The Horse Drawn Hearse Project

This is a major project in just the planning stages. I plan on building a working horse drawn Hearse as a prop for Kingsbury Cemetery. The inspiration for this project came partly from Sean Blanck, another home haunter in Texas who built a horse drawn hearse for his yard display and walk through haunt called Blanck Mortuary, and part of the inspiration was from the Horse-Drawn Hearse at the Disney Haunted Mansion. Sean no longer runs his home haunt, but the Hearse and many of his other props are being used by a local pro haunt. He still has a link to the pictures he took while building the hearse several years ago. Sean's hearse was a static prop that only needed to sit in his front yard. The wheels turned but only had to function well enough to get the hearse from storage in the back yard to the front yard each year. He built his hearse with plywood cutout wheels and an improvised fifth wheel device for turning. I plan on using real new carriage wheels with rubber treads so that eventually the hearse can be actually pulled by a horse on city streets.

I began research for the project on the internet, and then purchased a recently published book on Horse Drawn Funeral Vehicles. This wonderful find was found on the Carriage Museum of America web site