Broadcasting sounds cleaner and better organized than it is.

Halloween is always a little crazy around the Vancouver Police Museum; for the last four years we’ve participated in the Haunted Trolley Tour with the Vancouver Trolley Company and the Vancouver Museum. On this program, riders get a bus tour of the city, focusing on some of the city’s most famous murders and hauntings. A walk through Mountain View Cemetery and a visit to the old city morgue (our building) are also big parts of the fun.

These tours run in the evenings from 6:30pm until 11:30pm, so those of us who work those shifts often end up working 14 hour days–our regular eight hour shifts, followed by another six acting as coroners and coroners assistants. When those visitors arrive, we whisk them into the old autopsy suite and run through the process of an autopsy, in significant detail. In 2007, we had sixteen people faint during the fifteen day run of the tour.

Errol keeping watch.

By itself, that would make for a busy Halloween for us, especially since October 31st seems to be the most popular day to take the tour. We see in excess of 400 people come through on the Haunted Tour on that evening alone.

This year, though, we had another reason to be tired–local radio station, The Beat 94.5, asked us if they could broadcast live from our autopsy suite for Halloween morning. (As mentioned previously!) Set-up started at 3:30am so that broadcasting could begin at 6:00am. A psychic was brought in (Madame Zora) to read the energies of the place and we had a great chance to promote ourselves as well. Kid Carson, Nera Arora and Amy Beeman were all here, along with Benjamin the Butler and a few tech crew.

You just can't keep Errol out of a picture.

The radio crew wrapped up at 10:00am, and the tech crew left with all their gear shortly afterwards. From there, we launched into a typical day with school programs and regular visitors. At 5:00pm, we all took a breath, grabbed a quick bite to eat and then launched into the last part of our day: Haunted Trolley. Five hours, twelve trolleys, 506 visitors, and countless fireworks-explosions-in-our-back-lane later, we were finally able to shuffle home and sleep in.

Exhausting, all of it, but another perfect spooky Halloween at the Police Museum. A big thank you to all the staff and volunteers who made it possible to get through October without going insane! (Let’s do it all again next year!)

Of course, to broadcast at 6AM, they’ll need to be here by 3AM to set up; it’s going to be an exhausting morning–at least I don’t have to do Haunted Trolley the night before. (I will be doing it on the 31st, however – a 20 hour day!).

Make sure you tune in on the 31st, or even come down to the museum to meet the hosts in person. We’ll post photos after the event.