Balloon Manor Canceled for 2009

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Balloon Manor is a haunted attraction created entirely from balloons that pops up each year in the Rochester, New York area. The story behind Balloon Manor is a romantic one. Artist Larry Moss's wife, Judy, fell into a coma in 2003 due to complications from cancer treatments. Larry would talk to her in the hopes he could bring her out of her unconscious state. One day he promised her that if she would please wake up and return to him, he would celebrate their Halloween wedding anniversary by building her a haunted castle out of balloons. When Judy finally came out of her coma, the one thing she remembered was Larry making that promise to her. In October of 2004, Larry and a team of volunteers fulfilled his romantic promise to his wife and built a 10,000 square foot haunted castle completely out of latex balloons. Everything, including the walls, furniture and monsters were made from balloons: an undertaking that took six and half days and over 100,000 balloons to make. One hundred percent of the profits for Balloon Manor went to cancer charities (and still do). Balloon Manor became a yearly tradition, with the exception of 2005 which was skipped.

Sadly, due to the current state of the economy and a lack of sponsorship this year, there will not be a Balloon Manor in 2009. There has been news coverage of Larry's struggles to drum up the support necessary for creating Balloon Manor, and while it brought in new volunteers and donations, it just wasn't enough to make Balloon Manor 2009 a reality. Larry informed me through email that he was going to make a public announcement about the cancellation later this week. He gave me the go ahead to break the news in advance through Dark Destinations since I was already in the process of updating our entry on Balloon Manor (see Balloon Manor). This is not the end of Balloon Manor, which Larry intends to bring back in the future. This also doesn't mean that Larry Moss doesn't have some other magic up his sleeve; he will also be announcing new upcoming projects that he has in development. To receive the official announcement (as well as future Balloon Manor announcements) you can sign up through http://balloonmanor.com/ or by following Balloon Manor on Twitter. Also, should you wish and are able, you can make monetary donations towards next year's Balloon Manor or even volunteer to help in its creation through the Balloon Manor Web site.

Click here to learn more about Balloon Manor and to view photos from past Balloon Manors.


-Tom G