Sounds are pretty important for the elevator. Crowd noise is always a concern for me as my haunt is in my garage with nothing but some plastic between me and the crowd of screaming kids waiting impatiently in line. Earlier years, I just cranked up the volume of the recordings to drown them out. Then I got a better idea of putting a long tunnel in my driveway to separate my haunt from the line by about 30 feet. I did research a different idea I would love to implement - but it turned out to be way too expensive. My idea would be to sound-proof the walls of my elevator simulator. I would then mic the crowd and pump the noise into the elevator at a natural volume. Then as the elevator "descended", I would gradually decrease the crowd noise to make it sound like you were actually descending into the ground. Good idea, but soundproofing even a small room is very very expensive.
So, I stick with the tunnel.
I did two things for sound with this elevator. the first was I put in stereo speakers - one in the ceiling and one in the floor. I can now have machinery in the top be noisy at first but get quieter and I can have screams and voices coming from below and get louder. I also had some ghosts do fly-throughs where the screams start from below then pan through to the top speaker. The effect worked but stereo works better with the speakers left and right than top and bottom. That is because your ears are better positioned on your head for distinguishing left and right. I used peg-board covered in bed sheets for the roof and floor of my elevator. That way, the speaker sound would have no problems penetrating the roof and floor. By the way, I used some compact computer speakers for this (so that the bottom speaker would fit beneath the elevator) but had to splice in some extra speaker wire to be able to separate the speaker pairs by about 10 feet. The splicing was easy so don't fret over it. Just extend the length of two wires. Here is the sound file again.
I wanted the elevator to sound like it broke through the floor boards and was pulled underground. I thought it would be cool to have a scraping noise up the walls of the elevator as this happens. So, I built some scrapers. Originally, I was going to have these on all four walls, but I ended up putting them on just one (good enough).
The scraper was a wooden block with two springs (Home Depot) and a piece of PVC pipe attached. I zip-tied two short wooden dowels to the springs and put an eye-hook in the block so that I could attach a cord to it. The PVC pipe will be the guide and the dowels will do the scraping.
Here you can see the scrapers at the back of the elevator. Pull a rope and both scrapers will scratch up the wall. I had to pull each down manually to re-set. All manual, yes, but it did add a nice effect.
