Spooky Boudoir Photoshoot in Haunted 100 year old ruins!

One of my favorite recent shoots I’ve done is a spooky, fun, ghost costume boudoir shoot at a 100 year old haunted ruin of a 1900’s dam pump house. There’s a trend on TikTok where you don a sheet with eye holes cut (like in Charlie Brown or any number of 90’s kids photo albums) and do a photoshoot! This costume is the king of the low effort, highly hilarious Halloween costume world, and it makes for really fun photoshoots, especially paired with some stockings and heels!

So when one of my former clients (who you might recognize from my Renaissance Meme Photoshoot) contacted me to do a spooky shoot, I knew we had to do the ghost shoot challenge! I also had the perfect location in mind too.

Bend, Oregon has a fascinating history. We literally live in a desert here, so water has always been an issue. So one of the people who sought to remedy that lack of water was an early 20th Century Grifter who took government money, built a reservoir where it was completely illogical to build a reservoir, then ran off with millions of dollars when it failed. All that’s left of that project is the original dam pump house that in the intervening century has devolved into ruinous crumbles. And there’s a rumor that it’s haunted. So it was the perfect place for this shoot. Here’s a really interesting C-SPAN documentary that talks about the whole project!

Anyway, back to the spooky shoot! So while the ghost photoshoot challenge was the main purpose of the shoot, we did some other photos too.

But First, Skeleton Body Suit:

Here we have Amanda looking like a skeletal Terminator. Which rules. Amanda has this amazing swagger about her that just comes out in full when she’s in her full Terminator element! So after we grabbed some shots of this look, it was time to head down to the pump house for the Ghost Photoshoot Challenge.

Ghost Photoshoot Challenge

Boudoir and Witchcraft go hand in hand.

I just can’t get enough of these. They absolutely crack me up. But they’re also really gorgeous and mysterious and beautiful! I think that gets to something I've talked a lot about on my TikTok and on my Instagram, that the spooky, witchy world pretty perfectly parallels the boudoir world. Boudoir and Witchcraft go hand in hand. They’re both bold, rebellious, seditious, and seek to show what life could be like outside of the patriarchal norms our society is so obsessed with. Both are about finding strength within yourself while also forming solidarity amongst others. Both elevate and challenge our system. Both are full of brave folks who are over and done with the way our world is currently structured. And I’m here for it.

As a white, cis male, this system is literally built for me. But I don’t want to be party to the oppression, hierarchy, and exploitation of the patriarchy. The voices of folks like me have been advantaged and privileged for too long. So in my work, I seek to cede my privilege; I seek to cede the space which is open for my voice based solely on my identity. I want my clients to take that space. I want my clients to feel the liberation that comes from being an average cis white man. But I think I’m getting off track. Let’s get back to ghost photos!

And now for some Behind the Scenes:

I’ve been trying to branch out into doing some YouTube videos in addition to my TikTok videos and Instagram Reels. That’s been a lot of fun, but it’s also added a few steps to my process. Instead of just capturing video on my phone vertically, I’ve been hauling along my smaller APS-C camera with me to get horizontal behind the scenes. So I basically have been running around at my shoots jostling 3 cameras. Which makes it complicated a smidge, but I also really like being able to document and memorialize my shoots! So here’s a behind the scenes video that I posted on my YouTube Channel, let me know what you think!

This was such a fun photoshoot and I hope you enjoyed it as well! If you’d like to setup a shoot, click the button below, and if you want to support my work by joining my Patreon, click this link!