Halloween Hell

Of all the shows RWL put on during its first year, Halloween Hell might be the one we’ve had the most trouble remembering.

Not because nothing interesting happened. Quite the opposite, as it turns out.

The problem is that we don’t have a single second of footage.

No full show, no music video, no random AVI files with completely incorrect names. Nothing.

For a promotion that seemed determined to film practically everything it did during 2007, somehow managing to lose an entire event is quite an achievement.

What we do know is that Halloween Hell took place at Turning Medieval in Blackburn, most likely on Saturday, 27th October 2007. That date comes from a reference made during Monday Night RaGE 6 on the 29th, where Valo mentions something that had happened at Halloween Hell two days earlier.

The show itself is remembered by those who were involved, and after speaking to several of them, we’ve managed to establish three matches and their results. We still don’t know the original running order, whether anything else took place, or where any recordings might have ended up.

But what we’ve recovered so far paints a fairly familiar picture of RWL in 2007.

There were championship matches, personal grudges, questionable decisions and an alarming amount of wrestling equipment that apparently refused to break.

And, somewhere along the way, a house party went spectacularly wrong.

The House Party From Hell

One of the matches we’ve been able to confirm is Adam “The Axe” Watson against Kazuki Lyger, and the story behind it is probably more memorable than anything we could have booked ourselves.

At an RWL house party, believed to have taken place the night before the show, Kazuki had been drinking and decided it would be funny to superglue Watson’s hair to his hands.

Watson, who’d also been drinking, was asleep on the floor at the time.

Already an absolutely terrible idea.

Unfortunately, things got considerably worse when Watson woke up and rubbed his eyes, accidentally transferring some of the glue onto his eyelids.

The result was a trip to hospital, where medical staff attempted to separate his eyelids. They managed to free one eye, but the other remained glued shut.

Watson spent the following few weeks walking around with one eye stuck closed.

What started as an exceptionally stupid drunken prank had become a genuine injury, and understandably, people weren’t particularly happy about it.

Watson’s parents were furious enough to visit Valo’s house over the incident. There may also have been police involvement, although that part of the story hasn’t been confirmed.

For the record, Valo hadn’t actually done anything to Watson. He’d been present at the party, similarly drunk, but was simply a bystander when Kazuki came up with his spectacularly poor idea.

Unfortunately, being the person associated with running RWL apparently made Valo a convenient place to direct some of the anger.

It’s easy to laugh at how ridiculous the circumstances sound nearly twenty years later, but the injury itself was no joke. Watson had ended up requiring hospital treatment because somebody thought superglue would make for a funny prank.

Somehow, rather than allowing the situation to remain a thoroughly unpleasant memory, it became the basis for a wrestling match.

At Halloween Hell, Watson defeated Kazuki Lyger by pinfall, before continuing to attack Lyger after the match.

Watson had recently joined The Omen, led by Valo alongside Spyke and Overkill, and the post-match assault fitted his increasingly aggressive character.

It also explains a line in the surviving RaGE 6 footage, where Valo states that Watson had “taken out Kazuki Lyger at Halloween Hell two days ago.”

That passing comment was one of the first clues we had when trying to reconstruct this lost show.

We don’t know the details of the match itself, but given what had happened at the house party, it’s safe to say there was considerably more behind it than your average RWL grudge.

A Door That Wouldn’t Break

Another match we’ve been able to recover from memory is Shawn O’ Mercy defending the RWL Hardcore Championship against Valo.

And this one sounds particularly unpleasant.

By this point, Valo and Cyanide Danny Cooper were still deeply involved in their ongoing rivalry. Cyanide had defeated Valo at Entertainmania II to become RWL World Champion, while Valo had responded by attacking him following his successful defence against Overkill at RaGE 5.

Halloween Hell gave Valo an opportunity to challenge for a different championship, this time against the reigning Hardcore Champion.

And being a Hardcore Match, the two made full use of Turning Medieval’s assortment of makeshift weapons and obstacles.

Unfortunately, some of those objects were considerably more stubborn than expected.

At one point, Valo attempted to Crucifix Powerbomb Shawn O’ Mercy through a door.

The door didn’t break.

Instead, Shawn simply bounced off it and landed on the floor.

So they tried again.

Same result.

And then, apparently deciding that the third time might be the charm, they attempted it once more.

Three Crucifix Powerbombs. Three failed attempts to break the door.

By this point, you might have thought somebody would have decided that perhaps the door wasn’t particularly suitable for the job.

But this was RWL in 2007, and sensible decisions weren’t always our strongest point.

The door wasn’t the only thing that refused to cooperate, either.

A thick plank of wood had been propped diagonally against one of the large boulders at Turning Medieval, providing another makeshift structure for a particularly nasty spot.

Valo delivered a Piledriver onto the wood, expecting it to break beneath Shawn.

It didn’t.

Instead, Shawn bounced off the solid plank headfirst.

