Rentaghost-busting paranormal and plastic game concoction

One of those board games with extra bits to assemble before play and a stalwart of the ‘70s.. The ads depicted spooky goings-on as stage school kids gathered round the board inside an actual haunted house. As always, the reality was slightly less exciting.

The board featured a standard “follow the path” configuration and was split into four quarters, each representing rooms in the house¹, with a large “haunted house” structure included to build in the centre. The main purpose of this was to construct a complex system of tunnels with one entrance in the chimney at the top and several exits around the sides. Occasionally during your trip round the board, you’d be asked to pick up a card from the horror-themed pile. The game came with a glow-in-the-dark “Whammy Ball” skull and, usually, the cards ordered you to toss the skull into the chimney to let it find its own way out of the house. If your counter (a plastic silhouette in the “boys and girls come out to play” style²) happened to be in front of an exit, the skull would come crashing out and knock it over. This sent you back to the start or inflicted some other horrible penalty, such as being turned into a plastic mouse.

If you survived the onslaught of the skull, on you went, following the footprint-shaped spaces around the house (avoiding the danger areas, loose floorboards, false walls and a tipping bucket) until you arrived at the foot of the stairs. The winner was the first to climb these and close the lid on the coffin at the house apex, thus banishing the banshees forever.

Haunted House featured the enigmatic “Ghoulish Gerty” as a notional head of the house³, with the skull card reading “Ghoulish Gerty drops it down the chimney” (“it” became a marble after you lost the skull). And they never explained how to read the board after you turned the lights off for full-on glow-in-the-dark action.