we put them into use. We’ve got some big stock around. We’ve got a costume that goes over your shoulders, it’s a frame that goes over your shoulders, a head harness goes on your head, and the head of this monster — now, the shoulders are up here, it’s got big, long arms — but when you turn your head with that head harness, the monster’s head turns ... and you’re holding these elbow handles and your arms reach out like eight feet. The thing’s almost ten feet tall. It’s a big crowd-pleaser.

This is obviously only open a month or two a year. What do you do the rest of the time?
Demolition contractor. Tear houses down and do asbestos abatement.

You ever find any ghosts when you’re doing that?
No ghosts, but we find a lot of good building materials. This facade right here is from a 120-year-old house that we tore down. These columns are from a 100-year-old house we tore down. We save all little bits and pieces and re-incorporate it. The rocks on this castle facade are ceiling towers out of a commercial building ... pretty much all this stuff is recycled demolition debris.

How did you hear about the contest?
My wife is the one that actually found out about the contest. She found it online and she told me about it, and as soon as she told me about it, friends started calling me telling me about it, and I finally said, I wanna do it, I think I can pull this off.

It seems like you’re already sort of doing your dream job.
Disney’s the real dream job. Nobody does a haunted house like Disney. They set the bar for haunted attractions everywhere.

I picture them as more, uh ...
Family-friendly?

Light and friendly and happy, yeah.
But they pull it off. They get more people going through that haunted house than any other in the world.

Do you think you might have sort of an advantage over other people, given that you run your own haunted house already?
There were others that run their own haunted houses that are much more bigger and prolific than this one that entered and didn’t make it ... the top five won. We don’t know what our top score was.

So you might have been number one or number five or three.
Don’t know. Don’t know, and I don’t think they’ll ever tell us.