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Hair-Raising Rewards
October 08, 2007
From haunted hotels to hunting ghosts, increase the fear factor on your next incentive activity
By Alex Palmer
Striking fear into employees is usually only considered a "motivation strategy" by more tyrannical bosses, and it certainly doesn't jibe with the carrot approach that Incentive magazine advocates. But as Halloween approaches, incentive planners might consider how much fun spooks and scares can be when crafting their next event. Whether choosing a hotel with a, shall we say, vibrant history, or giving your winners a dining experience where they may end up the prime suspect in a sinister murder mystery, many companies are finding that few things are as entertaining, or motivating, as a good scare.
 Dinner and a Murder
Mixing comedy, mystery and role-playing, murder mystery nights have proven to be a memorable way to entertain employees, even taking into account the occasional casualties. A typical scenario is for your group to gather at an upscale restaurant, or for cocktails in the lobby of your hotel, and in between drinks and appetizers they are instructed by the host to keep their eyes on everyone—waiters, other guests and even coworkers (who may have been e-mailed their roles ahead of time by the event planner). Just as the party gets started, a guest turns up dead, a detective (an actor hired by the mystery planners) shows up asking questions, and the guests are charged with solving the mystery before more bodies start dropping.
"Our detective and other actors do most of it," says Margo Morrison, co-creator of Burbank, Calif.–based Margo & Keith's Murder Mystery USA. "But the real fun of having [the murderer or victims] hidden in the group is that you're not expecting your own friends or your coworkers to either be guilty or get bumped off." Finding out the person you sat next to on the flight over was "murdered" adds a personal touch and excitement to the event. "People like seeing people they know getting either killed or arrested," jokes Morrison.
Established murder planners, like Murder Mystery USA or San Francisco–based Murder on the Menu, offer a variety of possibilities for your mystery event, including four-day mystery weekends at luxury hotels, "mystery trains" and even cruises. Technology supplier Ingram Micro tapped Murder Mystery USA to host several of these incentive weekends at Whistler, British Columbia, among other locations, for its winners.
The planners coordinate with the managers of the hotel or restaurant of your choosing, and tailor the evening's bloodshed to your individual preferences. If you're hosting a group at a resort and feel that the Thursday-night dinner could use a little more energy, these companies will give your group an evening they won't forget.
The script itself can also be custom-made. Prior to the event, the mystery planner sits down with the incentive planner to gather pieces of useful information about the employees, embarrassing catchphrases the boss likes using, and other "dirt" on the participants, which is then dropped into the evening's entertainment. This offers a great opportunity to embarrass some coworkers, but also a great chance for recognizing incentive winners in a very unique way.
For example, Murder on the Menu recently hosted a murder mystery night as part of a larger incentive trip for an insurance client. Just as a salesperson was singled out as a possible suspect, a video that had been commissioned by the trip planner rolled on a screen in the back of the room. The employee was surprised to see one of his main customers seated in what looked like an interrogation room. A detective in the film began asking the customer questions about the salesperson, saying, "He has been accused of murder, what do you think about that?" The customer's response was to the effect of, "He couldn't have done it, he's too outstanding of a guy and he's been too busy servicing my account to have time for murder." Before the credits rolled, the customer told the detective that not only did this person not commit the crime, but he was actually the winner of the company's Salesperson of the Year award. Four other awards were given out in a similar manner.
"They didn't want an Oscar-style award ceremony. They'd done that before and were just kind of tired of that red carpet style," says Cynthia Alford, owner and managing director of Atlanta, Ga.–based Destination South Meetings and Events, who worked with Murder on the Menu to create the event. "They charged us with creating something totally different for their award ceremony." By presenting the award announcement as a kind of "defense" of the suspects/winners, the event gave the customers a chance to thank their reps personally and gave the reps themselves the very special honor of receiving a reprieve from the detective, based on the glowing words of their top clients.
To add an extra incentive, you can give out prizes to the winning teams who identify the killer. Bottles of wine, gift bags, and even iPods have been given away to the cleverest teams of detectives.
But the biggest boon from bumping off your coworkers is less in the prizes the employees get than the teambuilding and problem-solving skills the participants gain. An important part of these nights is the cooperative detective work the groups must perform among themselves as they try to solve the crime. Surprisingly, pretending to murder each other can be a great way for coworkers to strengthen their communication, collaboration and problem-solving skills.
 Ghostly Guests
A major draw for many hotel destinations is their sense of history and significance, but incentive planners looking to scare their participants might seek out a location where the past is (or is reputed to be) still palpably present. A large number of hotels, including some of the most luxurious, are enhanced with spooky backstories of locked doors flying open, pianos that play by themselves, ghostly little girls and deceased doormen who make occasional appearances.
Take, for instance, The Fairmont Banff Springs. Modeled after a 17th-century Scottish castle set in the middle of the vast Banff National Park, in Alberta, the hotel exudes as much mystery as majesty. Offering 76,000 square feet of convention meeting space, skiing and one of the top spas in Canada, there's certainly no shortage of options for corporate visitors. But there's something about having a couple of ghosts staying there that makes the destination just a little more special.
"We've got a couple resident ghosts," says Dave Moberg, guest relations manager at The Fairmont Banff Springs. The regular visitors are Sam the Bellman, who still shows up for work though he died several decades ago, and the Bride, who met her demise on her wedding day at the turn of the 20th century, and still comes back looking for her lost love. "There isn't a day that I don't get a question regarding the supernatural," says Moberg.
