Our Disneyland Haunted Mansion Sleepover Experience

Dear friends,

First, thank you for putting up with our shameless begging for votes.
Without your help, we would have never had this incredible
opportunity. Obviously, we won the contest!

First, let me start with the basics. We are Tim and Cyndi Sutton of
Santa Clarita. I know a ton of people think I’m nuts for putting this
out on the web, but next week, our names will be plastered all over a
ton of stuff, so what’s one more place gonna hurt?

Cyndi was the mastermind behind this. We, as a family, have a few
“family favorites”, and Disneyland is at the top of our list. When
she heard Mark and Brian on KLOS were holding a contest to win family
four packs of three day Park Hopper passes, she immediately started
figuring out what to do to win. The catch….tickets would only be
given away to those picked to participate in Kid Breaks. So, the
wheels started spinning. Listening to many of the kids already on the
air, a trend emerged. The kids, usually very young and very shy,
often had a “less than enthusiastic” approach to their calls. I don’t
blame them. There’s a lot of pressure when you’re two and are being
asked to sing the National Anthem on cue! This lack of enthusiasm
gives Mark and Brian the chance to act like they hate doing kids’
break. Don’t let them fool you. They keep asking kids questions,
joking with them, having fun, and deep down inside, we all know they
love every second!

Cyndi got our girls together and decided to sing “Happy Birthday” to
the Haunted Mansion. From our years of listening to M&B, we know that
most calls involving animals never work. “Sure your parrot can
whistle the Andy Griffith theme!” (if you listen, you know what I
mean!!!). Well, cue CJ, the wonder mutt. She’s our yellow lab and
every time the girls sing Happy Birthday, she chimes in. Some people
say it’s a bad sign that the dog starts howling when they sing, I
chose to look at it as CJ just wanting to join in the fun. Well, M&B
took the girls’ call and they sang their hearts out…and CJ did not
disappoint.  M&B seemed to genuinely enjoy the girl’s call.  The dog
performed on cue,  the girls had fun, were energetic,  and they were
genuinely excited about winning the tickets.  The link to their call on  the Mark and Brian website is dead, may it rest in peace! (Hey, it’s a Haunted Mansion thing!)

Phase two of the contest started with the M&B team picked the 8 “Best
Of” calls and put them to a vote on http://www.MarkandBrian.com.  The
winners get to “sleep” in the Haunted Mansion, not that there will be
much sleeping.   That’s when the marketing machine went into high
gear for us.  Thank you for putting up with our repeated prods and
reminders (well, it was more grovellilng, I guess!) to vote….any
way you could!  It worked.  Because of you, we won.  And not by a big
margin, either.  We came in only 41 votes ahead of second place!!!
Holy Cow!  But we won, have signed our life away and are heading to
Disneyland (DL) on Sunday.

What we know right now is we check into the DL Hotel on Sunday, and
meet at the official Cast Members (CM) at the Haunted Mansion (HM) at
Midnight.  We’ve been warned that there are surprises to be
expected….creaking doors, rattling chains, “maybe” some visitors in
the middle of the night.  “Nah….we ain’t sleepin’!  The beds will
be set up in the Stretching Room…..where there are no
windows….and no doooooors!  I wonder where the restrooms are!?

“Wake up” time is 6am, we’ll go back to the hotel for breakfast, then
back to the park to join M&B on the air sometime Monday morning.  I
THINK it will be in the 8am hour, but am not sure.  For those not
local, if you want to listen in, you can at http://www.955klos.com, then
click on listen live.  They’re on the air live from 6-10am Pacific
Timc.  After that, we’re on our own in the park.

I can not tell you how incredibly excited we all are!  This is the
first time ever anyone has been allowed to sleep in the HM.  I didn’t
think we would win with Happy Birthday, however, between the Girls’
enthusiasm, the dog’s participation and your votes, we did it.
Cyndi’s optimism beat out my pecimism once again!

I will post pictures as soon as I can.  In all honesty, it will
probably be Wednesday night, unless Cyndi wants to tackle it on
Tuesday, though we’ll all be pretty beat.

Oh, and we’ve also been told that this will be a major media event
and many news outlets will be there to talk to us!  Aaagh!  Time to
trim the nose hairs!   (Dang, that was out loud, wasn’t it?!)  I
imagine channel 7 KABC is a sure bet considering KLOS, and ABC are
owned by Disney.

Again, thank you all for helping us win this incredible adventure.
Words can not express our gratitude.  MANY people have said they
would vote for us if we would post as many details as possible and
this will be the place for those updates.  There may be  other
sources, too, which I will post as they present themselves.  Updates
will not be real-time, though.  I’m too cheap to pay for an iPhone!
I’ll post as soon as I can on Tuesday, though!

Stay Tuned…..

Here’s the rest:  https://disneyjoe.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/the-tall-tale-…ur-lives-sorta/