Haunted House Decommission Crew Auctions Animatronic Skeleton, Sparking Bidding War

DUNMORE — What was supposed to be a routine surplus auction at the Blackwood Manor haunted attraction Saturday turned into a four-hour bidding war after the decommissioning crew listed “Gerald,” the attraction’s eight-foot animatronic skeleton, with an opening bid of fifty dollars.

“The bidding hit two hundred in the first ten minutes, and that’s when I knew we’d lost control of the room,” said Doug Rafferty, the crew’s Decommissioning Foreman, who served as auctioneer. “By hour three, two men were bidding against each other for a skeleton neither of them had room for. One of them lives in a studio apartment. He said ‘I’ll make room.’ That is the power of Gerald.”

Gerald — named by the attraction’s staff, who “name everything, it’s a morale thing” — had served as the centerpiece of the manor’s graveyard scene, where his jaw mechanism “chattered with what our sound designer called ‘menace’ and our electrician called ‘a loose wire.’” The skeleton’s left arm raises on a timer, its eyes glow red, and, according to the auction listing, it “occasionally activates on its own, which the seller discloses with pride.”

The final bidders were identified as a Halloween superfan building “a year-round haunt in his garage,” a restaurant owner planning “a skeleton-themed bistro, which raises questions none of us asked,” and a woman who told Rafferty she simply “needed him” and declined to elaborate. After 47 rounds of bidding, Gerald sold for $2,300 — “more than the attraction paid for him new, which tells you everything about the secondary market for pre-haunted goods.”

The auction also moved 400 feet of fake cobweb (“sold as a lot, to a man who said he was ‘stocking up’”), sixty gallons of fog juice (“purchased by a wedding DJ”), and the attraction’s vortex tunnel, which went to the car wash “for the invigorating rinse experience, as previously reported.”

Total auction proceeds reached $8,400, which the attraction’s owner called “the most profitable part of the entire haunt season, which is either a triumph of asset management or an indictment of our ticket pricing.”

Gerald’s new owner, the woman who “needed him,” was last seen loading the eight-foot skeleton into a minivan with the help of four strangers “who simply appeared, as if summoned.” She told Rafferty her plans were “between me and Gerald.”

“People get attached,” Rafferty said, watching the minivan pull away with Gerald’s skull visible through the rear window. “You spend 22 nights in a haunted house, everything in it becomes family. Even the wasp nest — we relocated it with full honors, and I’m not ashamed to say I saluted. Decommissioning is not demolition. Decommissioning is saying goodbye, one animatronic at a time.”