Baltimore's Admiral Fell Inn, which used to serve as a hostel for seamen back in the early 1900s, invites guests to take afternoon tea with its pair of ghosts—played convincingly by a pair of local actors—or join them in a rousing set of sea shanties at the hotel's pub. The Windsor Hotel in Americus, Ga., holds occasional ghost-hunting workshops led by Big Bend Ghost Trackers of Tallahassee, Fla. If members of your group can't tell if that cold spot is actually a phantom, the Big Bend Trackers will teach them how to be sure.
The stately 138-room Stanley Hotel and Conference Center in the Colorado Rockies is where Stephen King wrote about half of The Shining, and you can see how its expansive Georgian architecture inspired his scary ideas for the book. Instead of living topiary or a ghostly bartender, the actual Stanley Hotel, in Estes Park, Colo., is supposedly haunted by Flora Stanley, the wife of the original owner, who likes to play the piano late at night.
Though having a few spirits is probably not reason enough to choose a particular hotel for your next incentive travel hub, the appeal of staying at a haunted destination does give an already-attractive location a little more excitement.
The Eerie Side of a City's History
If the possibility of sharing one's suite with a dead person is too much for your travelers, going on a ghost tour can be a more casual way to be entertained by the departed. These tours can serve both as entertainment and lessons in culture and history.
"From the time I started [writing books and giving tours on Chicago ghosts], I was deliberately trying to trick people into learning the history of the city through these stories," says Ursula Bielski, the creator of Chicago Hauntings Tours, "There's a ghost story about every square inch of Chicago."
Chicago does indeed have a lively history, and coincidentally, plenty of ghosts. Portions of the tour include discussions of gangster John Dillinger and the cold-blooded duo Leopold and Loeb, and a stop at the site of the Iroquois Theater, struck by a tragic fire in 1903 that killed at least 600 people. Now rebuilt as the Oriental Theatre and playing Wicked, among other shows, it has a reputation for ghostly doings: Attendees have reported feeling their hair pulled or a child's hand taking their own when the theater goes dark.
And if you want your group to check out the city's haunts in style, the company is happy to oblige. "We can accommodate any taste, so we've done everything from Hummer limousines to the beautiful, sleek party buses with the cocktail lounge inside. Whatever your budget allows we can accommodate," says Bielski.
Audience interaction is often an important part of these tours. Besides trivia games and stops for socializing at haunted bars—which, judging by how many bars are included on these tours, seem to have more resident ghosts than graveyards do—some tours give the group instructions on parapsychology and the tools for detecting ghosts (like electromagnetic-field readers and digital recording devices). Occasionally members of the tour group have reported spotting apparitions themselves.
"We investigated a haunted bar last August and got a lot of strange things on audio and video," says Tommy Netzband, tour guide and owner of San Francisco–based Haunted Haight Tours. "The stereo turned on by itself. When people were in the restroom they felt they were being watched."
Almost every city has its own haunted tour or several of them, each with its own local flavor and ghosts, from New York's "Mystery, Murder, and Mayhem in Manhattan" tour, which may include sightings of Edgar Allan Poe or Mark Twain, to Las Vegas's "Haunted Vegas Tour" featuring Liberace, Bugsy Siegel and the (allegedly) deceased King himself, Elvis Presley.
London is the originator of the walking tour, so it makes sense that its Jack the Ripper and Ghost Walks remain staples of group travel events. Salem, Mass.–based travel incentive group Journeymasters includes a Jack the Ripper Walk as part of its London incentive trips.
"The companies like to come on a ghost tour because you have some of the employees that like ghosts, others are just tagging along but they learn the art and architecture and culture, so it sort of has a little bit of everything for everyone," says Netzband. "Everybody loves a ghost story."
Sidebar: Classic Haunts
Most of North America's haunted places aren't much older than 100 or 150 years. You have to look overseas to find the haunted hot spots that have been giving travelers the willies for centuries.
 Dracula's Castle
It's actually called Bran Castle, and it is still disputed whether Vlad III the Impaler (on whom Bram Stoker's Count is based) actually lived there, but this fortress still exudes an unnerving creepiness to those who enter its solid stone walls. Since the fall of communism in Romania, the country has worked hard to attract tourists to its most famous abode, and it's easier than ever to book a trip to the Transylvanian locale.
The Catacombs, Paris
These 186 miles of spooky tunnels snake throughout several of Paris' arrondissements. They originally served as Roman-era limestone quarries, but 18th-century Parisians found a better use for them: a storage facility for the city's skeletons. After it was realized that improper burials in graveyards were causing contamination and disease to the citizens, the city officials had the bodies moved underground—to the catacombs. Now you can walk through miles of tunnels walled with stacked skulls and femurs.
Mary King's Close
Like the catacombs, Edinburgh, Scotland's Mary King's Close began as an unusual city planning project and got progressively creepier as the decades went by. When Edinburgh officials decided the rundown tenements of Mary King needed to make way for a new building, they just built right on top of the lower houses, creating hidden underground rooms. Stories of murderers, ghosts and cruelty abound. Ghost fans will want to mark May's Ghost Fest on their calendar. The 10-day celebration of the paranormal was just short-listed for Scotland's "Tourism Oscars," the Scottish Thistle Awards.
Planner Resources:
Keith & Margo's Murder Mystery USA
www.murdermysteryusa.com
(877) 528-9020
Janet A. Rudolph's Murder on the Menu
www.murderonthemenu.com
(510) 845-3600
Haunted Haight Walking Tour
www.hauntedhaight.com
(800) 838-3006
Vampire Tour of San Francisco
www.sfvampiretour.com
(866) 424-8836
Chicago Hauntings Tours
www.chicagohauntings.com
(888) GHOST-91
London Walks
www.walks.com
+44 020 7624 3978
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