An extremely dangerous landing, and one that really should have been enough to abandon the idea.

Unfortunately, they attempted it again.

This time, the wood finally broke.

Looking back, it’s difficult not to wince at the thought of how much punishment Shawn took simply because the materials we were using were far stronger than anybody had anticipated.

The match eventually ended with Cyanide Danny Cooper interfering against Valo, allowing Shawn O’ Mercy to pick up the victory and retain the RWL Hardcore Championship.

We don’t currently know the exact circumstances of the finish, but Cyanide’s involvement continued the rivalry that had dominated much of RWL’s second half of 2007.

Only two days later, Valo would finally defeat Cyanide at RaGE 6 to capture his first RWL World Championship, before Cyanide immediately exercised his own rematch clause and won the title straight back.

But for Halloween Hell, it was Shawn who left with his championship intact.

And, presumably, a newfound hatred of doors.

Overkill’s Cruiserweight Challenge

The third confirmed match saw KillSwitch defend the RWL Cruiserweight Championship against Overkill.

Unlike the other two encounters, this one had been building through several previous RWL shows.

At Entertainmania II, Overkill had made it clear that he wanted KillSwitch’s championship, attacking him and interfering in the debut match of Switchblade Corp, KillSwitch’s team with Teddie H.

Things escalated at Monday Night RaGE 5, when Valo and Overkill confronted Switchblade Corp and attacked both men.

During the assault, Valo placed a bicycle across KillSwitch’s knee before delivering a Double Stomp onto it, leaving the Cruiserweight Champion injured.

By Halloween Hell, Overkill finally had his opportunity to take the title.

Unfortunately for him, it didn’t end well.

KillSwitch retained the RWL Cruiserweight Championship after hanging Overkill until he passed out, forcing the referee to stop the match.

It’s another particularly dangerous-sounding finish from this period of RWL, and one that fits with the increasingly violent direction the rivalry had taken.

Without the original footage, we can’t establish exactly how the match unfolded or what led to the stoppage, but the result has been confirmed through the recollections of those involved.

Overkill has also recalled that Ciaran Kennedy was in attendance at Halloween Hell.

Whether Kennedy wrestled or appeared in another segment remains unknown, but it’s another small detail that helps us establish who was actually there.

And with that, we’ve reached the end of what we can currently piece together.

Three matches, two championship defences, a revenge attack, and one spectacularly unsuccessful door.

Whatever else happened at Halloween Hell has yet to be recovered.

The Missing Halloween Show

One of the most frustrating things about documenting RWL’s early history is knowing how much material was recorded over the years, yet occasionally finding that an entire show has disappeared.

Halloween Hell is probably the clearest example.

At least with some of our other incomplete events, we’ve had a music video or a handful of surviving clips to help establish what happened.

With Halloween Hell, there is currently no known footage whatsoever.

Everything documented here has been pieced together through conversations with the people who were involved, personal recollections and the occasional reference in other surviving recordings.

That’s also why some details remain uncertain.

The date is our best reconstruction rather than something confirmed by an original recording. We don’t know the match order, how many people attended, or whether these three encounters represented the complete card.

And while we’ve recovered some fairly memorable incidents, there may well have been other matches, promos or storylines that nobody has mentioned yet.

It would be easy to fill those gaps with assumptions, but that wouldn’t be much use to an encyclopaedia attempting to preserve what actually happened.

For now, we’re documenting what we know and leaving the rest open.

Which brings us to something we’d really appreciate your help with.

Were You at RWL Halloween Hell?

We’re looking for anybody who remembers RWL Halloween Hell in October 2007.

Were you there at Turning Medieval? Did you wrestle, referee, film, take photographs or simply turn up to watch?

Do you remember any matches we’ve missed, any additional segments, or anything else that happened that day?

Maybe you can confirm the exact date, remember the running order, or tell us something about the crowd and atmosphere.

And most importantly, does anybody have any footage or photographs?

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a complete recording, a few seconds of video, a blurry photograph or something buried on an old MiniDV tape.

We’d love to see it.

If you have anything that could help, please get in touch with RWL through our social media pages or via RWLuk.com.

Even if you don’t have any recordings, your memories could help us recover another piece of the show’s history.

The information we’ve managed to establish so far has already come from people remembering things that happened nearly nineteen years ago. There’s every chance somebody else remembers something we’ve completely forgotten.

And that’s really the point of building this archive.

Not every show was a classic. Not every match was particularly good. Some of the decisions we made were absolutely ridiculous, and a few of them were downright dangerous.

But they happened, and they’re part of RWL’s history.

Halloween Hell was a real event, with real matches, real championships and, in Watson’s case, an unfortunately very real injury behind one of its storylines.

We’d love to eventually be able to tell its complete story.

Until then, this is what we’ve got.

Three matches, a collection of memories, and a fairly strong suspicion that none of us should ever have been trusted with superglue or unusually sturdy building materials.