1/3 Indistinguishable from the real thing: John built the Ghost Castle of the Efteling
He is handy and a huge fan of the Efteling. John Steijger (52) from Oisterwijk built with angelic patience and terrifying precision the entire Haunted Castle from the Efteling, including dancing gravestones and banging doors. “When I heard that the attraction is being demolished, I thought: now I want to immortalize it.”
As an 8-year-old boy, John shuffled into the Spookslot for the first time, guided by his mother. The dark catacombs, rousing music and ghostly monks, he was an instant fan.
And now, 44 years later, the fascination for the eerie scene is just as great. For four hundred hours he fiddled with his own little Haunted Castle in his shed, with tiny skulls, gravestones and skulls.
He also plugged in an impressive amount of electronics to recreate the terrifying scenes. “I made axles and connecting rods for all those moving particles,” he says. A lot of fiddling, but as an electrician he doesn’t mind.
The decor is extremely detailed. John used a special plastic, cutting out all the parts with a box cutter.
“Sometimes I would drop a part and it would be so small I couldn’t even find it.”
“After that everything had to be glued together and painted. Sometimes I would drop a part on the floor, and because it was so small, I couldn’t even find it. Then I started again,” laughs John.
In recent months he has worked on all the wiring for the electronics, so that everything moves and is well exposed. “There are about five hundred electronic components in it,” says John.
In recent months, he visited the Spookslot at least ten times, to see whether all the details for his own creation were correct. “Then I would have made something, but during a visit I found out that it was not quite the same as in the real show. So then I had to break something down and make it again.”
“Occasionally I had to hold back not to work through the night.”
Yet it is also a relief that the project is finished. “I was done with it, literally. Sometimes I was tinkering for sixteen hours a day. And now and then I really had to hold back not to work all night. But at least now I have time for my other hobbies. “