Booker T was yelling for someone to ring the bell, Naraku and Shiloh Hill were already wrestling, and the referee went ahead and counted the pin anyway. What the hell happened during their bizarre WWE NXT Halloween Havoc match? It turns out WWE had a reason for never ringing the bell, but the way the whole thing played out left plenty of confusion.
During the October 31 edition of WWE NXT Halloween Havoc, Naraku and Hill spent much of the show trapped in strange hallucinations before finally making their way into the arena for a short match. Now, Dave Meltzer has explained in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter why the match never officially started with the usual bell. According to Meltzer, the zombie referee had already signaled for the match to begin while both wrestlers were still inside their hallucination.
“So this was the story on the Naraku vs. Shiloh Hill match from Halloween Havoc. Before they got in the arena during the final skit when both guys were doing the hallucinating gimmick, they both saw each other and the zombie referee raised his arms so that was to be the signal to start the match, but they never rang a bell.”
That’s where things got ridiculous. Naraku and Hill eventually fought their way into the arena and continued wrestling as if everything was normal. Booker T apparently wasn’t in on what was happening because he kept calling for someone to ring the bell. Nobody did, and the referee still counted Hill’s winning pin.
“The two then fought in front of the fans and into the ring and the match was going. Booker T kept yelling at them to ring the bell. But they just wrestled, never rang the bell, and the ref counted the pin by Hill a minute later. So the idea is the match was started during the hallucination by the zombie ref and that’s why they didn’t ring the bell.”
So the missing bell wasn’t necessarily a production mistake. The idea was that the match had already started in the hallucination, even though fans watching the actual wrestling never heard the opening bell. That explanation comes after Ringside News previously covered Meltzer’s claims that people at Halloween Havoc believed the Naraku and Shiloh Hill storyline ruined the entire show.
WWE clearly wanted the hallucination storyline to be something different, but having Booker T yell for a bell that was never supposed to ring didn’t exactly help explain what was going on. Hill got the win, the match ended, and viewers were left trying to figure out when the damn thing actually started.
What do you think about WWE starting the Naraku and Shiloh Hill match during a hallucination instead of ringing the bell in the arena? Was it a clever idea that didn’t translate well, or did WWE make the whole thing unnecessarily confusing? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.Ringside News+1
